Completing Him Challenge - How we met

How David and I met is a complete mystery, not only to us, but also to our families! We are guessing we were around 12 or 13 at the time, maybe even 10? Who knows, but needless to say our families have known each other for a very long time through church. David and his sisters went to a church school that was at the sister church of the church I attended. So their school would come and do special programs for our church. I initially became friends with his sister, Malissa and she and I wrote each other periodically as pen-pals.

At about high-school graduation age (I was 17 at the time) David and I started talking to each other more at various church things and also through Pathfinders, since it was my job to drop my brother off from time to time.We had corresponded a couple times over e-mail while I was trying to decide where to go for college. We both found out we would be attending the same community college that fall and so we planned on talking more at school.

That summer I was colportuering in St. Louis and David worked at summer camp ('02). About 2 weeks into camp, David was involved in a very serious rock climbing fall and was hospitalized for 3 months. He was not able to start school in the fall due to his recovery so I started and then started talking to him over instant messaging while he was at home getting better.

Our chatting started happening more frequently, to practically every night for hours at a time. In the spring of 03, David planned on attending the pathfinder fair and asked if I wanted to come up as well. So my dad took my brother and I up for the day.

 This isn't the best picture, but my dad took this picture of us while we were at the fair. 

After that weekend we started talking more and more online and then David asked me to go hiking with him one day at a local state park. After that hike, we both knew that this was leading to something more than just friends, so we decided to start dating after then. 

  This picture was taken about 2 weeks after we started dating at the Ohio camp-meeting in '03.

Pretty quickly we both knew we wanted to get married, but since David was behind a year in school we knew it would be a little while. On August 27, 2005 David asked me to marry him! And we planned on getting married the following year after I graduated from college. 

 My mom took this picture the day we were engaged, however I didn't know yet that he was going to ask me that day! I was totally shocked and surprised when he did later that night on the swing in the my parents back yard! I should have guessed because he was so serious the whole time, but it didn't hit me until he got down on one knee and gave me the ring!! 

And so we were married, exactly one year to the day that he proposed (that was a total accident) on August 27, 2006. And this year will be 4 years married, 7 years together!

~ Heather