Months before Kara and Micah’s wedding, they sent out invitations to close friends and family members. But as the week of the wedding approached, rain threatened to be an uninvited and very last-minute guest.

The entire family was glued to the weather report, giving each other up-to-the-second updates on weather patterns. To tent or not to tent was very much the question for this outdoor celebration. Much later, Micah confessed that he and Kara woke up every day for a week and a half and checked every weather site they could find. Even the Serenbe administrative office staff checked obsessively and they weren’t even part of the festivities.

The day before the wedding, there was a 60 percent chance of rain—a very literal gray cloud hanging over our heads. We talked about moving the reception to the pavilion on the Inn grounds, but that was worst-case scenario for Kara, who uses it as home base for Camp Serenbe every summer. If you work in an office, it’d basically be the equivalent of hosting your reception in the conference room.

My sweet Kara works all year to make 8 weeks of summer camp look effortless. She has it organized to a T: 70 children, 24 counselors and spreadsheets to the max. She knows her budgets and schedules and approached the logistics of this wedding in much the same way. She worked for the better part of a year to make it look effortless and when we had no choice but to talk about tenting the reception space versus moving to the pavilion, Steve and I shut it down shortly after we saw the look of disappointment on her face. We’re here to help make her dreams come true, not settle for Plan B.

So we tented. And did it rain? Not a drop. It rained all around us—literally right down the street in Newnan—but it was like there was a bubble over us that rain didn’t dare penetrate.

On Monday, after the last guests left, Steve took the newlyweds to the airport to catch the first of two flights that would take them to Greece. As he pulled off the gravel road of the Inn and onto the paved road that borders Serenbe, the skies opened up and it poured. And it reminded me of Field of Dreams, that wonderful movie about baseball players from different eras, when Burt Lancaster crosses the line and changes everything. When Kara and Micah left, the universe somehow knew it was okay for the rain to come.

And it did. 

Join me next week for the final installment of the Kara’s Wedding series: A grateful look all the angels that came together to make her day magical.