It may have been happenstance. Coincidence. Chance.
But for the Dunaways, the Carters, the Wilsons, and the Wentworths, so many things in their lives lined up so perfectly that it’s difficult to leave it up to chance.
For them, it seems like fate, providence, or even the work of our Lord.
For them, their chance meetings, their first encounters, the work they did to reconnect with each other—it all adds up to much more than coincidence. For them, they were both perfect for each other and found each other (or re-found each other) at just the perfect time.
They do not profess to be perfect. They don’t believe they have great advice to share for other couples. They do not believe you should follow these stories for any type of model.
But in a month where everyone starts to feel a little lovely inside, and in a time when we need more love in the world, at VUE, we hope that you read these stories and find joy.
In a time when so many things can go differently and lead someone down paths toward different lives, that these four couples ended up happy and in love is proof of…
Perfect timing!
William & LaVerne Carter
In the early 1960s, LaVerne was getting excited about attending Florida A&M University for college, but her plans were dashed when her parents received an opportunity for her to travel farther and attend Tuskegee Institute (now University).
The redirection of her life to Tuskegee, though, would not shake LaVerne’s solid foundation and the strict rules and regulations that her parents had set forth for her. Her mother, an educator and college graduate, had told LaVerne, “If you have to come back home from college, make sure it’s not because you are pregnant.”
She was so conservative that the first time her new boyfriend William gave her a peck on the cheek, she wiped it away.
“When I met LaVerne, she was beautiful and conservative, just like what I wanted,” William recalls.
The couple married young, when LaVerne was a junior at Tuskegee. William had graduated one year earlier and was working in his field at a plant in Calvert City, Ky.
“There was just so much that I didn’t really understand about being married,” LaVerne says.
“I was just as green as I could be when it came to marriage. We both were.”
Over the next 13 years, that inexperience would start to have an effect on the Carters’ marriage and lives.
According to William, they both knew there were problems, but they didn’t know how to communicate properly to solve them. They both had careers, and they had two children as well, nine-year-old Michael and two-year-old LaShanna.
Times were tough for the pair.
“I told LaVerne I didn’t want to be married anymore,” he says. “She said I needed to leave.”
It wasn’t long, however, before William began to regret his decision.
“I felt like I was in a hole and couldn’t climb out,” he says. “I felt so alone.”
He realized that he was still in love with LaVerne and did not want to see his children raised in a home without a father.
Prior to their separation, the couple had invited LaVerne’s Aunt Aretha, who had recently retired, to come and live with them and keep their children while they worked. Being a strong Christian, she was a blessing to the family.
“I realized that the Lord knew what was going to happen in our relationship,” LaVerne says. “I believe Aunt Aretha was sent by the Lord to help us. If she had not been here, I don’t know what kind of situation we would have ended up in.”
William says that through prayer and obedience, along with Aunt Aretha and the couple’s pastor, family, and friends’ constant prayer, they were able to make their way back to one another. In less than a year, they remarried.
“We don’t call it a remarriage, because we believe that what God put together, no man can bring asunder,” William says. “We call it 55 years, without the divorce time.”
Four decades later, the Carters are still practicing the same obedience to God’s plan that they believe led them back together.
“I believe God allowed us to go through divorce because He needed us coach others through their marriage problems,” William says.
Since that time, William and LaVerne have coached others on how to avoid mistakes and helped to reconcile their marriages. They mentor under the leadership of Rev. James Hudson at Harrison Street Missionary Baptist Church.
They’ve also watched Michael and LaShanna grow to be successful adults. Michael, a graduate of Washington University with an MBA from Harvard University, is a successful investment banker. LaShanna graduated from the University of Kentucky, with a masters from Mercer University, and is a teacher. The couple’s grandchildren are also in college at Washington University and Wake Forest University, with one still in high school.
“If we hadn’t gone through what we did, would a lot of other people have suffered?” William says.
“Would their marriages have been saved? No, maybe not.”
“Would our children be as happy and successful?”
“We were there for all of them. We believe God used us for that purpose.”
