Every story has a design. The author carefully crafts each strand, then weaves the strings of the story together to create a solid, magnificent work.

The love story of Dominic Balli and his wife Emily is an example of such an authorship.

At sixteen, Dominic became a born again Christian at a youth camp. By this time he had suffered from a history of bad relationships and heartache from becoming too emotionally attached to the women he was dating.

“Each time I felt like I had a lost part of my heart. I said, ‘God just tell me who to marry and I’ll ask her to marry me.’”

A year later, Dominic was singing at his grandfather’s church when he met Emily. They spent the next two years singing together at the church, becoming good friends. And when Emily’s senior prom came around, she called Dominic.

“I don’t want to go with a guy that’s going to get freaky. I want to go with a guy that’s safe. Will you go to my prom with me?”

At this point, Dominic felt no romantic feelings towards her, so, as only a friend, he agreed to go. But when Emily met him at the door in her prom gown, his feelings began to change.

“We started to fall in love with each other that night,” Dominic says. “We just hung out and had a crazy fun time.”

But his past relationships made him cautious. When he interned at his grandfather’s church that summer, he communicated to Emily that he didn’t want to hang out anymore.

But the Author of the story had a different design.

A few extra interns were brought onto the team that summer, including none other than Emily herself. She and Dominic ended up spending many hours together working at the church, but neither one of them spoke of an attraction. Dominic wasn’t interested in a girlfriend, so he told God, “If this is my wife, tell me she’s my wife and I’ll marry her.”

And God answered. Every time Dominic opened his Bible it would turn to verses that related to the preciousness of a good wife (Proverbs 31:10), the way a husband should love his wife (Ephesians 5:25), or two becoming one (Genesis 2:24). A collection of these events made the circumstances hard to ignore.

“I went to her and asked, ‘So has God been telling you anything about anything?’ And she said, ‘Maybe. Has God been telling you anything about anything?’”

It took less than a day from the time the conversation broke open to the time Dominic and Emily decided to get married. The next day they announced their engagement and a year and half later they walked down the isle.

“When you get married, you realize what an idiot you are. All your little faults come out and now they’re not just affecting you, but the people close to you. But if you don’t deal with those things, it’s going to affect your closest relationship. You can’t make yourself a better person. God has to work through you. Daily surrender is important to that process.”

Dominic’s newest album “American Dream,” coming out July 26th, includes the song “Take My Love”, which tells the story he shares with Emily. Dominic wrote it while he and his wife were on vacation, in the backyard of a beach house.

“I was looking at the ocean and my beautiful wife, just remembering our story.”

As a musician, Dominic is aware of the mainstream viewpoint of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” being what people chase to find fulfillment, but as a married Christian man he knows the pursuit of these endeavors always comes up short of satisfying.

“The reason people are going to come up feeling empty every time is because the most fulfillment they’re going to have in a loving relationship is with God. You don’t really know a true love relationship or true contentment until you’ve given everything to the Creator.”

Which is just how the Author designed it.