In August 2020. I went to an event called Regenerate 2.0. It was led by Pricilla Mathew, Neeza Abraham and their Bible Study Group (Thank you!). To this day I still don't know why they picked Fort Yargo or why I even showed up. I sat through group sessions and talks. Each part of the event chipped away at past resentment and by the end, I opened up about how I was broken down spiritually. Right after I had finished my talk, a girl got up to speak. She told her story, cried a bit and mentioned that she decided to speak up after hearing what I had to say. That girl was Ashley. Now, you're probably thinking "That's the moment!" where auspicious Bollywood music began to play and the wind blew through our hair as we passionately gazed into each other's eyes. That didn't happen. To be honest, I forgot about Ash by the end of the day. The next day, Neeza had invited me to hang out with everyone from the event and I had a good time. By the evening I was trying to start a conversation with Ash and see how she was doing. The whole day of hanging out made her tired and she was ready to go home. She was short with me and every time I tried to strike up a conversation she had little to say. After that night, I didn't think much would come after but that became the beginning of our story. The next day, Ash messaged me on Instagram apologizing for being out of it that night. I was surprised to hear back from her. She shared her experiences and I opened up about things I had gone through. We texted every day. The conversations were refreshing and we agreed things would eventually fizzle out between us. They didn't. We talked about our days, vented about problems and prayed for each other. We worked with each other and peeled back all our worries. Everything snowballed after that. We worked together and never stopped. We met up in person, decided to date and I eventually proposed. I went to Regenerate asking God to prove me wrong. I can see now that Ash was His response.

The very first time I saw Chris was at Regenerate 2.0 on August 1st, 2020, which was led by Neeza and Pris. I go to this park where the conference was held and I volunteered to help sign people in. I saw this guy walking towards the sign-in table and I was like “ jeez that guy is tall” in my head. I go on and write his name and his brothers' name on the tag. Towards the end of the conference, it was testimony time. Chris goes up and shares his testimony and I get wrecked. He made everyone there cry! He shares about all the stuff he had gone through prior to this conference and he was giving God one more chance to show up for him and God did for him at this conference. The crazy part was, before the conference I asked God “ change at least one person's life there otherwise there was no point to attending”. Of course, God answered that prayer. The following day Neeza invited Chris to hang out with our group and we all went out to eat. He sat right next to me. Mind you, at this point, I was EXTREMELY tired. For those who do not know me reading this, I'm not nice when I'm tired. Chris tries to have small talk with me and I would just give him one-word answers the whole night. I just wanted to home and sleep. That's all I wanted. The next morning I left back home and I realized how not nice I was to Chris. I messaged him and apologized for my attitude (which normally I do not do, and to this day I think it was God telling me to apologize). He was understanding and I thought it would end there. But it didn't! after a week he told me he wouldn't be opposed to dating me. I was very hesitant at the time and was not ready to date. I wanted to pursue my relationship with God first. We kept talking and 4 months later he came to Florida to visit his cousins for Christmas and eventually ended up seeing me and my family with his siblings. We decided to make it official and now here we are getting married. To this day I am in awe of how God put us together.