How We Met David and Sally

We moved from the Zuck homestead the weekend of September 21. Little did we know in February or March 1989, when first driving down the Zuck lane, that in 2009 we’d know that lane as the drive to our home. Little did we know that in twenty years we’d spend three restorative years on land that has been in David’s family for generations.

When Vickie and I moved to the Richmond area in 1989 we didn’t know anyone and we didn’t have jobs. A short time before our move from Baltimore an acquaintance visited us in our home, someone who I had been around occasionally over the years, I’ll call him Frank; you’ll see why I’m not using his real name in a future post.

“Frank, we’re moving to Richmond,” we told him.

“I know some people in Richmond, let me give you their names and phone number.” Thankfully Frank had his address book with him and he gave us the names of Gordon and Alice Jenkins and their phone number.

Prior to the move Vickie made an appointment with a real estate agent to show us some houses (even though we didn’t know anyone or have jobs we did have enough sense to know we needed a place to live), as it turned out the agent was located in the Brandermill – Hull Street Road area of Chesterfield County. We looked at a few houses before we called it a day with the agent, and then we called an owner who was renting her house with an option to purchase, this house was in the general area in which we’d been looking at houses with the agent. Jan the owner told Vickie that she was getting ready to leave but that if we came right then we could see the house. We came, we saw, we rented, and we eventually purchased the house.

Now remember, we didn’t know anyone in Richmond. We didn’t know where Alice and Gordon Jenkins lived, and we’d never heard of David and Sally Zuck. We didn’t know the difference between Chester and Chesterfield and Midlothian and Hanover and Henrico and the Fan or Carytown – we had no regional orientation whatsoever.

After we moved we called Gordon and Alice and introduced ourselves, telling them that Frank had given us their contact information. They invited us to their home for a “meeting”, friends were coming over for fellowship…and guess what? Frank was going to be there. For lack of a better short description, Frank was a teacher in one stream of the house-church movement, which is how I first met him. Alice and Gordon had been involved in the charismatic – house church – alternative Christianity movement for years and often hosted meetings in their home.

As it “happened” Alice and Gordon lived about twenty minutes from us, off Midlothian Turnpike; as it also “happened” David and Sally Zuck, who we met that first night at Alice and Gordon’s, lived about ten minutes from us. We could have moved to Hanover or Henrico or Chester or the Fan or Carytown but we didn’t – we moved to the area where the Jenkins and Zucks lived – we didn’t know anyone when we first moved to the Richmond area but God designed our move so that friends were waiting for us, and He ensured that we moved close to the couple whose contact information we had been given, and even closer to the couple with whom we would become lifelong friends. Of course, after that first meeting at the Jenkins’s we wondered if we’d ever hear from them (or anyone else who was at the meeting) again – but that story is for the next post.