About five or six years ago I started thinking about moving to NYC. At the time I had no idea why. It didn't make any sense. I had a great job, living close to my family, and leaving just was not in the cards. Or so it seemed. After a LOT of thought, many gentle (and some not so gentle) pushes, and lot of puzzle pieces falling into place I made the leap and went to NYC. After three years of some ups and downs I was ready to leave NY for good, but something kept me there for one more year. In the beginning of my fourth school year, I met Jeff. Even though Jeff and I had been in the same church congregation (ward) for about a year, we had never interacted. Not even so much as a hello had passed between us. Jeff sang in a choir I directed for a conference, but even then, we never spoke. It wasn't until a year after he joined the ward that we both ended up at a single's conference in DC one weekend. On Saturday night a group of us were hanging out at a campfire. I was mostly hanging out with some friends who had come to the conference with me. Late in the evening Jeff came over to our group. When I saw him coming I said, "Jeff Murphy!" as if he and I had been good friends, and not the actual perfect strangers that we were. The rest, as they say, was history. We spent that entire evening, and a good portion of the night, chatting about who knows what, flirting a little bit ;) and mostly laughing at each other's ridiculous jokes. Later on that night I told Jeff that I was afraid of falling for him, because I was already feeling it was going to be something special. The very next day Jeff asked me out, and every day since then we have either texted, talked, or seen each other. As they say, it only takes one person to change everything, and that's what happened with us! ~Christa

The first time I remember seeing Christa was at a church building in Woodside, Queens. She was conducting a choir and I had volunteered to sing. She was in a bright red Ohio State t-shirt and was trying to get this mostly english speaking choir to sing a song in spanish. If that wasn't exasperating enough, one member of the choir made a very condescending comment to her, which she handled with grace and charm, and planted a little seed in my heart for her. But as these things seem to go, I didn't talk to her until almost exactly a year later. Now, I had plenty of opportunities - she was in my congregation, we have a ton of mutual friends, we sang in the same church choir - but we had to drive from NYC to a small country town in Maryland, at a conference for single members of our church, to finally talk. I had gone to this conference with some hesitation and agreed at the prompting of some friends in my congregation. I arrived on Friday night and throughout that night and into Saturday, I met many fun and friendly people, but no one I really connected with. On the last night of the conference, I went down to the campfire and spotted a friend and Christa. When I approached, Christa called out "JEFF MURPHY!", which surprised me, since we had never said two words to each other. But I knew who she was. We started chatting, she made me a s'more, we told each other some jokes, and we had a really fun time. I could tell she was going to be someone I wanted to spend more time with, and we haven't gone a day without speaking since!