10 years ago this summer, Sam and I met at Ankeny Baptist Church. I used to go visit my sister who lives in Ankeny for a few weeks during the summer so that is how Sam and I connected. I went up to Iowa almost every summer after and one summer I went to camp with Sam's youth group but we didn't have much interaction with each other. My first memory of Sam was after a church softball game everyone went to Applebees and around the table we were talking about basketball. I wasn't really paying attention until I heard Sam say, "I don't like Grayson Allen" and that was when I knew I didn't like Sam. Before my sophomore year at FBBC, I looked up the roster of one of my classes and saw that Sam was in that class and my first thought was please don't let this class be in alphabetical order because I don't want to sit next to Sam. We ended up sitting one chair apart... thank goodness. Late fall we were in the same Sadie's group and I asked someone else, and his date didn't come to the first activity with us so I had to pay for Sam and my date. Sam and I ended up hanging out a lot during that night and at the same moment we both changed our minds about each other. I have a video of it somewhere but then the rest is history. We started dating on January 12, 2020 and took a break late summer of 2021. God had a plan for us and we both needed to grow to see what He wanted for our lives. We stayed in contact for most of the next year Sam went to Alaska for the summer of 2022 and I stayed in Iowa. He reached out again to me in July and when he came back to Iowa, I agreed to see him in person. It was a little weird at first but then it was just like old times. We had a lot of conversations about our future and what we had learned while we were apart. We started dating again in the winter of 2022 and we got engaged on March 3, 2023. We have been best friends since 2020 and are so excited to spend the rest of our lives together.