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When Bill Met Jan

July 15, 2018     Time: 15:04
When Bill Met Jan

Summary

Many want to know how Dr. Craig and Jan met. Here's the story!​

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I'd like to get a little personal with you and talk about your relationship with your lovely wife, Jan. A lot of people ask me questions about you and Jan who haven't had the chance to meet you. I thought that I would talk to you a little bit about your relationship with her and your lives together and answer some questions that people have.

How did you and Jan meet?

DR. CRAIG: We met after I graduated from Wheaton College. When I was a senior at Wheaton I wanted to go on to seminary, but I heard a speaker in chapel my senior year who encouraged us before going on for graduate studies to take out a couple of years and squeeze out that sponge that had been soaking up all that learning at Wheaton and be involved in Christian ministry. I thought, How could I best do this? The answer seemed obvious to me – Campus Crusade for Christ. So for two years I made a commitment to join the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ and to share the Gospel with non-believing students and to disciple Christian students in evangelism.

I had to go out to San Bernardino for staff training the summer after graduating from Wheaton and at the end of that staff training I would receive my assignment as to what university in the United States I would be assigned to. The way they do this is they pass out white envelopes with your name on it to all of the staff members after the final meeting, and then you open the envelope and inside it will have the name of the university to which you've been assigned. I was assigned to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. As I was walking through the lobby of the hotel at Arrowhead Springs, all of a sudden I heard a girl say Northern Illinois University! I turned around and said, Are you going there, too? Hi, my name is Bill Craig. I stuck out my hand, and it was Jan. That was how I first met her. We were assigned to the same staff team at NIU.

KEVIN HARRIS: Was it an attraction at first sight, or did this just kind of develop?

DR. CRAIG: It developed. I noticed that obviously she was pretty. But it took working together at NIU for us to fall in love as we realized that we shared the same evangelistic burden, had the same calling. She also wanted to go on to seminary and knew I was on my way there. As she worked with the gals and I worked with the guys at NIU we fell in love and were eventually married on the campus.

KEVIN HARRIS: How did you know that she was the one?

DR. CRAIG: That was a hard question for me. I didn't have any sort of divine revelation or sense that this is the one. In Campus Crusade at that time they had a principle for decision-making that they would teach the staff called the “sound mind principle.” What this involved was making a column down a piece of paper and you put the pros on one side and you put the cons on the other side and weigh them against each other. And on that basis you use your sound thinking to make up your mind and trust God to guide you.

KEVIN HARRIS: So on one side of the paper you wrote, “pretty.”

DR. CRAIG: [laughter] There wasn’t much on the other side other than just my uncertainty not having a sort of word from the Lord that this is the one. We were going to counseling together, and the pastor said something about What is your reluctance? and I said, Well, I'm just not sure she's the right one. And he said to me, What are you waiting for? A bolt of lightning? And I thought, well, yeah, why am I waiting for some bolt of lightning? It was obvious, and so that was my decision. This seemed like the right thing to do.

KEVIN HARRIS: What did she think about all your philosophical pursuits?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I wasn't into them at that time. She wasn't attracted to me at first because she says she thought I was stupid. I dressed in a kind of counter-cultural way – you know, this was the 70s, the hippie movement, and the Jesus Movement. So I wore things like bell-bottom ragged blue jeans and army surplus coats and a kind of buffalo hat with a feather hanging from it and a dog bone around my neck and torn off sleeves on the shirt to make a vest.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm trying to picture this.

DR. CRAIG: [laughter] She had always wanted to marry somebody intelligent and didn't think I was. She almost kind of fell in love with me in spite of herself. It wasn't until we finally got to Trinity that she realized, Wait a minute – this guy is smart! And this was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be married to somebody who was intellectual.

KEVIN HARRIS: What the two of you had in common was your ministry aspirations.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly.

KEVIN HARRIS: What period of time do you think (after you've been married) or circumstances has most challenged your relationship?

DR. CRAIG: I think probably having teenagers was the roughest. When Jan and I are just by ourselves we are sort of like newlyweds, but having two young adults in the home who could be rebellious and were trying to find their own autonomy – every parent knows how difficult those teenage years can be. Those were sources of difficulty and tension for us as well.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you have a time in mind that you think most unified you? It might have been that. It might have been the teenage years of the two.

DR. CRAIG: I personally think it was really the first ten years that we spent together. We delayed having children until after my graduate studies were complete. So Jan and I were married for ten years.

