Our dating story:

Cason and I met back in high school through a program called Teen Advisors (TAs).  He was homeschooled, but he came to my high school for TA sessions.  We knew each other, and we had plenty of mutual friends, but we weren’t close at the time. (Cason says he had a crush on me at one point, but he steered clear because I was dating someone throughout high school.)  After I graduated, Cason and I didn’t stay in touch.  When I was home from college during Christmas and summer breaks, I went to a young adult ministry called The Door, and we ended up reconnecting through that ministry.

During my sophomore year in college and after a recent breakup, I bumped into Cason at Fantasy in Lights over Christmas break (2011).  We chatted like old friends–he asked about my experiences at Mercer and shared about his adventures in Australia.  Given my introverted nature, a conversation this detailed, however brief, was a big deal to me.  Cason, naturally social and chatty, probably didn’t think twice about it.

The next time we saw each other was during the following summer break (2012).  We both attended The Door one evening, and afterwords Cason invited  me to Buffalo Wild Wings with him and some friends for his birthday.  I accepted his invitation, which was also probably a pretty big deal for me–if you know me, you know that in all honesty, I probably just wanted to go home for some alone time after being with a group of people for two hours.  We talked about our travels including one pub in London that we thought we had both visited.  After I got home that night, I sent him a photo of the pub that I took during my travels, but I never heard back from him.  (Thankfully, we can now laugh about how he never responded to me.)

By the spring of this year, I had graduated college and returned to our hometown to prepare for my trip to China.  However, Cason was interested to hear about my travel plans, so he messaged me on Facebook one night and invited me to grab coffee with him.  It’s funny because the day before he messaged me, I was feeling pretty bored at home without all my friends.  So I was trying to think of people to hang out with, and I saw that he was online on Facebook.  I went to message him–opened the chat window and everything–but I got distracted by my parents and ended up not messaging him.  (Though it’s unfortunate that the trip to China never happened, I think now it’s obvious that God still had great things in store for me.)

If you ask me about our first date, I would say it was that February night at Starbucks, though Cason will admit that he didn’t think of it as a date at the time.  I was quite surprised by how naturally we hit it off, and I remember wondering why we never hung out more in high school.  Cason is genuine and very forthcoming about his life and experiences, and I appreciated that very much.  I think we can both agree that at that point in our lives we were tired of unhappy endings and playing games with people; we were both looking for something real.  I must have seen that right away in Cason because that night after Starbucks, I told one of my friends, “I’m gonna marry this guy.”

In our dating relationship, we were very intentional about getting to know each other.  (We knew of each other for so long, that it made it easy to transition from the general to the more specific.)  Early on, we both realized that we had found what we were looking for, so to speak, so naturally we talked about getting married; we already had the mindset and the devotion–we wanted it to be “official.”

Over the summer, I found out that I got into Baylor, and I was both thankful and surprised to find that Cason was more than willing to move with me to build on our relationship and embark on this new journey with me.  Not only was he willing to move 700 miles from home with me, but he also would have married me before-hand, had we not been brought back down from cloud nine.

So we moved to Texas together, and though it has been difficult at times, Cason has been a great blessing to me during this transition.  I know that the move has been just as difficult for him, and that helped us grow together and closer to Christ in the process.  We’ve found a church and made new friends and just have generally done life together from day one here in Waco.  We had talked over the past couple of months about getting engaged so needless to say, I knew that a proposal was imminent.