Call to preach was misheard at wedding rehearsal

When Susie Van Dyke chimed the hour for the beginning of the start of the wedding Saturday, my imagination ran with the what if thought — what if she loses count? I could only relate to what might happen if I had been tasked with ringing the chime 11 times, exactly. During the pause between chimes, my mind would have started wandering and when it returned to the task at hand, I would have lost count.
She did not lose count, of course, and the wedding of grandson Hunt and his beautiful bride Mary Lynn started as planned, but later, when I mentioned my strange imaging about losing count to a couple of people, they said the same thought had occurred to them.
But there we found ourselves beaming as the wedding party strolled down the aisle as previously choreographed and rehearsed, then standing as the bride’s father escorted her to the previously appointed and heavily symbolic end of the aisle.
The night before at the rehearsal dinner I had witnessed the groom’s other grandfather, Gary Blair, introduce himself to Presbyterian pastor Jerry Long, who would officiate. Gary doesn’t come with a warning label, and apparently no one had previously briefed the pastor. When Gary started telling Jerry that he had always been a Baptist and had at times thought he wanted to preach, I was all ears.
He had never attempted preaching, he said, because he never got the call. Then a few minutes earlier during the rehearsal, Gary said, after all the years, that he thought he finally heard the call.
“Mr Gary, can you come up here?” was what he said he thought he heard.
The wedding coordinator had actually said, “Mr. Jerry, can you come up here?”
Somewhere in the telling, Jerry got his introduction to Gary. At the end of the tale, Gary blamed the misunderstanding on his new hearing aid. It is so high tech that it must be barely visible because I never saw it. I was not even sure, until he showed me the apps on his phone, that control the device in his ears, whether there was really a hearing aid or whether he had started hearing voices in his head. Those apps control the reception of the hearing devices through a range of situations, including one that says “Wife Mute.”