KEVIN HARRIS: And went to Europe.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, before having children. Charity came home from the hospital with Jan on our tenth wedding anniversary. During those ten years together, just she and I living with one another, we worked out a lot of the kinks in a relationship that might have gotten swept under the rug if we had been burdened with child-rearing at that time.

KEVIN HARRIS: I’ve been wondering if you have to remove your debater’s hat in order to communicate, in order to fight fairly. I mean, you're not gonna look at Jan and say, That's a non-sequitur, and you're committing the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem! It's probably a temptation to throw that at her being that men and women tend to think differently about solving something.

DR. CRAIG: I love the way you put that, Kevin – solving rather than winning the argument. What I have come to see over the years is that one doesn't try to win fights or win arguments with your spouse. You try to overcome the obstacle. You try to reach agreement and come together again and restore that emotional closeness that is disrupted by the fight or the argument. When we would have a disagreement, we would strive not to defeat the other person in argument but say how can we work through this – how can we find a mutually acceptable solution that will enable us to get past that? That sort of positive attitude, I think, really builds and strengthens a relationship as opposed to destructive fighting and arguing.

KEVIN HARRIS: I’ve often wondered how the two of you enter one another's world of interests. In other words, I doubt she – and she knows about these things – I doubt she sits around and talks about abstract objects and the ontological argument and things like that very often because she's probably got other interests. But she knows they’re interests of yours and so she has to kind of enter your world. But at the same time, she's got some interests that are probably apart from theology and philosophy that you have to enter into. Do you find yourself making an effort to enter one another's world?

DR. CRAIG: She has been marvelous precisely in that respect. Right from the beginning, when I began my studies at Trinity, Jan was involved in what I was studying. She would say, Teach me what you're learning; I want to learn, too. Share with me what you're hearing in class; I understand that it's important and I want to see what you're doing.

Norm Geisler would have a Monday night colloquium at his home where all the philosophy majors would meet, and we'd work through a book together or discuss a subject. The wives were invited to attend. Jan was the only wife who would come to those colloquia. The other wives had no interest at all in what their husbands were doing or studying. I remember one of the fellow students of mine came up to Jan and he said, Oh, how I wish that my wife were as interested in my work as you are in Bill’s. That couple today is divorced. They didn't make it. But Jan knew that we could not allow ourselves to live separate lives, and so she made a real, real effort to be involved in every way that she could in my studies and in discussions.

Another way this would be manifested is that when, say, three couples would get together, what would happen typically is the three fellows would go off and they would discuss philosophy and theology in the corner, and the three wives would go off and they would discuss the things of interest to them. Jan wouldn't do that. She joined the guys. She wanted to be in on the discussion, not even so much as a participant but just to be involved to understand what were the things we were thinking about and wrestling with and thought important. Again and again she would find herself, in a sense, separating from the other wives in order to be with me and with what she called “the boys,” “my boys.”

Over the years that's the way she's been. You know, she typed both of my Masters theses. She typed both of my doctoral dissertations. She typed all of my articles. She typed my books. It wasn't until relatively recently with word processing on computers that I began to be able to do this myself. She was just wholly involved in what I was doing to prevent this kind of growing separateness that so often afflicts marriages.

I have tried to reciprocate in that way, as well, because she does have interests of her own. One of them is finances. She's terribly enthralled with following the stock market and these sorts of financial things. I don't understand a lot of this stuff, but I, in the same way, try to learn the lingo about 200-day moving averages and puts and calls and options and all of these sorts of things that she understands and talks about all the time. So I'm really trying to follow her lead and, as you say, entering into her world in the way that she's entered mine.

KEVIN HARRIS: What a blessing. That’s just tremendous. And she's very involved in your work today.

DR. CRAIG: Still. She is the assistant to the president of Reasonable Faith. I’m the president; she's my assistant. That’s not just a titular office. She's involved in the work of the Reasonable Faith ministry in various ways.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm hearing you say the importance of all that you just said about entering one another's world and being supportive of one another. Rather than just say “What advice do you have?” because that's pretty broad, maybe you can just kind of emphasize the necessity of what you just said because, again, it's very glaring that she came to be involved in your world when other spouses didn't because they said, I could care less about the ontological argument.

DR. CRAIG: That's really true, and sometimes they even hated their husband's studies. It wasn't just disinterest; it was even antipathy. I think that one of the things that young couples need to realize is that a tremendous threat to their marriage is this idea of creeping separateness that she pursues her career and he pursues his and over the years they grow farther and farther and farther apart. You've really got to combat that right from the beginning to find ways to pull together and to be unified and one so as to combat that growing separateness.[1]

 

[1]          Total Running Time: 15:03 (Copyright © 2018 William Lane Craig)