When I first met my wife, Marti, she was not a professional Christian. She didn’t know one Bible translation from another, and it didn’t matter. She could open any Bible to any place and find something meaningful for herself and for those around her.

Marti met Christ through a rather bizarre series of events that included dating the backslidden son of a Baptist pastor. It was 1970 and she was a “stewardess” in an era when it was still okay to use that term. The job still retained a little of its “coffee, tea, or me” glamour. Long fake lashes and sculptured hairstyles were part of the standard uniform of the day.

Marti met the minister’s son when her roommates — all stewardesses — snagged him on a return flight to their Los Angeles domicile and, on a dare, brought him home to meet her. He was backslidden enough to go along with the caper. A relationship ensued, and in the process, Marti became acquainted with the man’s library. As she says, “Had they been books on baseball, I would have studied baseball.” But they were books on God and Christianity, and unlike this young man, they remained faithful to their message — a message of God’s mercy that finally reached Marti one night as she was alone in her bed. She had an unforgettable experience with Christ, who touched her with His love and flooded her with His mercy. No one administered this to her. It was just Marti and God.

This was a turn of events the pastor’s son had not anticipated. Spiritually, Marti leapfrogged over him and sought out his father in her search for the answers to her myriad of questions.

On her first visit to his office, Marti bypassed the church secretary and barged right in unannounced. The pastor received her graciously in spite of it. She put her feet up on his desk, and smoke from her cigarette filled the room as he searched for a makeshift ashtray. Marti was totally unaware that smoking was nearly a mortal sin in a Baptist church. To this day she is embarrassed over how rude she was, but the pastor never blinked. He actually seemed to take joy in her eager, genuine heart and uninformed irreverence.

“How can I trust that what you say is the truth?” She asked.

“You can’t,” he told her, wisely. “You have to find out for yourself.”

“What do I need to do?”

At that the pastor began a mini course of Bible interpretation. Like a doctor giving her a prescription, he sent her out with a list of books to purchase. A New American Standard Bible, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. When the pastor mentioned that many words in Greek and Hebrew often translate to only one word in English and to recapture the more subtle meanings you have to know something about the original languages. Marti insisted on knowing how to do that. That’s what the books were all about. He also got an associate on the phone and enrolled her in a seminary-level school.

But Marti didn’t wait for school to become an ardent recruiter for God. She jumped right in. Before each flight, she prayed for two specific people: someone she could introduce to the Lord and someone who already knew Him who would encourage her. She purposely chose the shortest flight segments so she could get in as many as five flights a day.

It was her method of doing this that broke all molds. She took all her newly prescribed Bible-study books on board (we’re talking about more pages than a pilot’s flight manual) and would strike up a conversation with a passenger. As soon as Marti identified some problem or dilemma in that person’s life that could be captured in a word, she would look up that word in her concordance and find related Scriptures. Working together, she and her passenger would dig through the Scriptures together until they found an answer.

“Is there anything here you don’t understand?” she would ask. “Well, let’s look it up.” This was a little like you or me going out on the golf course with Tiger Woods’ clubs, having barely a clue as to what to do with them. No matter. She wasn’t a professional Christian. She was a spiritual midwife in midair in a uniform.

“Would this be a good opportunity for you to accept the Lord?” she would ask.

“I don’t know,” was often the honest response.

“Well, I know for myself that if you believe in your heart that the Lord is the Son of God and confess with your mouth that He is Lord, you’re in. (This was Marti’s version of Romans 10:9, which she didn’t get quite right, but that didn’t seem to matter too much.)

“I can do that.”

“Goods. Let’s pray. You start.”

“Do I have to close my eyes?”

We’re above the clouds . . . I don’t think God will mind either way.”

Marti couldn’t help it. Her joy was welling up inside. She was overwhelmed by God’s forgiveness. The fact that the free gift of salvation was offered to all people meant that everyone simply had to know about this. You couldn’t have stopped her from doing this anymore than you could stop a runaway train.

What Marti didn’t know was her greatest asset. She didn’t know the “right” way to share her faith. Her limited understanding of the Bible and her unorthodox use of Bible-reference tools only proved how much she wanted to share her joy with people. I know God smiled on all of this and was able to do His work quite well, thank you.

Marti simply has never been a professional Christian. She is oblivious to the rules of professionalism; she just likes being around people who want to be free. When everyone’s trying to meet someone else’s standard, it’s easy to lose the joy of being free. I think this was the reason the pastor didn’t mind her audaciousness in his office. He realized he had been around professional Christians for so long, he had lost the whole point of his message. Marti’s unprofessional faith reminded him of the joy of his own salvation.