I met my wife because her father got arrested in China.

That’s one heck of an opening line when you’re at a party and someone asks the icebreaker question “How did you meet your spouse?”

The thing is, it’s true. It was the summer of 1998. I was at church in a Bible study for single parents. This young woman came into the class for the first time and asked for prayer for her father. He was on a short-term mission trip to China and the only thing she knew was his group had been arrested. We prayed with her. The journalist in me, however, didn’t have to look too hard to see that there was an interesting story there.

At the time I was working for the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call. I gave the woman my business card and told her I wanted to do a story for the paper. A couple weeks later her father was safely back home, and we arranged an interview at his house. His name is Joe Snyder and he had gone with a small group in support of a Chineseborn American missionary who made frequent Christian mission trips deep into China.

It turns out their “arrest” was more like house detention. They were told to stop evangelizing and to keep to the house where they were staying for the duration of their trip. The only saving grace to keep the incident from escalating was the fact that it was the Fourth of July (which meant nothing to the Chinese) and President Bill Clinton was visiting the country.

A subtle hint to authorities about creating an international incident during our national holiday while our president was in the country is all it took to get leniency. The group was allowed to leave the country under the condition they never return. (The missionary continued to return for years afterward and Snyder went back with him on one trip under a new passport.)

As I interviewed the man who would become my father-in-law, his daughter, who was recently divorced like me, was at the house but hid in another room. She apparently liked me but was shy. I’m also eight years older and at the time the age gap was a little uncomfortable. She eventually came out and said hi. That ended the shyness.

After that she began to pay more attention to me whenever our group met at church or for social activities. That fall one of my favorite singers, Glen Campbell, was doing a concert in Denver. I bought a pair of tickets with the intention of going with another friend, who couldn’t go. I asked around to see if anyone else wanted to join me. She did. So off we went into a snowstorm to a large church with an oversold crowd.

We crammed into folding chairs hastily set up in the hallway of the balcony. The concert was awesome, but he never sang “Rhinestone Cowboy” which is one of my all-time favorite songs. I don’t think either of us at the time considered the concert a date, but we changed that in retrospect.

For Valentine’s Day in 1999, the guys in our single parents group made breakfast for the gals, who had an overnight women’s retreat at one of their homes. It was at that gathering that several couples got together and eventually married. Sandy and I were one of those couples.

Our relationship grew quite serious very quickly. I bought us a pair of passes to the first Star Wars Celebration, which was held in a monsoon in Denver. It was there as we stood in a long line in the drizzle and mud to see one of the actors for the new “Phantom Menace” movie on stage that I asked her to marry me. There was no hesitation.

We kept our engagement quiet at first. We staged a formal proposal on Mother’s Day when we invited my parents to come over to meet her parents at their house. After breakfast on the back porch, I called her son and my daughter over and asked them how they would feel being brother and sister. They were too young to understand the question, but they liked the idea.

I got on my knee, took out the ring, and proposed to her in front of our parents and children. It was a happy occasion, but I’m pretty sure our parents felt things were happening a little too fast. After all, we both had been divorced just the year before and neither of us were really settled into a new life yet.

At this point in my story some of you may be wondering why I’m bringing this up now. That’s because Dec. 17 is our 21st anniversary. Those 21 years have been filled with some amazing hardships and adventures. We went from living in a mobile home, blending a family that didn’t always mesh, to owning a new home and adding two more boys to the mix.

We’ve gone through a business failure, bankruptcy, and foreclosure. We’ve lived in a house that was condemned. She supported me through many job changes, and I supported her getting her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From our marriage we have one child with a college degree, two with trade school certifications, and a fourth preparing to go to college. Two of the boys are Eagle Scouts!

Through all of this we’ve had each other. Ours is a marriage grounded in our Christian faith and supported by an ironclad commitment to our vows and each other. After 21 years I could not be happier with my choice for a wife. And I’m very thankful her father got arrested in China all those years ago. Had he not, our lives would be very different today.