Tina Edge worked for the Dow Employees Credit Union, where she managed a branch at the Dow Center. We met through Dow. We dated for several months, and in the summer of 1984, we married in the backyard of my brother's home in Lake Jackson. For a short time, we lived in a patio home in Houston. Later, we bought a home in Katy. I was beginning another marriage. I wanted it to work.
Micah
There was another very important part of my marriage to Tina. We had a son. Micah. By then I was already the father of Ben and Bryan from my marriage to Cece. Micah gave me a third son and permanently joined Tina and me in something much greater than the circumstances that would eventually bring our marriage to an end. Marriages can end. Being a father does not. Whatever happened later between Tina and me, I would never want the story of that marriage told only in terms of why it failed.
Micah came from that marriage. And that alone made those years an important part of my life. But during that marriage, something happened in my life that would eventually become more important to me than my career. My religious beliefs began to change.
Questions I Could No Longer Ignore
I began studying. The more I studied the Bible, the more questions I had about things I had simply accepted before. One of those questions concerned the seventh-day Sabbath. My study eventually convinced me that the Sabbath had not been changed from the seventh day of the week. For me, this was not simply an interesting theological question. If I believed God commanded something, then I believed I had an obligation to obey it. Tina had been raised Pentecostal. She did not come to the same conclusions I did.
That created a division between us that went much deeper than deciding where to go on a Saturday. It concerned how we understood God, Scripture, worship, and the direction of our lives. My second marriage eventually ended in divorce. I had now been married twice. And divorced twice. At that point, I certainly had no reason to think that my greatest marriage was still ahead of me. But it was. Her name was Trish.