“Come on in,” she coos through the radio in that trademark dusky voice. “It’s time to relax and unwind – to leave the cares of the day behind you. It’s time to love someone.”

It’s time to slip into Delilah’s world, a schmaltzy, airbrushed place where love is all that matters, although it’s often tragic or just out of reach. But we seek it despite the pain, because when love comes, as she likes to say, “it’s so stinkin’ worth it.”

For her predominantly female audience, Delilah Rene’s show is the comforting auditory equivalent of chicken pot pie, a silk floral arrangement or an ’80s-era stenciled wallpaper border. Women say “hubby” here, and “stud-muffin,” and rarely fail to mention their gratitude for God’s blessings.

De-liiii-lah ... The unmistakable lead-in to the show wafts every weeknight from her studio near Seattle to 222 stations nationwide, making her the most listened-to woman on the radio. Although no longer in the Fort Wayne market, she can still be heard on stations in Evansville, Kokomo, South Bend and Terre Haute in Indiana.

An estimated 8 million people a week tune in to hear the self-described “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” play cuts such as “That’s What Friends Are For” and “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” She reaches out to the lonely drivers and overworked moms, shuffling requests and dedications between second helpings of empathy and homespun advice.

It seems safe to assume that one doesn’t become a ubiquitous expert on affairs of the heart by spending a lifetime as an emotional idiot. But tune in long enough, and you’ll hear the radio star (born Delilah Luke the day after Valentine’s Day 50 years ago) drop hints about how she has made every mistake in the book, how unlucky she has been with men and how ironic it is that so many millions turn to her for advice.

Consider: She has been divorced three times. One marriage lasted six weeks.

Steve Kenagy, the man who, with his brother Jerome, gave Delilah her first job in radio, will say it was all there from the beginning. She was 14 when she started working at their Oregon station, a natural talent with a penetrating, sugary voice.

“But she would get all crazy about some guy,” Kenagy said. “We’d say, ‘With your gorgeous voice and your creativity, the sky is the limit for you. ... Don’t throw your life away chasing a boy right now.’ ”

But again and again, she would be overwhelmed by the compulsion to find love, or something like it.

Sit with the woman and she’ll run through the whole thing: the doomed marriages, the 10 children – three biological, the rest adopted – the drama and dysfunction.

But Kenagy was wrong about something. The boy-chasing didn’t portend professional implosion. He couldn’t have known that her full-throttled obsession with love would be the linchpin of her success.

“I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won’t be me,” Delilah says.

She’s tucked into the softly lighted basement recording studio of a renovated farmhouse 70 miles from Seattle. It’s her primary office, allowing her to slip downstairs to purr at listeners after feeding dinner to the five kids who live at home.

The studio’s bookshelves are lined with titles ranging from “The Prophet” to “The South Beach Diet.” On the mantel of a fake fireplace sits a yellowing box radio with a dial tuner.

And that’s where the story of a little girl’s search for true love begins.

Hearing her calling

Delilah Luke would lie in bed with that AM radio as a kid in Reedsport, Ore., trying to pull in stations out of Portland and San Francisco.

When her Girl Scout troop took a field trip to the local radio station, she came home with reams of teletype broadcast material. She read each sheet aloud to an imaginary audience, she says.

Every teacher’s comment would be a variation on the same theme: “Your daughter is a delight to have in class; however, she has a problem with excessive talking.”

“I actually had a teacher tape my mouth shut with duct tape,” she recalls.

But in eighth grade, she won four out of five categories in a junior high oratorical contest the Kenagy brothers were judging. The next year, she started doing a weekly report for the station on the school.

But it was apparent to the Kenagys that her motivation was as much about escaping a troubled home as it was about learning the radio business. Delilah, the second eldest of four children, says her strict father drank, and her mother had “issues with codependency.”

When she came home an hour past curfew the night of her high school graduation, she says, her suitcase was packed and waiting for her on the front step.

She enrolled at a community college in Eugene, Ore., and worked part time at a radio station. She set off on both a personal journey and a professional one, journeys that would rival each other in jagged edges, tumult and felicity.

First marriage, show

“Delilah was always the kind who wanted to pick up the poor person, the underprivileged, kind of the down-and-outer, to get them on their feet,” Steve Kenagy says.

At 21, she married George Harris, a divorced man who also worked in radio. Her parents disowned her when they found out she’d wed a black man, she says. She eventually reconciled with her mother.

Throughout Delilah’s life, one craving has surpassed her hunger for romantic love: the desire for babies. As she wrote in her first book, “Love Someone Today,” even as a little girl she would pray that God would turn her favorite doll into a “real baby.”

Harris resisted the idea, but at 24 she gave birth to son Isaiah. In her telling – which is loud and still laced with anger – Harris walked out on her and their 10-month-old baby.

“He’s cheating on me with a woman named Enid. Enid! Who the hell would leave me for a woman named Enid?” she shouts.

Harris, a radio reporter for KCBS in San Francisco, says there was no Enid and it was Delilah who “threw me out.”

When her Seattle station, KLSY, switched from rock to easy listening, Delilah asked whether she could start a call-in show.

“The part that I loved about radio wasn’t getting on the air – it was all this great stuff my listeners would tell me.”

The program director was skeptical but let her give it a shot, and 16 days after Isaiah was born, she went on the air with “Delilah After Dark.”

Looking for answers

A few months later, a plane carrying Delilah’s older brother and his wife, who were on their way to visit their new nephew, went missing. (The wreckage was found six years later.) Shortly after the plane disappeared, her split with Harris became official.

