We're getting married!

We met at Community of Faith church where I'm the Director of Kids Ministry and Chris volunteers in our second and third grade classroom as a small group leader. We met a few times in passing over the summer with special kid events and regular Sunday mornings, but it wasn't until September that Chris got bold and decided to ask me to get coffee. However, I very gently declined, and we didn't mention it again until the beginning of November. I then played it off like I hadn't rejected him and instead asked if he still would be interested in getting coffee sometime as "volunteer appreciation". I made it very clear during that meeting that it was definitely not a date. It wasn't until our official first date that we both realized how similar we were - even down to sharing the exact same middle name. It was after that that we became inseparable and shortly thereafter both knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives loving one another.

Mikayla was nosey and asked a lot questions so my plan was thrown off a little bit. The original plan was to recreate our first date but she was strongly opposed to going back to work on a Saturday to prank one of her coworkers again. So instead, I asked her if she would like to go hiking around Lake Houston. It wasn't until we got there that I realized Lake Houston wasn't all that pretty...nor is any kind of hike in Texas an actual hike. It's more like a walking trail...with roots in it. So instead we went to dinner at our favorite sushi place where we went on our second date and then went and walked around Towne Lake. Towne Lake is a beautiful lake neighborhood that we walk around almost weekly with coffee from our favorite shop in hand and it's where we talk about life, our relationship, and what God is doing in our lives with no distractions. It was walking around this lake on our first date that I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Mikayla. We found a bench and sat down and I told her that I wanted to bring her back to this spot because it was the very beginning of our adventure, and I wanted to be able to begin a brand new adventure in the same place. Obviously she said yes to a lifetime of new adventures together!