John & Sherron Dunaway
In the late 1940s, in the same Paducah hospital, two babies were born only four days apart. Eighteen years later, those two babies would meet each other as students of Lone Oak High School, and they would begin a love story that would take some surprising turns over its lifetime.
For Sherron, one thing stands out about her high school attraction to John, the guy who was almost exactly her same age. It’s pretty simple, and she giggles when she says it.
“I thought he was great looking,” she says. “I was all about how he looked.”
“And, he had a ‘55 Chevy that he’d worked on.”
Because John also thought that Sherron was cute, the pair set about a high school romance that would last for nearly two years. John recalls that he and Sherron “never argued and got along great.”
After high school, John enlisted in the United States Navy, and he wasn’t surprised when Sherron decided to end their relationship.
“She kicked me to the curb,” he says of their relationship’s end. “I had enlisted for three years, and we were both seventeen and a half. At that age, no one expects someone to stay around for that.”
Sherron’s memory of the end is less clear.
“He says I kicked him to the curb,” she says. “I probably did. I was seventeen, what can I say?”
After the aforementioned “kicking to the curb,” the pair went on to marry other spouses and lived long and happy lives in Paducah.
Unbeknownst to them, though, the couples were building those lives only two miles from one another. Despite it being a small town, in 42 years, they never crossed paths.
“I had no idea where he was, and he had no idea where I was,” Sherron says.
“It’s very odd—we aren’t in that big of a town—that we didn’t run into each other anywhere.”
In a common practice for those among us who have reached a certain age, Sherron regularly scanned the obituaries from local funeral homes. She was surprised one day when she read an entry for the wife of her old beau, John. The late Mrs. Dunaway had passed after an extended battle with kidney cancer. It must have brought back memories for Sherron, who had lost her husband only five years before, following a long struggle with lung cancer.
Sherron decided that the most appropriate thing to do was to reach out to offer condolences to John.
That simple message turned into a phone call from John, which turned into a visit, which turned into a full day spent together catching up and “talking about everything under the sun.”
“I had always said I had no desire to marry again,” Sherron says, but she convinced John to give them a chance to see where a relationship might lead.
It led them back down the aisle, this time with each other, nearly 50 years after their high school breakup.
Going on nine years as a married couple now, the Dunaways have no idea why they spent their lives so close, yet so far apart, and what drew them back together at just the perfect time.
But they are still getting along great, talking about everything under the sun, and living by one simple rule.
“We never argued when we dated, and we never argue now,” John says.
“We don’t argue because she’s always right.”
Michael & Teri Wentworth
When the Sunday roast went up in flames, it might have been an omen. It might have signaled to Teri that something was askew with her plans.
A college student at nearby Eastern Kentucky University, Teri had invited a special guest to Sunday dinner that day. She had recently met Michael, a freshman transfer student from a small town in Western Kentucky, and as the pair had become friends, she’d noticed that he “seemed kind of alone.” She’d thought that maybe Michael missed home and his family. She’d seen that he survived mostly on ramen noodles, Ho Hos, and Ding Dongs.
Teri felt sorry for Michael, so she invited him over for Sunday roast and the kind of family time that she thought might help comfort his homesickness.
Michael panicked. The 18-year-old product of divorced parents was not looking for a serious relationship. He was convinced that he’d never have one of those at all in his life.
“I swore up and down that I was never going to get married,” he recalls. “I liked Teri as a friend, but when she invited me over to meet her parents, I backed out. I just didn’t show up.”
Following that day, Teri took great care to avoid Michael, a small price to pay for a wasted special Sunday dinner.
“I’d see him on campus, and I’d go out of my way to stay away from him,” she says.
During those two years they were living on the same campus but steering clear of one another, they were also dating other people and learning more about themselves in the process.
For Michael, during the separation, he was slowly experiencing a change of heart.
“I was always just looking for the right person,” he says.
“I started realizing there was a hole in my life.”
Nearly 30 years into the Wentworths’ love story, Michael looks back on what happens next and credits it entirely to a fulfillment of God’s plan for his life.
