Twenty-Two Words
Twenty-two Words
“Not much of a religious fanatic, but believe there definitely must be something greater than man to hold all this shit together.”
One sentence. Twenty-two words, scrawled on the first page of a seven-page letter.
But before that letter ever arrived in my mailbox, a story began with an unexpected meeting on the Georgia coast.
I met Bill on Tybee Island in July of 1988. A group of us gathered at Spanky’s after work, a mix of government and Gulfstream folks grabbing drinks outside, loosening ties, and unwinding at the end of the day. I stepped out onto the patio with my coworker, Jim Ross, who nodded toward two young men sitting together.
“Bill and his brother look just alike, don’t they?” Jim asked.
I had never met either of them, so I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess they do,” I said, and then I grabbed a seat at a table with my Gulfstream colleagues.
In their civilian clothes, the two young officers blended perfectly into the beachside crowd. I wouldn't have noticed them at all had I not seen them pulling bottles of beer from the pockets of their cargo pants. It turned out their military rank carried real responsibility but very little pay. Sneaking their own drinks into the bar wasn't just a prank, it was economics.
Though we didn’t speak that night, we soon became partners in a shared mission: managing the transition of the C-20 Program from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to Warner Robins Air Logistics Center. After the conference, with Bill in Ohio and me in Georgia, we had frequent work-related phone calls and faxes. As the months wore on, I could feel the tone of our conversations becoming much more relaxed and friendly. We occasionally even talked on the phone outside of work. Then, in November, Bill bypassed the inter-office mail system completely, sending a seven-page letter on lined paper straight to the mailbox at the end of my driveway. Reading his handwriting felt like deciphering an ancient scroll, but I didn’t need a decoder ring to realize he was doing more than just introducing himself. He was auditioning for a role much bigger than ‘colleague.’
And right there on the first page of that letter I read these words:
“Not much of a religious fanatic, but believe there definitely must be something greater than man to hold all this shit together.”
I chuckled at the irreverence of it, shook my head, and kept reading. It was just a single curious sentence in a very long letter; I had no way of knowing then that I would remember those words for the rest of my life.
Bill was charming, intelligent, and relentlessly persuasive. The more we talked over the next few months, the more he insisted that the miles between us were a problem. And that problem was one that he intended to solve. He didn’t simply talk about a future together, he engineered it by personally finding me a job at Wright-Patterson AFB. Though my cautious nature told me to stay put, I eventually gave in to his persistence and headed north. I simply trusted an instinct and took a leap of faith.
My first year in Dayton confirmed that I had made the right choice. It became one of the richest chapters of our lives: long bike rides to Yellow Springs, hikes at Hocking Hills State Park, cross-country skiing on icy neighborhood streets, and even the difficult task of remodeling a bathroom.
A dozen moves in ten short years. From 1989 to 1999 our life was a blur of new zip codes. In the middle of that whirlwind, we made time for what mattered. In February of 1990, we said our “I dos” in a one-room church tucked into the mountains of Tennessee. Before the ceremony, Reverend Clyde Fisher met with us privately and assured us that when he ties a knot, he uses very strong thread and pulls it extra tight.
We welcomed Savannah in St. Louis in 1993, and Jake in Roswell, Georgia, in 1994. I never could have imagined the indescribable joy they would bring into our lives. As we grew into a family of four, our address may have been a moving target, but the foundation we were building was rock solid.
Careers. Babies. Moving vans. Loss. My Daddy died in 1992 and we lost Bill’s father in 1996. We packed our grief alongside Fisher-Price toys and household goods. During those years, Savannah and Jake brought a joy that far outweighed our very real exhaustion. Even when we felt too weary to take another step, the delight of their laughter gave us the strength to keep going. We were tired, but we were happy. Our determination, bolstered by something intangible, held it all together.
But together did not always mean under the same roof. I stepped away from my career to raise our children, while Bill transitioned from the Air Force* to the corporate world. In just fourteen months, we went from 'dual income, no kids' to ‘one income, two kids.’ That shift was a financial strain at first, and while his new career allowed him to positively influence many lives, it often required us to live apart. For years, he made long commutes home every weekend. We accepted the distance because we knew both roles mattered. Through the miles and the years, the thread tied by Reverend Fisher may have frayed a bit, but it never broke.
