Welcome to Our Love Story

Stephen and I met in 7th Grade, in Wheaton, Illinois! He was the star basketball player at our school and since I was on the pep squad, I got to travel with my friends to championship games to nearby states and watch our team play. Go Spartans! We actually lived around the corner from each other and many of us would walk home from school together. A couple years after living there, my parents decided to move our family back to our home state of California. I was sad to leave all my friends and toward the end of those 2 years, I had started to develop a crush on Stephen! Talk about bad timing! Well, I was checking the lost and found box at school before we moved, to see if I had left anything in it, an lo and behold I found a boy's purple dress shirt with orange pin stripes and I knew that it belonged to Stephen! So, I got the bright idea to take it home with me and thought maybe I could bring him his shirt and get to talk to him! But once I got home, I realized that I was too scared to do that, so I kept his shirt for a week! Then I folded it, put it in a bag and walked to his house and made sure no one was around, and I ran up and put it on his doorstep. As I was walking home, it made me so sad to be moving. As I shed a few tears, I thought to myself, I will never see him again. Little did I know that the story wasn't over yet! Fast forward, to 4 1/2 years later and I was walking outside of my college dorm. Someone came out of a crowd of people and started calling my name. I looked around trying to see who it was and there was Stephen walking out of the crowd! He ran up to me and hugged me and asked if I remembered him! He was there checking out a basketball scholarship. And of course, I wondered if he ever got his purple shirt back, but I was way too embarrassed to ask him then. We talked and caught up for quite a while. Such a crazy thing that he would show up at my college in California! Never forgot that. Then much later I saw him on Facebook, because he was a friend of someone I knew. And all I could think was "Wow, he became a long-haired hippy in Colorado!" In 2019, we got to talk on the phone for quite a while, and became friends on Facebook. We exchanged pictures we had from back when we knew each other and of our kids and families. He told me that it really made his day. Then in March 2021, we talked again on the phone and things were different this time. Stephen said, "Instead of meeting by accident throughout our lives, we need to plan to meet on purpose!" He asked if I would come and visit him or if he could come and visit me. I thought he was just being nice, but he kept asking. So, I ended up visiting him in one of the worst snowstorms of the century! Then he came to Knoxville to visit me for my birthday last April. We talked or texted every day and had a long-distance relationship for 5 months and then he moved to Knoxville, last July! On January 28th, he proposed and put his proposal up in lights on the marquee at the Tennessee Theatre downtown! The sidewalk was adorned with rose petals and it started snowing right when he knelt down on one knee. We are so happy that we reconnected and that God has given us love and allowed us the joy and happiness of being together on this journey!