Dear Friend,

If you're reading this, it likely means you’ve walked alongside us in some way, perhaps from the very beginning, or maybe just long enough to feel like family. However, our paths have crossed, your presence has shaped our story. We’re so thankful you’re here.

Lately, we’ve been reflecting on how stories unfold. Not in straight lines or sudden flashes, but quietly, thread by thread. Most of the time, you don’t even realize that someone or something has become part of the fabric until you look back. And then you see it. A moment, a prayer, a word of encouragement, a shared meal, woven in. Essential.

Our story is full of those moments. And chances are, you were one of them.

Bella was raised in Tryon, North Carolina. It’s a small town tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, where summer nights come with live music in the park and long hikes with family. Her house was always full of people, of food, of impromptu swims and conversations that ran late into the night. It was the kind of home where the door didn’t need to be knocked on. You just came in, and you were part of things.

I was raised in Dehradun, a valley resting at the foot of the Himalayas. It’s a place of slow mist and sudden color, of jungle rains and mountain silence. You can hear temple bells in the distance and monkeys rustling on rooftops. The streets are lined with litchi orchards and tea stalls. Wild elephants still roam the forest roads. My parents’ home sat in a quiet neighborhood amidst a bustling city. The front gate was rarely closed. Friends, neighbors, and unannounced visitors would drift in for a cup of chai, or for no reason at all. There was always room. Always something warm on the stove. It wasn’t loud, but it was never still.

Bella and I came from different continents, cultures, and languages. But both of us were shaped by places where hospitality was second nature, where beauty came quietly, and where love was something practiced in the everyday rhythms of life.

We met in Johnson City, Tennessee, a town neither of us expected to be in. We’d both come for school, thinking it was temporary. But God was already at work, arranging something far more lasting.

We met through a mutual friend at Fridays After Five, a local summer music event downtown. It was a pleasant evening, nothing particularly remarkable. And yet, something stirred.

Later, we found ourselves together for a weekend in the mountains, celebrating the wedding of close friends. There were group hikes, car games, and singing. And there was one evening during a worship song sung with more zeal than pitch when we both lost it. Laughter poured out at exactly the wrong time, and somehow, in that shared moment, something opened between us.

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” That was the feeling: quiet recognition, a thread pulling gently.

Soon after, I asked Bella on a date. We drove to the lake with pizza, a bottle of wine, and a few paints. The sky softened into evening while we talked and painted. It was simple. It was holy.

By the second date, I had met her parents and she had met my closest friends. We don’t recommend that timeline, but somehow it worked.

What followed wasn’t always linear. We shared meals, painted together, swing danced, and stayed up late talking. We found joy in the small things. We also discovered difference, real, sometimes disorienting difference. But love isn’t forged in compatibility alone. It’s forged in promise, in the decision to show up, to listen, to change, to stay.

That kind of love doesn’t grow by accident. It grows by grace. And it grows best when rooted in something deeper than feeling, something covenantal. Not the pursuit of personal happiness, but the sacred invitation to be both known and transformed.

Over time, we began to see that our differences weren’t barriers. They were tools, instruments of growth, gifts that God would use to shape us into people who love more like Him.

We traveled to India together twice. Bella embraced my world with tenderness and courage. She drank chai with my aunties, cooked alongside my mom, wandered through the orchards I’d grown up in, and listened to the stories that had shaped me. My family loved her. The land did too.

I proposed in the hills of Mussoorie, on a morning washed in sunlight and pine.

Today, we live just a few minutes apart in Chattanooga. We’re learning how to build something beautiful here, something rooted in prayer, in community, and in the daily rhythms of ordinary grace.

We’re getting married this December. Not because we’ve arrived, not because we’re perfectly aligned, but because we believe in a love that outlasts emotion, a love made possible by the One who first loved us.

Marriage is not just a celebration of love. It’s a covenant of grace, a daily dying and rising, a lifelong unveiling. It is work, and it is wonder. And we don’t take it lightly.

So as we prepare to step into this new chapter, we just want to say thank you. Whether you helped bring us together, encouraged us along the way, or simply walked beside us in the in-between, you are a thread in this story.

And we’re so glad you’re part of it.

With love,

Abhi & Bella