When Montana, my granddaughter, called to say that she and her fiancé, Ian, had set their wedding date, I was excited to put it on my calendar.  “February 3, 2026,” she announced.  Surely my calendar was wrong…or Montana was mistaken.

“Mo, that’s a Tuesday.”

“I know,” she declared, excitedly.

“Is this a destination wedding?” I questioned.

“No, Grandma, we’re getting married in Fort Scott…at my parent’s house.”

“Well then, where will the reception be?” I pressed.  Mo had it all figured out.  “It will be an outdoor wedding, and the reception will be inside their house.”  This was not my business to question.  Still, I questioned. “Mo, do you know what Kansas weather is like in February, not to mention, Tuesdays are in the middle of the week?”

“I know.”

“Then why did you choose that day?”

“Because God gave me that date.”

There was only one thing I could say: “Well, then, February 3 it is.”  As I later found out, that date, years before, had been one in which Mo made a heart-change to follow the Lord and trust that His ways are far higher than ours could ever be.  The wedding was a testimony to that.

Mo and Ian chose several “unusual” things for their big day (like a Ding-Dong wedding cake and a stadium hot-dog bar), not the least of which was to have actual church pews for the guests.  I mean, it’s not like church pews are available at Walmart, and no church that I know of would be amenable to loaning theirs out for an outdoor wedding.  Especially a February wedding.  But that’s where God did what only God can do.

As it turned out, someone had donated dozens of antique, wooden church pews to the nuns who live in Fort Scott.  The pews were in a semi-truck, waiting for volunteers to sand and stain them.  And that’s where Mo’s family and friends offered to help.  Weeks of work went into preparing the pews for the wedding ceremony, definitely a blessing to Mo and Ian, but God had plans much grander than the February 3 event.

The week before the wedding, the snow, wind and freezing temperatures caused schools and businesses to close. If this weather continued, how would we survive an outdoor wedding?  I envisioned wedding photos with icicles hanging from our nose hairs and updo’s ruined by earmuffs.  How could antique, wooden church pews endure freezing rain?

And then came Tuesday.  Bright, sunny skies.  Temperature in the mid-40’s.  No wind.

But the bigger blessing came after the wedding when volunteers from the Catholic Church delivered the slightly-used pews to the nuns who now would have beautiful, refinished pews for a lifetime.  It should come as no surprise that the One who orchestrates things like temperatures can turn a blessing for an hour into a blessing for a lifetime.  What a God we serve!