When Erica Dyer went
about making her wedding
website at mywedding.com,
she did something that
didn’t surprise her friends.
Along with the rest of the
wedding party, she listed
Karen Kingsbury as her Matron of Honor. Dyer, 24, is a
longtime Kingsbury fan
and has quoted Kingsbury’s books frequently in
a journal of letters to her future husband
that she’s kept since she was 17.
So Dyer posted a photo of herself and
Kingsbury taken at one of Kingsbury’s
events, and beneath that she wrote simply:
Matron of Honor—Hopeful.
For a while, everyone who knew Erica
had a good chuckle over her wishful thinking. “About a month later, my mom told
me I should write Karen and at least let her
know that she was my Matron of Honor,”
Erica says. “So I emailed Karen, but the
whole thing was never meant to be serious. I knew Karen would never even have
time to read my email.”
But that day, Kingsbury was sitting bedside
with her husband, who’d undergone surgery to repair a hole in
his heart. “I had more time than
usual to read letters from my
reader friends,” she says. “Of
course the subject line caught
my eye. ’Matron
of Honor?’”
Kingsbury
showed her
husband—who
has since completely recovered—and he
noted that the wedding was
smack in the middle of
Kingsbury’s upcoming tour
to promote her novel Take
Four.
“You’ll be on the road, anyway,” he told
her. “You should do it.”
Kingsbury has a mission statement when
it comes to writing books and dealing with
her fans: Always love and serve the readers.
So it took only a minute for Kingsbury to ?re
off an email to Dyer.
Erica, I’m honored you would ask—even if
this is all a little tongue-in-cheek, Kingsbury
wrote. Still, you have to live outside the box
sometimes, so maybe my husband is right.
Where’s the wedding?
Within hours of receiving Kingsbury’s
email, all of Odessa, Mo., knew about Dyer ’s
shock and disbelief : She writes a column for
the local paper, where she detailed the saga
of events, and she teaches Spanish at the
local high school—so literally she told
everyone she knows. Aside from her
column, Erica kept all of her friends, family
and wedding party up-to-date on her
website at mywedding.com.
On June 25 in an old church with stained-
glass windows in Odessa, in front of
400 guests, Kingsbury made good on
that promise.
As a gift to the bride and groom,
Kingsbury’s publisher, Zondervan, and
mywedding.com sponsored a three-day
pre-honeymoon trip to New York City. Erica
and her husband, Ryan Shippy, were able to
go to Broadway shows, sightsee and enjoy
time together.
“It’s a dream come true,” Dyer says. “A day
doesn’t go by I don’t tell someone the unbelievable news—my favorite author was my
Matron of Honor!” FF