The calendar now reads 2026. Bill and I remain in overdrive, devoting time to our mothers and our grown children while finally reclaiming time together. We are simply grateful and joyful to have come this far. The introductions made in the letters and phone calls of our younger years have evolved into conversations of our shared life, our family, and our faith.
In the years since I first read those twenty-two words, my own faith has deepened. A lifetime lived as the beneficiary of God’s grace and presence, along with time spent reading the Bible, has confirmed the same truth Bill wrote about all those years ago. I see now that those early, scrawled words were Bill’s way of acknowledging a sovereign God who remains constant through the noise and trials of a restless world. What Bill sensed then, I know for certain now.
Through every move and every loss, through both joy and heartbreak, that mysterious ‘something greater’ has remained. Bill gave it voice in a single, unguarded sentence long before we understood its weight. Over our lifetime together, I have come to understand it fully.
Bill was right.
There is something greater, and it has been holding us together all along.
*The Gas Gauge Gamble
(How we made the decision to leave the Air Force)
In the spring of 1991, our future was in limbo. The choice between staying in the Air Force or entering the corporate world came down to the most unlikely of factors: the fuel gauge on my Mazda 626.
Bill was at a juncture. Six years into his Air Force career, he stood at the crossroads of certainty and the unknown. Staying in offered a guaranteed path, a respectable rank, and the security we had come to rely on. Leaving would hopefully offer the opportunity to make a wider impact and do more good. However, the potential for greater influence also meant far more uncertainty. We had debated, analyzed, and agonized for weeks, reaching the final day of his decision window with no resolution in sight.
The deadline was absolute. He had to commit to a new term that morning at Wright-Patterson AFB, or his service would conclude. As we climbed into the car that Monday morning to head to the base, Bill glanced at the dashboard. The gas gauge was deep into the red. We were running on fumes and indecision. That’s when Bill, with his characteristic blend of logic and whimsy, issued a decree to the universe.
"If we run out of gas, I’m getting out," he announced. "If we make it to the station, I’ll stay in."
If we couldn't make the choice, we would let the fuel gauge make it instead.
I sat in the passenger seat, heart racing, as we headed toward the gas station. Every time Bill braked for a red light or slowed for traffic, the engine seemed to shudder. It felt like we were seconds away from being stranded along a very busy Dayton-Xenia Road. I was so relieved when at last, we rolled up to the pump.
The gas gauge had spoken: Bill was staying in the Air Force!
The rest of the drive onto the base was delightfully light. Now that the decision was made, the weight we had carried for weeks evaporated. Lighthearted and finally certain, we sang "Love Shack" by the B-52's at the top of our joy-filled lungs. Even the airman at the Area B gate seemed to be in on the secret. He waved us through with an unusually crisp military salute, as if he knew our future was finally settled. Bill pulled up beside the sidewalk in front of Building 7 to drop me off.
I stepped from the car and inhaled a deep breath of military-grade stability. With a spring in my step, I ascended the stairs to the front door of R&D Contracting. That is when I heard the whir of a power window behind me.
I turned just as Bill swung the car around to head toward his own building. He leaned across the passenger seat, his face framed by the open window, and yelled with the grin of a man who had just broken every rule of his own game:
"I’m getting out!"
He didn't even wait for a response. He just drove off to finalize the paperwork that would change our lives forever. It was classic Bill, playful under pressure and unapologetically himself.
Sometimes life’s most difficult decisions aren’t made by logic or spreadsheets, but in the moments we’re too exhausted to keep pretending we control the outcome. We had made it to the gas station. By Bill’s own decree, that should have sealed our future inside the Air Force. But somewhere between the pump and Building 7, something changed. The sign pointed one way, but Bill’s heart pointed another.
The tank didn’t run dry, but that season of our life in the Air Force had reached its end. When Bill shouted his decision, he chose uncertainty over security and possibility over predictability. As it turns out, that rebellious little override allowed us to build a life far richer than the safe answer ever could have.