I like to say that our love began when Noah, an ambitious incoming freshman, sent me a Facebook message saying "Hey. I'm hip. You're hip. Let's become friends and make a hip posse of friends." That was the beginning of a deep friendship, but it would be a few months before any sparks started flying. Coming off the end of a breakup with his high school sweetheart, Noah came to me, one of his closest confidants on campus, for consolation and encouragement. You can imagine how confused he was when he started to realize that he was falling for me. Big time. On my end, I had been falling for Noah for MONTHS. But I kept it quiet in my heart, praying all the time that he would be the one I married (ambitious prayer, I know). We ended up confessing our feelings for each other one night in January, deciding to try our hand at dating. In those first few months that held much confusion and brokenness for both Noah and I, God was working to lay the foundations of trust and love that our lives are built on today. If it were not for the intensity of the things we had to work through together then and throughout the past three years, we would not be the individuals nor the couple we are today. - R
I was planning on proposing to Rebecca some time in the late spring of 2018, but when we started planning our New Years trip out to Colorado Springs, I saw the perfect opportunity to make a dream of hers come true: to be proposed to on a mountain top. So, before the end of 2017, I met with her dad and we hatched a plan. I found a nice, easy 2 mile hike with a wonderful view of the Broadmoor Seven Falls for New Years Day. On the way up, Rebecca had some suspicions as to what was going on, so she hugged me to try and squeeze my coat for some hint of the ring box that I had carefully hidden in my layers. Finally, we reached the top, and I had successfully convinced Rebecca that it wasn't happening that day by keeping a quick pace and a good few steps between us on the trail (in reality I was just super nervous). But, when I told Rebecca to give her phone to her dad to take a picture of us, the jig was up and I was down on one knee. She was stoked. I was stoked. We didn't know if we should kiss in front of her dad, so we didn't. Then Dan prayed over us on top of the mountain that set the stage for a rock solid engagement and marriage to come. - N