Friend of a family’s friends becomes family, eventually
There’s family, and there’s “like family.” Sheffield Duke’s grateful that Ben Coulter was the latter. So when they say they met at a family reunion, they’re quick to distinguish between family and “like family.”
Sheffield and her parents were on their annual weekend getaway with her father’s side of the family at Lake Chicot State Park in Lake Village in July 2007. Her father grew up in Hamburg and the neighbors across the street were “like family” to him.
“These family friends … that my dad grew up with and that we consider family come to the family reunion every year,” she says.
Ben, who grew up in Montrose, just outside Hamburg, was close friends with that family, too.
Ben taught himself to play the guitar when he was 19 because there was no one to play worship music at the church he co-pastored in Monticello while he attended the University of Arkansas there. He filled that need and simultaneously discovered he had a talent for music. On this particular weekend, he happened to be performing at a blues festival at Lake Chicot State Park.
His friends invited him to come to their cabin for dinner that night.
“As I was pulling up at their cabin, I saw her leaving,” he says of Sheffield. “I thought, ‘Man, I hope she’s coming back.’” She did, 15 minutes later. She was intrigued by the cute guy who, at his friends’ request, played guitar and sang country music for the next couple of hours.
The cabin was crowded, but Sheffield found a seat on the floor next to Ben while he sang.
“We were all in a circle and I was sitting next to my cousin and I remember [Ben] saying, ‘I hope I don’t hit you in the head with my guitar,’” she says. “We both just laughed about that.”
“I was just trying to find something to talk with her about,” he says.
When Sheffield got back home to Little Rock she found a Facebook friend request from Ben. They started exchanging private messages and Ben asked if he could call her sometime.
“He had just moved back from Nashville,” she says. “He said he would be coming through Little Rock on his way to play music in Hot Springs, and he asked if he could take me out.”
That Thursday night, he took her to Faded Rose. He stopped back by to see her a few days later on his way to a gig in Fayetteville, that time asking her to be his girlfriend.
A year after that Ben moved from Monticello to Little Rock to be near her.
“He had said he wouldn’t ever move to the city — he’s a country boy,” says Sheffield, who was teaching kindergarten in the Little Rock School District then.
Sheffield and Ben had been dating for five years in 2013 when he went with her to Fayetteville for her grandfather’s induction into the University of Arkansas Sports Hall of Honor for his achievements on the football field.
They stayed at her aunt’s house in Springdale and the morning after the event, Ben was rushing Sheffield to pack up so they could get on the road. She was off the next day, Labor Day, and would have preferred a slower start to the day, but Ben, who was back in school pursuing a leadership in ministry degree, insisted he needed to get home and start on schoolwork.
On their way back, Ben suggested they take a detour to Mount Sequoyah.
“I didn’t know he had a plan, of course. I was just kind of, in my own words, being a brat,” Sheffield says. “I was like, ‘You said you had to get back and study and we don’t have time to go up there.’”
She resisted getting out of the car after they stopped near the big white cross and the overlook that boasts a spectacular view of the town below.
Ben’s sense of urgency was tied to the availability of a friend who was helping him out, but was on a tight schedule.
“I was stressing,” he admits.
He had bought a Bible with “Sheffield Coulter” engraved on the cover and asked the friend to leave the Bible on a bench, open to Proverbs 18:22. Sheffield read that highlighted verse — “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord” — and turned around to find Ben proposing on bended knee.
The lyrics to a song Ben wrote for that moment are inscribed in the Bible as well.
Ben and Sheffield exchanged vows on June 6, 2014, in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.
The Coulters recently moved to Wheatley, where Ben is pastor of Wheatley Baptist Church. Sheffield teaches kindergarten in Brinkley.
They go to the annual family reunion now as a family, including their 7-month-old son, James.
“It’s really neat that we can go back to the place where we met every year,” Ben says. “We really like doing that.”