A STORY FOR VALENTINE’S DAY: With the help of an ordained minister, Lily Parker and Eli Wilson found the soulmate each had been praying for
When Eli Wilson arrived at Lily Parker’s house near Thornfield on Nov. 2, 2020, to pick her up, his cover story was that they were going to drive into Gainesville to pick up their concealed carry permits, having completed the weapons course a few days earlier.
But as Eli got out of his car and approached the Parkers’ home, the front door opened, and it was obvious that Lily’s parents were in on the young couple’s secret. Lily stepped out of the door clutching her father’s arm and wearing a huge smile – and the antique wedding dress she had bought years earlier at a thrift store. Lily had told her parents they weren’t just planning to pick up their carry permits. They were also headed to the courthouse to get their marriage license – and then they were planning to elope.
Her parents, Hank and Cindy Parker, were the only ones who were in on the secret, and they were supportive of the young couple’s plans.
As she stepped out the door in the wedding dress, “there were a lot of happy tears,” said Lily, 20.
And as for Eli? “I was ecstatic,” said the 22-year-old groom.
They had known each other only five months, but they had no doubts, no second thoughts, about what they were about to do. After all, their first blind date had been set up by an ordained minister, Leon Turner, the yard manager at Wilson Industries, formerly Bryant Plastics, the Ozark County company Eli’s family had bought in September 2018.
When Eli’s parents, Roger and Sherri Wilson and other members of their family settled into Ozark County after moving from Nebraska to take over the company, Eli had instead attended a year of college at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. He rejoined his family in Ozark County in the summer of 2019.
Eli wanted to find someone to share his life with, but he didn’t really know anyone here, and most of his time was spent working at his family’s plastics plant, so he had a hard time getting acquainted.
Sometime around Christmas 2019, Leon Turner told Eli he’d gone caroling with a church group that included Lily Parker, and he thought Lily “might be a good girl for Eli.” But when Leon mentioned the idea to Lily, she told him she was seeing someone else and wasn’t interested in meeting Eli.
A few months later, Eli and one of his older sisters, Savannah Wilson, who was also looking for a life partner, decided to move together to Ozark and commute to the plastics plant in Ozark County. In Ozark, they each hoped to enlarge their circle of friends by becoming active in one of the Springfield area’s bigger churches.
The week before they were set to move into the house in June 2020, Leon Turner happened to run into Lily at an area Wal-Mart. The next day he told Eli, “I guess she’s eligible now.”
Leon gave Lily Eli’s phone number, “and the night we moved into the Ozark house, Lily texted me,” Eli said. “It was something along the lines of, ‘Is this Elijah? Leon Turner gave me your number and said we might like to meet each other.’”
Leon had told Eli that Lily’s family was “very religious and lived in the back country,” a description that caused Eli to hesitate just a bit. As a devout Christian himself, the “very religious” part sounded good, but he wasn’t sure what “living in the back country” might mean.
Lily suggested Eli meet her the next Friday night at Liberty Baptist Church in Isabella, where her family hosted a weekly youth group session.
Eli agreed – and then tried but failed to find Lily on social media. He eventually found the online Ozark County Times stories and photos reporting that Lily was the 2019 Hootin an Hollarin queen.
“He was new to the area and wasn’t familiar with Hootin an Hollarin,” said Lily recently, laughing. Combined with Turner’s reference to the family’s living in the “back country,” Eli “was confused by the long dress thing, wondering if he was being set up with an Amish person,” she said.
Lily had some trepidation as well. “Leon had told me Eli was a very sweet man who didn’t have a lot of friends and was big but not fat,” she said. “I thought, ‘There had to be a reason why he didn’t have any friends.’ And I wondered, ‘What am I meeting?’”
Lily and Eli had both been praying that God would lead them to just the right person for each of them.
Lily had prayed for “someone who would be a good father and friend, someone who didn’t mind me being quirky and a bit of a nut case sometimes.” Eli had asked God not to let him meet a woman who wouldn’t be the one God meant for him.
That Friday evening at Liberty Baptist, Lily was inside helping her mom set up for the youth group when they heard Eli’s truck pull up. I walked out, and he was walking in,” she said.
She liked what she saw. Eli, at 5’11” and 245 pounds, “actually looked a lot like the man I’d envisioned myself with,” she said.
As for Eli? “I was relieved to see she was wearing a tank top,” he said, laughing, glad to see Lily apparently wasn’t Amish. The next thing he noticed – and the first things he fell in love with, he said, were “those dimples and that curly hair.”
