I love a love story and especially enjoy hearing how husbands and wives first met. Very often a man and woman are brought together in the most unusual of ways and frequently from faraway places.

For example, our daughter Linnea (who grew up in the Chicago suburbs) met her husband Adam (from central Florida) while they were both in Youth With A Mission (in Kona, Hawaii). Son Hans (from the same Midwest suburbs) met wife Katy (from England) while they were in a YWAM training school (in New Zealand).

Klaus left well-populated Chicago and moved to our tiny Michigan town where he met his true love Brooke. None of these six would have met without these unusual story lines.

Nate and I met during college, though we didn’t attend the same school. My girlfriend (at Wheaton College) and his guy friend (at Northwestern University) were engaged, and the two of them brought the two of us together on a blind date. Without our friendships with those particular students, he and I would never have met. If we interviewed 1,000 married couples, no two stories would be alike.

So…. does God have a part in all this? I like to believe he puts together these complicated scenarios to cause people to meet, sometimes setting the particulars in place many years before, in order for that one meeting to take place. After all, he’s a God who cares about the details.

One of my favorite love story meetings happened to my neighbor’s sister, but it didn’t begin with special chemistry or sparks flying. It all started when she had a brain aneurysm and lost consciousness. That’s a negative way to begin a positive story, but because of that aneurysm, Gayle had to postpone her plans for a trip to Europe with her girlfriend.

Four months later, fully recovered and feeling much better, Gayle and her friend embarked on their journey abroad. It was on that sight-seeing trip that she met her true love. There were no formal introductions, just a split-second decision to jump into the same cab in Florence, Italy. “If I hadn’t had that aneurysm,” she said, “I would never have met my husband. It’s the mystery of God.”

How much does God shape the circumstances around us? Because I’m convinced he fervently loves us, I believe it’s constant. Every time we pray, “Thy will be done,” he jumps into action, arranging and rearranging the events of our days. I believe life is more than a series of hit-and-miss occurrences, because if it was, we’d be no more than victims of chance. That doesn’t blend well with what we know of our watchful, caring, personal God. Scripture says he’s so involved with our lives that even when we’re rolling dice, he’s the one controlling where they land.

So the next time you bump into an unexpected change of plans or even an irksome interruption, pause to think that God himself might be behind it, setting up something special, just for you.

“We may throw the dice,but the Lord determines how they fall.” (Proverbs 16:33)