Mert and Sheila enter the family scene

Right on schedule, my 28-year-old son announced his engagement to marry. Years ago he said he didn’t have time to get married until he was at least 28 – he had too many things to do. I say he is “getting married” in the continuing, on-going tense because while he and his bride took their vows before her Indonesian family and friends in June, they will take them again in August before his American family and friends. They signed the church certificate in Indonesia, but since she was immigrating to the United States on a fiancee’ visa, they could not be legally married before she landed.
Of course, now that she is here, we have a few weeks to plan, prepare and present a wedding ceremony and reception on our side of the earth and to answer the many who ask, “How in the world did the two of them meet?”
Well, it wasn’t through a marriage service matching American men with Asian brides. — although one time my son did jest I needed to find him a bride – as parents of eligible young men do in some countries.
Actually, 10 years ago, my son went to Indonesia on a summer Teen Mission trip with a group that ministered in various churches. He met a lot of people that year, including a 13-year-old girl who asked if he would be her pen pal so she could practice her English. He casually handed her his address and pretty much forgot about it. When he got back to the states and received a letter from her, he realized he didn’t even have picture to remind himself what she looked like. She was one of many he met that summer, but she was the only one who actually followed through and wrote to him.
Seven or eight years later they still had not exchanged pictures, but they were still corresponding. Meanwhile he had completed college and entered graduate studies while she earned her college degree. Around then the tone of their letters evolved from a polite, careful cultural and spiritual exchange to more personal, intimate topics.
With the decreasing costs of international calls in a competitive communication market along with the increasing use and wide spread accessibility of the Internet, their communication time soared via e-mail, Instant Messaging and appointments to be on-line or near a phone when one was waking up and the other was going to bed. It was odd to hear him telling us on a Saturday evening that he couldn’t call her right then because she had already left for Sunday morning services.
About that time her father, business man with a large Indonesian company, stepped in and asked that stranger on the other side of the world to prove his worthiness to continue communicating via the Internet with his precious daughter. My son took it like a man and spent the next several weeks son gathering up letters of recommendations from pastors, parents and politicians. Since the U.S. does not have a national registry of all marriages (as a few small countries like Indonesia do), he even persuaded the The Union County court house clerks to validate that they did not have any record of him ever having married in this county. That was two years ago. This summer our last child has moved out of our house into their honeymoon home, just down the road and up the street, a few minutes away from us and I am enjoying just the idea of having one of the kids living in our neck of the woods.