Our Moment

Glenn’s habit was to wake up well before sunrise to go for a hike in the Arizona wilderness. On summer Sundays, we’d hike together for an hour before church. Otherwise I’d still be sleeping. The morning he died, a Saturday, I was wide awake. We said, “I love you,” and he kissed me goodbye. The last words he said to me were, “I’ll try to call from the Top of the World,” the nickname for Brown’s Peak, in the Four Peaks Wilderness.

- Carol Sprock

He was only 53 years old. We’d been married for 11 and a half years. I had a hard time after the news of his fatal fall. I had to make sense of things, and trust God to help me take one more step. What kept my faith alive was a memory, of a night Glenn and I had plenty of reasons to question the future. A night when we made the choice to entrust our hearts to a power greater than ourselves.

It was July 7, 1998. Glenn had invited me for dinner at his apartment in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Beforehand, he suggested we take a sunset stroll around Lake Scranton. He seemed nervous and distracted. For five weeks, Glenn and I had only exchanged e-mails. We’d been dating face-to-face for less than a month.

“He could be an ax murderer,” friends warned me before our first date. I was 37 years old, working as an assistant innkeeper at a bed-and breakfast. The owner had let me use his computer to try out a Christian matchmaking website. I hadn’t had many relationships. The last one had ended in disaster, and my therapist warned me about jumping into anything new.

There were multiple-choice questions on the website to gauge compatibility—Glenn and I matched at 29 percent. I was a midwestern girl, he was a New Jersey boy; I was a cat person, he had a dog, and so on. He sent me a message anyway. “This program claims we’re a 29-percent match, but what does it know, it’s just a computer!”