August 21, 2018 I (Liza) received an Instagram direct message from a guy named Grant Rost. Nothing too flirty but along the lines of “Hi, have we ever met”? You may be asking where this seemingly out of the blue question was coming from. Well, it may or may not have been because I had followed him just a week prior ; ). I promise the story becomes less millennial! We started talking over instagram and then FaceTiming, but we both saw very quickly that there was serious potential. We had to meet! Fast forward to November 11, Grant drove from Cincinnati and I drove from Grand Rapids to meet in Columbus (FOR THE FIRST TIME) to go to the Ohio State v. Michigan State football game. If any of you are sports fans you know how well that game went for me. Afterwards we talked, laughed, got dinner and the rest is history!

My (Liza) birthday is November 8th so for my birthday 12 of my closest friends planned to fly or drive to Chicago to celebrate the weekend of November 16-18. I had told Grant about “birthday weekend” and had shared how excited I was for it in the weeks leading up. During this time Grant was in the process of raising the last bit of his new ministry support before he moved to Chicago. We had talked about marriage and I knew that was the next step but was under the (false) impression that we were going to wait until he was living in Chicago to get engaged! On November 18, I went to church and brunch with everyone then one of my friends (Christie Young - Bridesmaid) said she wanted to go to Lincoln Park to meet up with her husband. We all decided we would go with her. We were wandering around the park trying to locate her “husband”, but really I was being lead to Grant's hiding spot! Once all of the girls were in position Grant came out of hiding in the bushes and came over to where we were. Right when I saw him I was absolutely so confused and felt like everything was so out of context. He then walked me over to a bridge and that is where he got down on one knee and asked me to spend the rest of his life with him! :)