A Wedding To Remember

Here is a wonderful story of God's provision of a wife and mother for great friends of ours. The beginning part is my email note the morning of the wedding, and the second part is Tony's letter of God's working in His life to provide Susan for him. I hope that you see anew the great and wonderful God we serve!!

By the way, just so you don't get too confused, my wife is Susan, Tony's first wife was Susan and his new wife is also Susan. I hope that helps.

Today, Sunday morning, we are getting ready to go to church and see a friend get remarried. This is significant to me for two reasons: 1) it is an answer to prayer with God’s provision of a wife for our widower friend and 2) the wedding follows immediately on the heels of the morning service. I’ve never heard of a wedding like this, but they want to make God the focal point of their new life together and since everyone is already at the church, they decided to get married then. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all transpires. A lot of memories go through my mind though as I think about the wedding, because I remember where we were when we received the call that his first wife, Susan, had passed away and was now in heaven. We had just crossed into Massachusetts on a deputation trip back from New England. My wife had expected to take Susan Christmas shopping when we returned to Greenville. When last we saw her she was definitely sick from the cancer, but she seemed to be doing well. At her funeral we celebrated the life of a woman who was selfless and uncomplaining in the midst of her trials and was now enjoying the fruit of that life in heaven with her Savior. I write this because as we get ready for the service all these memories have come flooding back to me, and it reminds me that God’s way are not our ways and neither are our ways His (Is. 55:8), but His plan is always the best. God in His omniscience knew of the death that cancer would bring, and He prepared a life to fill that void. What an awesome God we serve!!




Tony:

After going to a cancer grief meeting in January or early February I learned a lot about grief—either live or grieve forever. Almost everyone there at the meeting had been widowed 2 or 3 years and acted like they had just lost their spouse yesterday. I learned something else about them, none of them spoke about how they had been blessed or said anything about the Lord, so when my turn came I told them about the way it was. I hope I planted a seed.

So I decided to try to meet someone and I began an online search. Now after many weeks of computer profile reading, email conversations, and phone talk (local and long distance), I had almost completely given up. I was just too strict about what kind of lady I was looking for. Then I prayed that the Lord might help me find her locally, but I needed the perfect match, regardless of where she was, and He got me that time. I was on a page that I had never been on (the delete page), throwing out the trash, when up in the corner of the screen pops a square with 6 pictures, and one of the pictures had a first name attached to it (all the other pictures had their computer name or handle attached so as to keep their personal name out of it). Well, that name had the address (like all of them do), but I wasn’t interested as it was so far away, but one thing made me curious—the name. I said that I’ll at least read the write up because of that name, and so I clicked to a lady named Susan, from Alaska. Out of all of the hundreds of profiles I’ve read, none came close to this lady—not even close. It was like reading my own profile—everything about how we love missions, the work we do in the church, what we enjoy on vacation—everything.

My first email was to say hello and that I was amazed at how alike our profiles were, but there was no need to reply unless she really wanted to do so. She wrote back with hello, and that she too was amazed at our similarities, but she didn’t know where I got her first name. She said that she never gave her name to the program. During the time I’m not really looking at profiles, and I’m deleting on a different page, there pops up her name that she didn’t give to the program! I think the Lord placed her name there as bait for me because I wouldn’t have clicked on a profile from Alaska for any reason—no way.

All throughout the Bible, God uses names or changes the name of a person for His purposes, and it was the name—Susan—that led me to click on a girl from Alaska. When she was born her mom had another name picked out but her father didn’t like it so they agreed on the name Susan, and she believes it was for just this time.

By the way, the next day when I clicked on her profile her name was not there!! We truly believe that our Lord planned this from the beginning.