Back in 2009, Brenda Rivera was texting a new friend when she accidentally typed in the wrong number that belonged to a man named Isaiah Stearns. Little did she know this would be one of the best accidents of her life.
“I sent an uplifting Bible verse," Brenda, 36, tells TODAY.com. “A few minutes later, I get a reply that says, ‘Amen to that. Who is this?’”
Brenda told him that they had been introduced through her sister.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met, my name is Isaiah Stearns,” she recalled.
Isaiah wanted to keep the conversation going with Brenda and even asked if he could call her sometime.
"I thought it was a little weird," Brenda confesses. At this point, he didn’t know her age or what she looked like.
Isaiah did good on his promise and called her the next day.
“Obviously, I didn’t answer. I was a little creeped out. But I was also sort of hoping he’d leave a voicemail so I could hear what he sounded like,” Brenda recalls.
Isaiah called and left a voicemail and in the message, he said that the Bible verse Brenda sent made his day.
“I could just tell he was very genuine. So I decided OK — I’m gonna call him back,’” Brenda says. He answered right away.
When Brenda spoke to Isaiah, she told him that she lived in Georgia and her mom and sister live in Ohio, about 50 minutes from Dayton where Isaiah was based.
“I said maybe we could meet up when I visited my family,” she says. “We had an immediate connection.”
The two added each other on Facebook after the call. At the time, Isaiah had a shaved head.
“I thought he was cute, but he wasn’t the type of guy I was typically drawn to,” Brenda says, noting that she moved to the United States from Mexico when she was 12.
“I pictured myself with a dark-skinned, curly-haired, Spanish-speaking guy who loved salsa dancing — basically the opposite of him," she says. “Isaiah was bald and he didn’t...know how to dance.”
They ended up talking in the phone for hours and Brenda quickly fell in love with Isaiah.
“My mom volunteered to go spy on him. She was like, ‘What gym does he go to?’ ‘Where does he work?’ Brenda says.
Instead, she arranged a proper lunch date for her mom and Isaiah to meet.
“Isaiah was all for it,” Brenda says.
When the meal was over, Brenda asked her mom to rate Isaiah on a scale of 1 to 10. She gave him an 11, which Brenda says was “so out of character.”
“She was like, ‘You’re going to marry this guy,’” Brenda says.
Brenda Rivera Stearns and Isaiah Stearns, 41, ended up getting married. They will celebrate their 13-year wedding anniversary in June. They share six children: Victoria, 11, Veronica, 10, Samuel, 9, Vanessa, 7, Benjamin, 4, and Ezra, 1.
“I’m either pregnant or breastfeeding,” she says. But she adds that there will not be a seventh baby. Their brood is complete.
“I love us so much. Sometimes I’ll just look at my children and my husband and I wonder what I did to deserve all of this,” Brenda says.
“I wouldn’t have this many kids if my husband wasn’t so involved. He makes dinner. He does the laundry. He doesn’t ask, ‘Hey, do you need help?’ He doesn’t see it as helping me, because it’s his house, too,” she says. “I feel so lucky.”
Calling Isaiah the "perfect partner," Brenda adds that while he now has a full head of hair, he still can't dance.
Source: Today