I met a stranger at a 25th wedding anniversary at an old German church, who knew how I met my wife.
He actually heard our story 25 years earlier at that very couple’s wedding.
But the whole story hinges on something seemingly trivial:
an email exchange that almost didn’t happen
The stranger remembers our story so well because my wife and I met on the airport in Vancouver, Canada.
He even had told his daughter the story several times.
Here it is:
It’s the year 2000. My friend and I are trying to fly stand-by back to Dallas from a Labri conference.
The flight is full and the agents tell us our best bet is to take a bus to Seattle to catch a flight.
So, we book bus tickets and wait. I head off to the bathroom to freshen up a bit.
In the mean time, this girl comes up to my friend and asks him to watch her bags so she could make some phone calls.
(This was before 9/11. Bag watching wasn’t a big deal.)
When I come back, my friend introduces me to this girl who is not only a beautiful German and catching the same bus, but is a Christian!
Turns out she is visiting friends from her Bible school in Sweden, and I gladly ask her about how she became a Christian while standing in line to get on the bus.
She finds the question a bit weird, but she answers and we sit together on the bus.
We talk and talk and in the back of my mind I know there is little chance of anything romantic happening because I live thousands of miles away from here.
The way stand-by works is that you don’t know if you are getting on the flight until the very end.
She gets a seat first and gets in line to board, but she is angry about something.
I get up and find out what’s up.
Why was she mad?
I am not proud of this part of the story.
It had never dawned on me that I could have missed the flight.
We had not exchanged any contact details yet.
Still angry, she requests that we exchange emails.
I feel horrible.
But we do make it on the flight with her.
Things cleared up between us on the Chicago airport. Something special was brewing.
She then flew off to Tulsa. We to Dallas.
And with that precious email we began our correspondence.
Which has lead to an adventurous 26 years.
God wasn’t going to let us part without those emails.
But it would have been tragic had it never happened at all.
Ironic now that I help authors get emails with one of the best, time-tested methods for building an email list.
Or maybe it was inevitable.
Here’s how I can help you build an email course base on your book to hopefully build life changing relationships with your readers and beyond.
https://blairjohnlee.substack.com/p/done-for-you-email-course
Blair
P.S. 2000 was a world long before smartphones. I remember look, smell and feel of that college computer lab as I read her emails with heart pounding. Not just because I had sprinted there the moment it opened.