He helped her teach the youngest kids’ class during the youth group meeting. “At one point, I stepped out to get snacks, and when I got back he was reading crayon names to the kids, and coming up with new ones for the crayons that didn’t have wrappers,” Lily said. “I decided I liked this guy.”
Afterward, Eli asked to drive her home – with a stop at Cookie’s restaurant in Theodosia for a chocolate malt. On the way, they listened to the music play list Eli had on in his truck. That’s how they learned they both love the music of the late Nat King Cole.
As they talked, they discovered they had both moved quite a bit during their growing-up years due to their fathers’ work. Eli, who had been praying for a “God-fearing woman,” admits that his heart pounded a little when he found out that Lily’s middle name is Fear – because her parents wanted her to grow up with an intimate fear of the Lord.
That night, lying on the floor of his Ozark home (where the furniture hadn’t been delivered yet), Eli remembers “thinking I’d really like to see her again – and being glad she wasn’t Amish.”
On the following Tuesday, after Eli got off work at the plastics plant, they traveled together to the Caney picnic area on the Glade Top Trail, a picturesque spot about a 20-minute drive from the Parkers’ “back woods” home. Eli had bought some lunch meat, pickles, fruit and “two kinds of bread” hoping one would be okay for Lily’s gluten-intolerance. They call that late-afternoon picnic their “first real date.” It was a ritual they repeated almost weekly for the next five months.
Then, on a Saturday in October, they returned to the Caney picnic area with friends to do some hiking. That day, Eli brought along a little something extra besides the usual picnic stuff. In a picturesque spot Eli handed his phone to Lily’s sister so she could video what was about to happen. Eli gave Lily the ring he’d been carrying around for a week, and he asked her to marry him.
They set a date for April. But as the days passed, they decided that just wouldn’t do. They wanted to be together, “but we’re both pretty traditional. We didn’t want to live together until we were married,” Lily said.
Also, Eli wanted to get married while his grandmother, back in Nebraska and going into hospice care, could remember it.
So, a month after the proposal, they made other plans. On Nov. 2, when they headed into Gainesville to pick up their concealed carry permits after completing the required instruction and paperwork, they would also go to the courthouse for another piece of paper: a marriage license.
With license in hand, they headed back to the plastics plant and found the man who had set up their first meeting.
“We said, ‘Hey, Leon, could you marry us?’ And he said, ‘Let me run home and get my book,’” Lily said. “Then we realized we had to have witnesses, so I called my best friend, Sarah Jennings. She and her mom, Tracy, came to the plant.”
Eli’s parents were on their way to Nebraska to see his grandmother; he recruited another sister, Mykah as a witness. Then, when Leon Turner returned with his wedding book, the little group headed to the plant’s pipe yard for the ceremony. “It was very convenient,” Lily said, laughing again.
They spent the night in the little bedroom at the plastics plant where Eli sometimes stayed when he didn’t feel up to the long commute back to Ozark. The next day, they drove to Nebraska to share their news with Eli’s grandmother and other family members who had gathered there.
“She was excited for us,” Eli said, describing his grandmother’s reaction, but adding sadly that his grandmother died on Thanksgiving Day 2021.
A little later, Eli and Lily moved into a rented home in Theodosia. They count as their honeymoon the trips they made together to deliver plastic pipe throughout the region.
In April 2021, on the date they had first set for their wedding, they had another ceremony at Frontier Baptist Church in Pontiac. Leon Turner presided again. But Lily didn’t get to wear the antique wedding dress again. “By then I was 12 weeks pregnant, and the dress didn’t fit,” Lily said.
They enjoyed a second honeymoon afterward by spending a couple of days in Branson.
By the time Hootin an Hollarin 2021 rolled around, Lily was just about a month away from her due date, but she gamely delivered her “farewell speech” as the 2019 queen, joking that she was the longest-reigning queen in Hootin an Hollarin history since the 2020 festival had been canceled due to the covid pandemic.
The Wilsons’ son, Bowen, was born Oct. 28.
Looking back at their whirlwind romance, Lily remembers how, after that chocolate malt at Cookie’s, Eli, new to the area and “not knowing much about the geography,” turned east on Highway 160 instead of west to take Lily home to Thornfield via Highway 95 from Theodosia, making her wonder momentarily if she might be riding with a kidnapper.
Later that night, her positive feelings about Eli were tinged with a bit of doubt. “I was a little afraid, thinking, ‘He seems nice, but he’s a total mess. What if it gets worse?’” she said, only half serious. “But I think it was mostly because I can be an awkward person, and it turns out he can be an awkward person too. I was hoping that would resolve. And I guess it has.”