Terese DeJong has spent ten years of her life—a full decade—putting her husband through the last half of a B.A., two master's degrees, and a doctorate. She is a crack legal secretary who can keep code numbers and deposition details in her head without missing a whereas at eighty-five words per minute. Neither she nor her husband intended to be in the pastorate; Paul had had enough of that growing up as a minister's son. He rather wanted a Ph.D., and Terese wanted to see him get it.

Toward that end, they endured the usual stresses of seminary, he soaring into the academic stratosphere (but also working as a part-time youth pastor) while she earned most of the income—and had a baby. They passed each other in the apartment complex hallway more than once. Communication time was spasmodic. Terese remembers:

He'd come home and try some of his far-out theological ideas on me—and I had this little fundamentalist faith. I couldn't even understand him half the time. We went to church together, of ...