It's all happening! And yes, on New Year's Eve. We'll take care of the party. We're just thankful you're here.

That's why we've broken it up into little sections for you. You'll probably hear this again at our ceremony if you're in a hurry.

I'd known who Weston was for a while - frankly, I thought he was the most attractive man on campus. To the point that I was intimidated by him (silly, I know). Thus, we didn't talk much. I went to his family's home Bible study on Wednesday nights with dozens of other college students, and one time Freshman year ended up sitting next to him at Midnight Oil Coffeehouse. I finally worked up the courage after a quarter of an hour to say hello. A sweet interaction, really - we compared our textbooks to see whose was thicker - his engineering or my anatomy. I think it was a tie. My brother randomly stayed with Weston and his roommate during Spring Sing (set up through Weston's roommate), and at the end of the weekend I got a Snapchat from Weston telling me what a stud my brother was. I was giddy. But that was it for my first year at Harding.

12-8-2017 -- The day we went on our first date and the day Weston decided he wanted to get married. Let me elaborate. The above is 100% true. One fall night Sophomore year around 11:50 PM, I got a text from a number asking if I would go to TNT's function at a Memphis Grizzlies game with him. Spoiler - It was Weston. I obliged. (I found out much later that he had to have a date written down on the Google doc by midnight, and he states that my name randomly came to his head and he grabbed my number from a mutual friend). So, a month later, we piled in the car with some mutual friends (now married and in our wedding party!) and made the trek to Memphis. It was a lot of pressure, really - our first date lasted 7 hours, 4 of which were in the car. We shared a plate of barbecue, and I didn't watch more than 30 seconds of the game because of the rich conversation we had. The four of us each made an hour long playlist with some of our favorite songs for the trek to and from Memphis. If you know us you know that music plays a huge role in both of our lives, and this was one of the first ways we connected. He asked me for my playlist later that night, once we got home. The HIGHEST compliment. I told my roommate that evening that I'd never connected so well with a guy. But Weston went a step further - I found out a year later that Weston had taken the Grizzlies tickets that night and handwritten "Calling it now - she's the one." Look at that intuition.

After our date in Memphis, I was home for 3 months while I prepared to leave for my semester abroad in Latin America. Thus, we didn't see much of each other, but we kept in touch. Weston told me the week before I left that he wanted to pursue a relationship with me. Because I wanted to be fully present on my trip, we decided not to continue to build relationship long distance but to reassess the following summer. Fortunately our schedules aligned to where we both had a Searcy summer while he counseled at camp and I took a class. We started dating in July, and dated into the fall of our Junior year.

We took a little break for a while in the spring of junior year. As our majors picked up and we realized truly how different we are, we realized we didn't have what it took at the time to continue to build a healthy relationship together. However, after the breakup, I quickly knew that this wasn't the right thing to do forever. It was now my turn to wait patiently for Weston to come around to the idea of dating again. And praise God that he did! We began round two of dating fall of senior year, and the Lord's redemption in our relationship has been so evident.

A lot of people have wedding planners. We had an engagement planner! Her name is COVID. Weston and I knew pretty soon after beginning to date again that we wanted to do this for the long run. We had looked into wedding venues and engagement rings and begun premarital counseling before Corona was on anyone's radar. Shortly after Weston purchased the ring, Harding shut down on-campus activity and we all went home. The most important thing to me when it came to engagement was that I was completely surprised and that my loved ones were there to celebrate with us. Naturally, this took a while. But on May 8, 2020, Weston managed to pull off a surprise with many of our dearest friends. Although this season of long-distance and pandemic is not quite ideal, we are richly blessed. Saying we are excited for the future together in Memphis is simply an understatement.