How We Met
Josh and I met each other while attending school at Maryville University in St. Louis, MO. During fall 2016, I started attending Cru, which is the campus Christian organization. I had known who Josh was from afar for most of the year before; he has the loud, out there, hard-to-miss personality- which is exactly what I fell in love with. Josh is the kind of person who stands in the front row of church with his hands up, not caring what anyone thinks; at the time I was a back row person who definitely was worried what people thought about me during worship. For a good month into the school year, I stood from the back row watching him with awe and wonder.
We became friends during the annual Cru camping trip, Fall Getaway. We spent the weekend worshiping and joking around with all our friends. We are not really camping people; I had never been before this trip, nor do I plan to go again. In what I consider an attempt at flirting, Josh threatened to put spiders in my tent overnight. Much to my pleasure, Josh woke up to a spider on his own pillow (I swear it wasn’t me!). Back at school, Josh was preparing for the annual Mr. Maryville competition. Yes, that is our school’s male beauty pageant. And yes, he won. I personally think his dance to “My Milkshakes” won both the judges and me over. Josh spent the rest of Fall Festival week trying his best to impress me and woo me over (and he says he can’t wait to woo me for the rest of our lives)!
We spent the next few weeks watching movies and talking in the dorm lounge until the early morning hours. Our first date was a spontaneous trip to our favorite 24-hour breakfast diner after a school event at 10 pm in pajama onesies (insert cringy picture). A couple weeks of dating later, Josh showed up at my door with flowers and a Betta Fish, wanting to make our relationship “o-fish-al!”. We quickly became best friends, bonding over our love of football, Jesus, and cheesy jokes. When it was time for summer, our relationship became long distance, as Josh traveled to New Mexico to be a missionary and I traveled home to Michigan to teach summer school. We spent the next 3 months Facetiming as often as we could, which wasn’t much given the WiFi in the middle of the desert.
We reunited and classes started for the next year. We continued about our life together, going to support each other at CAB movies, dance performances, RA events, and Josh’s 8 million jobs. We have a crazy life, but we manage to spend as much time as we could together. Little did I know that Josh had big things in the works for our future…
how they asked
Come summer 2018, Josh had a travelling internship that would lead him to Florida for the summer and I would be starting my OT clinical rotations in St. Louis. In an effort to spend our last few days together, Josh suggested a breakfast picnic on campus before work one day. This idea was a completely normal thing for us to do (with our schedules, you take any time you can get with each other). So I rolled out of bed at 7 am one day and drove to campus to meet the love of my life for breakfast.
***To explain a bit further before going forward, I had started 1 Second Everyday videos at the beginning of 2018. This essentially means I take a video everyday, crop it to 1 second and will make a video of all of the days at the end of the year. Josh has been an integral part of my daily videos since the beginning***
After laying out the picnic blanket and setting up our breakfast food, Josh suggested that this would be a perfect time to take my video of the day. He told me he was going to pose with the box of cereal and that I should start facing the other way and pan into him. Being completely clueless, I did as I was told. I panned the camera around Gander Quad, turning to find Josh on one knee with the most perfect ring I could have imagined.
So I have the video of him proposing from my perspective. It’s a short video, but that is because I threw my phone in an attempt to say yes and give him a kiss. It was really the most perfect and intimate proposal for us and I can’t wait to live the rest of my life with him.
