While many celebrated tiffany Valentines Day with dinner, cards and candy, two Jackson County couples celebrated their love with a wedding.

Melissa and Jeff Atkins and Kathy and Ryan Briner each had their own wedding Saturday with friends and family gathered at Tampico Christian Church.

Although they had hopes of getting married, they didn’t realize it would come so soon. They each said they saw a recent article in The Tribune reporting the church would marry couples on Valentines Day, and they jumped at the chance.

“We’ve been together for five years, and we’ve been wanting to get married,” Jeff Atkins said. “Valentines Day seemed like it would be the right time to do it because we’ve been planning it for a while, but we haven’t been planning it for a while.”

His wife, Melissa added, “We have a 4-year-old and it’s kind of hard to save money to get married.”

Pastor of Tampico Church, Mike Hawkins, wasn’t surprised when his phone bangles started ringing Thursday morning with people calling wanting to get married. He said the idea of marrying couples on Valentines Day stemmed from a message from God that he received while visiting a church in Seymour.

“God placed it on my heart that we needed to do this and open up the church,” he said. “He gave me three dates that he laid on my heart, Valentines Day, March 6 and July 8.”

Hawkins said after the service he told his wife, Stephanie, about it and added that she was receptive to the idea.

But why did the Lord lay down those three dates?

“I can’t speak for God, but I do know this, there will be a lot of unions made on Valentines Day as well as those other days,” he said.

The other days he said are a play on numbers, March 6 is also 3-6-09 and July 8 is 7-8-09.

“I feel in my spirit that was what was going on,” he said. “When God speaks to me, I try very hard to be obedient. As a Christian and a believer, that is probably one of the hardest things we struggle with because some people say, do you hear God audibly? God makes himself clear through us.”

Melissa and Jeff, who met online through a Yahoo chat room, left their parents speechless when they called to tell them of their plans to wed on Saturday.

“They were confused and they didn’t know what to think,” Jeff said.

Melissa added, “They were excited.”

“Yeah, they were excited, but they didn’t know if we were going to be able to do rings it in time,” he said.

The couple did make it and managed to include everything from a suit and white dress to red rose bouquets and boutonnieres.

“At first it was supposed to be just blue jeans and dress shirts,” Jeff said. “It ended up being dress and suit, the whole nine yards.”

Friends and family gathered with Jeff and Melissa in celebration after the wedding at the Jackson-Washington

State Forest near Brownstown. They added they were going to go out to eat and to a horse show.

The couple said they were excited to share the union of their marriage on Valentines Day.

“It was kind of exciting because we knew it was Valentines Day and there’s supposed to be a lot of love going around in the air, so we figured we’d do it on one of the loving days of the year,” Jeff said.

As for Kathy and Ryan Briner, their choice to get married on Valentines Day played some in the romance of the holiday, but more on the result of the weak economy.

“We were planning to go to Tennessee (to get married), but Tuesday we find out if we are still going to have our jobs or not,” Kathy said, referring to their jobs at Celedon. “We found out this week they are having a meeting about our jobs. We wanted to get married and we didn’t want to go to the courthouse to bracelets get married.”

“We didn’t know if we were going to have money to do it,” Ryan added.

The couple has been together two and a half years and said they met through work.

“When she hired in at NTN, I trained her,” Ryan said.

Even though they only had a couple days to plan for the wedding, they said their parents were OK with the short notice.

“My parents love him,” Kathy said.

The couple said they had plans to celebrate with family with a dinner at The Pines and look forward to just being together.

“When the phone started ringing, I wasn’t surprised,” Pastor Hawkins said of the couples calling. “I was suddenly blessed again because God revealed himself and how faithful he is when we are faithful.”

Hawkins told the couples he married that their marriage was ordained by God, that they wouldn’t have been at the church Saturday to get married if it weren’t for God.

“If I wouldn’t have followed God’s command and I wouldn’t have (contacted The Tribune) and they didn’t respond the way they did, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.

Hawkins added the weddings offered couples a chance to share their union of marriage in the cufflinks eyes of God versus getting married at the courthouse.

“We were blessed today,” he said. “We had two couples come into our church and make a covenant not only with themselves, but with God; and too often that’s left out on the courthouse steps.”

The day provided an outreach for those wanting to be married in a church but who may not have an affiliation with one.

“That is what God placed on my spirit, that there are a lot of people that don’t feel like they can approach the church to be married either because of a lifestyle they’ve been living or a situation that is happening or has happened in their lives,” he said. “Now God is calling the church to step up and step out to take down some of those barriers that we’ve allowed to keep people away from the church for all too long now.”