My spouse is the former Julie Ann Smeenge and we were married on May 25, 1981. For those of you suffering from math deficiency, that is almost twenty-nine years. We were just kids when we said the two words that we really didn’t understand then and sometimes still can’t comprehend today. I was nineteen and Julie was twenty when we vowed our love to each other.

I wanted to honor my wife today by writing about how wonderful a lady that God blessed me with. We met in college while taking an accounting class which was as exciting as watching grass grow on a hot afternoon. Julie though was a different story. She wasn’t boring like the class we were in, as a matter of fact I saw her as a challenge. She already had a boyfriend, but she was a pretty little thing that I started taking a liking to and finally got around to asking her out. After a lengthy courtship(three months), we both decided we wanted to spend our lives with each other. This is the Cliff notes version of our courtship.

Julie worked at Western Sizzlin Steak House as a waitress and I worked at Hardees as the biscuit boy (I still have the recipe for those biscuits, email me if you want it) while we both attended college. We got a one bedroom aprtment in west Knoxville and began to live our lives together. As a new married couple, we played tennis together, went swimming in the pool at the apartment, and were with each other as much as possible.

Not long after we were married, possibly a year, something wonderful happened that set the path for our lives over the years even to this day. I had been a nominal Christian at best during my teenage years… wait, my Christianity was non-existent during those years. I had been raised in a Christian home and made a profession of faith in Jesus at the age of nine, but like so many children who do so, I had no idea of what that meant. Back to the story. My Dad had been asking me to come to a good old fashioned revival and I agreed to go. That night God gripped my heart and I decided then and there to allow Jesus to become the Lord of my life. That meant I was going to give up control of running the show. After that service, I went to where Julie worked and told her that I had something I had to tell her when she got home that night. Nothing like leaving your spouse in suspense! That night I told what had happened and how God had changed my heart, and it was like “okay, good for you.” After that I thought we should start attending church and we began to attend the church I grew up in and after about three months Julie accepted Jesus as her Lord and we began to serve together and have been serving since.

My wife is the most wonderful woman I know. She has given birth to two of the lovliest daughters ever to walk the face of this planet. Julie has given herself away in serving God and serving the people of the churches I have pastored. She is a person who doesn’t like the limelight and is a back stage kind of worker. As a pastor, she is my best asset as she has been by side in the good times and bad. Because she is not an out front person, she has been criticized by some people who really don’t know what she does. Ask anyone who knows her and they will tell you she is a go-getter who is not afraid to get in and do the dirty work of ministry. She has always been that way. After graduating from college, she went to work for Martin Marietta in a mail room. By the time she resigned from Lockheed-Martin fourteen years later, she was a supervisor in their IT department, supervising twenty-eight people! A slacker doesn’t get that kind of advancement. She is the typical wife and mother who goes over and above the call of duty.

But there is something you need to know about Julie Calloway. She is a wife that encourages me and is a true model of the wife being the help-mate that God wants for every marriage. She understands her role as a wife and mother and accepts it and through that role seeks to serve God and please him. Whant a woman! I love her dearly.

One last thing about this wonderful lady that I love so much today, she loves another man more than myself. His name is Jesus.

I love you sweetie!