A real-life tale of heartache and joy from Lyon, France where God joined two people together from a chance encounter -- prompted by their dogs!

My mum Any Descotes was baptized in January 1985 while visiting me in London. Then she went back home to Lyon in France, where she reached out to my dad for many years. Finally in 1999 my dad was baptized at the European conference in Paris. In 2003 he died of cancer and my mum had to face her grief. My younger brother bought her a cute little dog to keep her company. My mother never thought she would ever get married again. There aren’t too many single men in their sixties in the Lyon church!

God, though, had another plan. In October 2007, Any was walking her dog in the park when the dog started being friendly to an older gentleman sitting on a bench. This gentleman (Alain Octave) struck up a conversation with my mum. It turned out he had the exact same dog (indeed the two dogs look like clones!) and he had also lost his spouse to a long disease.

He then told my mum his faith in God had given him the strength to cope with his grief. At this point my mum could not believe her ears and she invited Alain to church. He started attending the meetings of the Lyon church and my brother Franck started studying the Bible with him. Alain was very open and he got baptized in March this year.

Meanwhile Alain and Any fell in love. They are both 67 years old yet they look so much younger! They got married on June 7th in Lyon. It was a very romantic and moving wedding. Alain and Any are right now on their honeymoon in Italy.

Both Alain and Any are very evangelistic. So many people came to Alain’s baptism and then to the wedding. I am sure God can use their story to inspire and give faith to others. God does wonderful miracles and this is surely one of them! It is a modern-day story with some of the beauty of the miracles we saw in the story of Ruth.