It was an incredible sight. I had no idea what to expect. First, there was the tunnel. I hadn’t known that there would be a tunnel. I had never in my life driven through a tunnel before. I was from Texas where the tallest feature was an overpass on Interstate 20 coming in from Shreveport to Dallas. But here were some mountains. Not big mountains, like the Rockies, but mountains nonetheless. Then, when I emerged from the tunnel there it was: the City of Pittsburgh, gleaming in the light of the setting sun. But no ordinary city. A city built on a triangle. As I looked at the buildings reflecting the sun’s rays I saw they were sandwiched between two rivers: the Alleghany on the left and the Monongahela on the right. They merged and came to a point to form the Ohio right in downtown. But I had no time to take it all in. Immediately I was on a bridge going over the rivers. The Ohio? The Monongahela? I had no clue. But I had to make a decision fast, because the highway split into two: one branch going along one river and the other going along the second. I chose the second and soon I was in Oakland and on the campus of Carnegie Institute of Technology.
As I entered Pittsburgh that day, a Southern boy who was now going to make his home for the next five years in the hated North, I was sure that I didn’t know a soul here. But I was wrong. I in fact had met a native Pittsburgher. Her name was Bonnie Bernhardt. She and I had both been lifeguards at a month long InterVarsity camp on an island in the Lake of Bays in northern Ontario three years earlier. How I got to be a lifeguard is another story in itself. While Bonnie was beautiful and athletic, I was a pretty scrawny kid who really didn’t like the water that much—except for an occasional waterski. But when the camp director asked on the first day, “any of you have a Red Cross Senior Lifesaving certificate?” I was forced to raise my hand along with Bonnie and two others. Somehow, I had managed to get an A in Freddie Lanoue’s drownproof swim course at Georgia Tech which automatically gave me the aforementioned certificate. And so there I was, along with Bonnie, suddenly a lifeguard. I’ll never forget the day I lifeguarded the famous Bible commentator Leon Morris, who had come from Australia to be one of our speakers. I asked him if he did the Australian crawl, and he graciously smiled while thinking to himself, “where did they get this guy?”
But I digress. Not remembering that Bonnie was from Pittsburgh, I totally forgot about her and went on my way attempting to acclimate myself to the new locale, including the local InterVarsity chapter where they actually had girls attending! This was a new phenomenon. At Tech (the other one: in Georgia) we were strictly men: there were only 19 coeds enrolled in the entire school when I entered. It was basically a male only bastion. But here there were women, and lots of them, even in IV. And one of them was a pretty 19-year-old sophomore named Susie Sanders. She caught my eye the first day, but I was determined not to get involved with anybody because I had to see if I could survive being a physics graduate student in a pretty tough school.
Before long I made the acquaintance of one Harry Norris, an Englishman who was a business major, and also like me a graduate student attending the local IV meetings. As the Fall progressed we discovered other IV chapters locally, including the one at the University of Pittsburgh, where—much to my surprise—I was reintroduced to Bonnie, a nursing student there. Not too long after it was announced that there was to be a regional IV get together on a Friday night out at a private home in a Pittsburgh suberb. “We ought to take dates,” Harry suggested –particularly since I had a car and he didn’t. I reluctantly agreed, and then asked, “but who?” “Why not Susie and Bonnie?” he answered. “OK,” I said, “but who gets who?” “We’ll have a coin toss,” he suggested. “Heads you get Susie, Tails you get Bonnie.”
And so we flipped the coin. A brand new 1962 quarter if I recall correctly. And it came down Heads. And the rest is history. I was always fond of telling the boys, “I won your mother in a coin toss.”
The people of Israel often used the equivalent of a coin toss to determine the will of the Lord. The Urim and the Thummin on the priest’s garments used an unknown process to make decisions. And of course the apostles cast lots to see who should take the place of Judas. So it seems appropriate to think the will of the Lord for my life and Susan’s was determined by a coin toss. But of course this is highly romanticized. Even if the coin toss had come up Tails, I doubt the outcome of that Fall’s social activities would have been different. My Susie says that “it was revealed to her” in a way she couldn’t fully describe that she would marry me some day. In fact it was revealed to her on the day she met me at the first IV meeting that Fall on the second floor of Skibo Student Center. And knowing my little Susie, a mere coin toss wouldn’t have stopped her from obtaining what the Lord had revealed. His providence with the “casting of lots” just made the process a little shorter, that’s all!
Bonnie went on to marry, not Harry, but a man named Merv Williams and they became missionaries to Sweden, where Bonnie would eventually develop breast cancer and die. How I mourned for her, because she was an exceptional lady both in body and spirit. Later her husband would come down with cancer himself, but survive and eventually remarry and return to Europe as a missionary.
And now my Susie is also dead. Perhaps she and Bonnie are remembering together in the heavenly courts those wonderful Fall days of 41 years ago when we were so young, and healthy, and alive and all our futures lay before us rich with promise. And perhaps they, too, are remembering the coin toss that changed my life. That guided me to live with the most wonderful human being I could imagine. How I miss those days. How I miss her. But how grateful I am that with a toss of that 1962 quarter the Lord brought into my life the person that more than anyone else in the world allowed me to see Him in her as He really is: full of love and compassion.