“You try to be a better person and have a good heart,” he says. “All of a sudden, God puts things in your life to basically reward you and show you the path He wants you to take.”
On the day the two reconnected, God’s path for Michael was literally standing on a crossroad underneath two street signs. It could not have been clearer.
“I wasn’t actively looking, but one day on campus, she just appeared in front of me on the street corner of Kit Karson and Park Drive,” he says.
Since Michael was no longer unavoidable, Teri managed a smile and a wave over the panic she was feeling. In conversations after the encounter, Teri realized immediately that the new Michael had changed. He was no longer the type of guy who would leave a Sunday dinner hanging.
“When he came back around the second time, I could just tell something had happened and he had a different outlook on things,” she says.
Wholeheartedly, both Michael and Teri believe that God is responsible for leading them back together at a time when they were both emotionally ready for a commitment to one another.
That belief is a thread that Teri sees as the backbone of their relationship, even now, nearly three decades later.
“Since I know that it was all about timing for us, keeping Christ the center of our marriage is what we focus on,” she says.
“I know the things we both went through, and when it came full circle, I know that was His doing.”
“I know that He’s responsible for putting us together, and when you get a second chance like that, you appreciate it and never take it for granted.”
Dustin & Lauren Wilson
In early January 2016, in the same area, a pair of strangers were each making life-changing decisions for themselves. The decisions would alter the fabric of their lives and soon would set them on a path toward their future together. But they didn’t know this at the time.
At the time, they only saw cold jail cells and thought maybe this time would be different.
For both Lauren and Dustin, leaving behind their lives of addiction and seeking treatment had been an ongoing challenge.
“It wasn’t my first time through recovery—I’d been through before,” Dustin recalls.
“You’ve got to really want it, and if you don’t, you go right back down the same road.”
“I dealt with that time and time again.”
In 2016, though, following an arrest, Dustin says something finally felt different. He volunteered to seek treatment, first at a 30-day facility and then in a longer program and facility.
“Any other time, I was court-ordered to go to treatment, but this time I was ready to go on my own, and I thought, ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes,’” he says.
Around the same time, Lauren was also sitting in a jail cell, serving 11 days and realizing that she, too, felt a difference.
“I remember feeling a sigh of relief when I was in jail,” Lauren recalls.
“I remember thinking, ‘You are done; you don’t have to do this anymore.’”
Lauren graduated from her treatment program with a new outlook on life. Shortly after, a mutual friend introduced her to Dustin, who was on the cusp of completing his own program.
“We had both known of each other, but we had never met,” Lauren says. “When we met, we were finally both just at such a good place in our lives.”
Dustin believes that meeting Lauren finally unlocked for him the piece he had needed to fully embrace recovery—the piece he had been missing so many times before.
“Before, when I’d get out, I didn’t have anything,” he says.
“I’d lost everything. I wouldn’t have nowhere to go, so I’d be back right with the same people, doing the same things.”
“When her and I met, she was it for me.”
“That’s what helped me, was to have someone that I could actually say that I loved and cared about and had my back and supported me no matter what.”
Lauren told her mom that she believed she had finally found the person she was meant to marry. The pair were inseparable almost instantly, and when Dustin graduated from his program, they started their lives together.
It was after they were married that they stumbled upon a piece of information that must have felt like a lightning bolt—like proof that Lauren was correct. Proof that the pair was meant to be and that they were destined to meet at a time when both were finally ready for a different life.
“Our sobriety dates are so close,” Lauren says. “My life changed on January 4, 2016 and Dustin’s life changed January 1, 2016.”
“We both thought it was so ironic.”
Five years into their new live together, Dustin and Lauren can hardly believe the fortunes that arose from those decisions they made, the plans, the recovery and the hard work.
“The blessings that God has given us, back to back, with our recovery, each other and our son,” Lauren says.
“The way that things all led up for Dustin and I, if you look at it on a timeline, it just seems like it was all perfectly pieced together.”
