Divine Will fulfilled a Carpenter's Love Story

I asked the Lord how to tell this story, and this is what He said:

Lord, where do I start to tell my story?

At the new beginning, and at the beginning. You are fulfilling what was set in place 60 years ago.  

Yes, Lord, You are.

This Sunday, April 27, 2025, I will sacramentally wed the love of my life, the man God designed and chose just for me; the man whom He announced I would marry at the moment of his birth! God is patient with us, and it has taken Him 60 years to get us to this place. I am so incredibly in awe of how He has worked in my life, and in all the breadcrumbs that He has left for me to discover.

We will be married in the Catholic Church, after 22 years of civil marriage, on Divine Mercy Sunday—the day when Jesus opens the floodgates of His mercy to all who trust in Him. By receiving the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion on this feast, our souls are cleansed completely, as if newly baptized, with all sins and their punishments wiped away. This extraordinary grace, promised by Jesus to St. Faustina, allows us to begin our marriage in love and in the holy purity and renewal that only His mercy can provide. It is fitting that the day we wed is one of the dates that has repeatedly been significant in my life. This year, the Feast of Divine Mercy will redeem this date for me, once and for all.

Having obtained the grace of Divine Mercy for myself, I will also strive to attain the additional Plenary Indulgence that is available and ask that it be applied for my mother, who seven years ago on April 27, 2018, expressed for all the world to see her profound disregard for me, painfully severing me from some of my most beloved family forever. I am grateful to be able to reject the pain and hurt intended for me and instead to apply the balm of God’s unfathomable Divine Mercy to it, bringing complete healing, asking that she be welcomed into heaven with nothing but love in my heart for her.

Stay with me here, and I will share with you a forensic story of God’s hand in my life, as I see how He has lined things up over the last 60 years. As Fifty Shades of Grace launches into the world today, it belongs totally to Him, and I believe that He has been at work to bring us to this day, and what He will do in the future, of which I do not know what that is—as none of us know God’s plans for our lives—but I do know that I will strive to live in His Divine Will until the day He calls me home.

As I said, Michael’s and my story started at the moment of his birth.

As an angel announced to Mary that she would bear a son who would save His people from their sins, a spiritual force, probably an angel, announced to me that I would “marry a carpenter just like Jesus” when I was 9 years old. Here is how it happened.

I was a little tomboy, and my dad had put together a carpentry set for me for Christmas, the Christmas before my sister was born. He made a wooden toolbox and filled it with kid-sized tools that all worked: a hammer, saw, hand drill, level, a planer, and miscellaneous other items to round out the set. I loved that thing and used it all the time.

My only sibling was born on February 27th, and my friend who lived down the street had a new baby in her family exactly one month later, on March 27th. I was minding my own business, sitting on the concrete sidewalk leading to our front door, fashioning some new treasure with my carpentry set on March 30th, 1965, as my cousin and I waited for Laura’s mom and new baby sister to come home from the hospital and my mom to call us in for lunch. Back in the day, babies were kept in the hospital for three days, which is how I know for sure that the date was March 30, 1965 at lunchtime.

As I was hammering away, I "felt" something come into my ear, and a pronouncement quickly followed out of my mouth.

I looked up at my cousin Sherry and announced: "When I grow up, I'm going to marry a carpenter just like Jesus." She looked at me quizzically, and I realized she didn't know who Jesus was. So I patiently explained, "Jesus was the son of God, and He was a carpenter, who worked in a carpentry shop with His dad every day. Hold on, I'm going to go and tell my dad that when I grow up, I'm going to marry a carpenter, just like Jesus."

I then jumped up, marched into the garage, and declared to my dad, "When I grow up, I'm going to marry a carpenter just like Jesus." "OK..." he said. Like, what else is a dad to say? It wasn't like I was the little girl sitting around thinking about my wedding day. This. Just. Happened. Out of the blue.

Interestingly, around this same time period, I was taking lessons to learn to play the organ. My teacher's name was Agnes Deschaine. I thought that Deschaine was a beautiful name, so I imagined myself with that name and took a piece of chalk and wrote in my very best penmanship, from the far upper left-hand corner of our two-car driveway to the lowest right-hand corner of the driveway:

Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine Patricia Anne Deschaine

I can't tell you how many times I wrote it, but I know it took hours. Maybe I got the idea to do that from writing "I will do what Sister Rose Herman tells me to do" 50 or 500 times, lol. I guess repetition was important.

Anyway, the look of dismay, coupled with distress, on my mother's face when she saw that driveway masterpiece was priceless. She burst out "WHAT are you doing?" I smiled up at her and said, "I like that name. That is what I want MY name to be." She promptly informed me that my name is and would continue to be Patricia Anne Armstrong and to get that cleaned off of the driveway before my father got home. I conceded that she was right but added that THAT was what I wanted my name to BE. It seemed to be a moot point at the time, but guess what?

Thirty years later, I would meet Michael John Deschaine in church, when I least expected it, and HE was and is a carpenter who went to work with his dad every day for 18 years.

Mike truly is a carpenter—building crates, working with wood, creating with his hands. He does not build houses; he literally works in a shop. For 18 years, he both commuted with and worked each day alongside his father at PG&E, just as Jesus worked alongside Joseph. Different trades, but shared days, shared journeys, shared purpose. God's promise to me was not symbolic—it was literal, lovingly fulfilled in the most beautiful and unexpected way.

He was born at 12:40 pm on March 30, 1965, the very time that I revealed my plans to marry a carpenter, just like Jesus.

I love this story, and I believe with everything in me that although my husband's and my lives both veered off track and took us in directions away from each other, God, in His discretion, worked on us like the car's GPS does. Rerouting, rerouting, rerouting. Ha! GPS — God's Positioning System.

At our civil wedding, I shared this story—one marked by a simple gift: a replica of my father's toolbox, lovingly made for me by his hands, just for that day. It was a symbol of preparation, of hope, of a promise yet to be fulfilled.

Today, that promise is fulfilled in full.

Today, we stand not just before family and friends, but before God Himself, as we receive the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony—the covenant He planned from the very beginning.

The prophecy spoken over my life has come to pass, and God's Divine Mercy and astonishing Grace have woven it all together in ways more beautiful than I could have imagined.

In the days to come, I look forward to sharing more of how God, in His perfect love, has led us here— and how this is just the beginning of a far greater adventure: exploring far more than Fifty Shades of Grace, but the endless wonders of His heart.