And between on-air calls comforting listeners, Delilah began to spend much of her time weeping.

Religion wasn’t a part of her family life as Delilah Luke was growing up, she says. Her parents named their firstborn Matthew Mark Luke as a joke. They picked Delilah, the name of one of the most notorious women in the Bible, as a cheeky exclamation mark.

After her marriage died and her brother’s plane went down, she lay in bed with Isaiah one night, ravaged with loneliness and grief. Out loud, she said: “God, if you’re real, I need to know.”

The next day, after stopping at Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, Delilah says, she found a small red book under the windshield of her car. It was a tiny copy of the New Testament with a handwritten inscription: “Jesus Loves You.”

She went with a neighbor to church the next weekend and felt as if everything the pastor said was directed straight at her.

“And that was the day I gave my heart to God,” she says.

Family, career grow

It was at church that Delilah met her second husband. She says they had a six-month “whirlwind romance” and were man and wife for six weeks before she had the marriage annulled. (She declined to provide the man’s name.)

Single again in 1990, she left Seattle and took her show to the East Coast, bouncing between Boston and Philadelphia.

Delilah’s approach – letting callers pour out their personal lives and responding with comfort or sisterly platitudes – was almost always a hit with listeners but fared less well with program directors, a still mostly male group. Over the course of her career, her contract has been terminated almost a dozen times.

Along the way, she met Douglas Ortega, a man eight years her junior who was involved in her church’s youth ministry. He was handsome and funny and religious, so that was part of the attraction. But also, she says now: “I wanted more kids. I wanted more kids! I WANTED MORE KIDS! Must. Get. Married.”

By 1996, when she moved to Rochester, N.Y., for her first attempt at syndication, she and Ortega were wed with a baby girl, Shayla.

In a little more than a year, she could be heard on more than 200 stations throughout the nation, with the lead-ins in each market tailored so that it always sounds as if Delilah was local.

“She is just an enormous talent. ... Part of it is her unique ability to sound like she really gets, understands and cares about the person,” says Edie Hilliard, who was the general manager of Broadcast Programming, which was later bought by Jones Media.

“And Delilah was able to match songs that had lyrical meaning to a particular caller’s issue – it resonated with listeners.”

True religion

Delilah had trouble conceiving after Shayla’s birth but still longed for more kids, so she and Ortega began to adopt. In 1999 they found a black boy close to Isaiah’s age; when they learned he had two siblings also in foster care, they decided to adopt them as well.

Then Delilah discovered she was pregnant. “So I went from having two biological kids ... to having six children in one year,” she says.

But she and Ortega separated the following year, and in 2001 they divorced. She says she grew tired of being the family’s breadwinner. Ortega says that they made a joint decision to support her career over his and that their marriage foundered for other reasons, including their age difference.

For a while, she feared she was disappointing God with her failed relationships.

“Then I realized, you know what? All this crap the church puts on you about divorce is just crap. You do the best that you can do, and when you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

To the great vexation of radio program directors across the country, Delilah talks constantly about God on her show, but her allegiance to organized religion is tenuous: “I buy very little of what’s sold to me in the church,” she says. “Very, very little.”

To her, religion boils down to one line she likes to paraphrase from the Book of James: “True religion is to care for the orphans and the widows in their affliction. Period.”

In 2002, she learned of a toddler with special needs who lacked a home. Less than three weeks later, he was in her custody.

The next year, when she met a 20-year-old single mom who never knew her parents, she completed an adult adoption so that the woman would be her legal daughter and the baby her granddaughter.

“And so that she was loved,” Delilah says.

Happily ever after

Radio Delilah is an ever-emanating source of warmth and encouragement, gushing sweetly to listeners about how special they are, how treasured. She is radio’s patron saint of positivity.

Which makes the following seem impossible: The real Delilah, although more emotionally volatile and prone to cursing, also seems more beatific.

Those who’ve known her through the years can rattle off anecdotes about her delivering food and coats to the most impoverished neighborhoods of Philadelphia, taking in young women who called her show with tales of homelessness and abuse, staying on the line for hours with forlorn listeners whose calls never make the air.

She has visited Buduburam, a Ghana refugee settlement of almost 100,000 people, 15 times and created a non-profit agency called Point Hope to provide its residents with medical care, skills training, food and fresh water. She also adopted two girls from the settlement, bringing her child count to an even 10 – and she won’t rule out adopting more.

In 2004, Delilah bought the rights to her own show. The move made her wealthy, allowed her to hire old friends as staffers and gave her full prerogative to talk about God as often as she pleases.

Delilah’s business partner, Kraig Kitchin, who also works with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, asked that the small town she lives in not be named. In the past, Delilah has had problems with stalkers.

Her home sits on 49 secluded acres with fruit trees, a chicken coop, two cows, three horses, four dogs and an emu. The children share bedrooms and one computer but are not allowed to watch TV or play video games.

Delilah employs four of her five grown children, and all of them – plus spouses and seven grandchildren – live on her property, either near the farm or in Seattle.

She won’t talk about her current romantic life, but in her 2008 book, “Love Matters,” she writes about finding love again with a motorcycle-riding man named Paul.

And she will say that her perspective on romance has changed a great deal over the years.

“When I was young, I thought romantic love was the end all-be all,” Delilah wrote in a follow-up e-mail. “That it was the main thing you needed to have happiness and joy in your life.”

Now she tells listeners that searching for love is fruitless, but “if you’re in the business of living your life fully, love will come to you – so much love, you won’t be able to even receive it all.”