In June 2020, Anna had a sleepover with one of her best friends. While Anna made smoothies for breakfast in the morning, her friend was scrolling through Instagram comments and clicked on a random commenter's profile. She quickly realized Richard's profile seemed quite similar to Anna’s (she said, quote- "He's like you, but a guy"), and said Anna should follow him "as a joke," because he was a "violinist, composer, and sinner saved by Christ."

Anna, new to social media at the time, was at first intrigued and thought "hmm that could be interesting, and I can always unfollow him." BUT THEN, she realized his profile actually said "violist," not "violinist," and she (being a loyal violinist) said, "Nope, can't do it." But she thought he was kind of cute in his picture so later that morning she asked her friend for the profile again and followed Richard.

When Richard accepted the follow request, Anna and her friend began looking through his page, to discover he had tried to start a group to reach his classmates with the Gospel. A week or two prior, Anna and her friends had began organizing a Bible study over Zoom since everything had been cancelled due to the pandemic. Her friend encouraged Anna to message Richard and invite him to come to her group, since after all, they were trying to take advantage of the lockdown situation to build a community of people as far spread as possible, and New York was the farthest yet!

Soon, Richard responded, and agreed to come to the Bible study online. Anna and Richard began chatting and quickly realized they quite enjoyed each other's company. After 13 days of chatting for more hours than could be counted and a zoom meeting with both of their parents, they decided to make it official.

In July 2020, they just had to meet each other in real life, so they tried to plan college visits that would coincide, but pandemic shutdowns got in the way. So, Anna and her mom and Richard and his dad all drove to Martinsburg, West Virginia to finally meet for the first time in the one state they could find between them that would let them in due to COVID restrictions at the time.

You can see the rest of the story unfolding through the pictures below!

Photos