January 2018 was when I first met Ethan working at an arcade at the Great Wolf Lodge. His tallness and curly blonde hair were the first things that captured my attention. I thought he was pretty cute, but I was not interested in pursuing any type of relationship with him. He and I were cordial with one another as coworkers usually are.

It wasn't until one day, Ethan sauntered on over to fix the bowling lane with his toolkit in hand. He made an odd remark about one of his tools and I couldn't help but correct him. I thought nothing of this exchange, but this conversation was indicative of how weird we both were.

Following this encounter, I noticed he kept popping up at work more wanting to talk to me. He and I continued this until we went on our first date in April. Neither of us had gone to church in a year or so, we attended his old church, Sovereign Grace in Old Town Orange. After the service, we walked around the plaza and visited the local car show. We finished the date with burritos at Wahoo's. Conversation with Ethan came very naturally and his goofy humor was so apparent.

I first met Jasmine when she began working at Great Wolf Lodge. I was already employed there for several months and, being young and more than a little arrogant, felt that I was too cool to talk to the new employees. A month or two went by and we were casual with one another, but didn’t talk much. However, I kept hearing good things about her from my coworkers.

One day, I got a call that there was an issue with the bowling alley, and when I came to fix it, I saw Jasmine there. We made some casual conversation and I realized that she and I share the same goofy and ironic sense of humor. We continued to talk and it felt very natural to skip past the small-talk semantics and carry more meaningful conversations.

After that initial conversation, I felt pretty dumb for waiting to talk to her for so long. I was delighted to learn that my next four shifts were all scheduled during the same time as hers. I made it a point to talk to her whenever I could find time. Not long after this, I asked her out to our first official date, where we attended my previous church, ate burritos from Wahoo’s, and checked out a classic car show that happened to be in the area.

May 23, 2018, was the day we became an official couple. This was also around the time that we started attending Compass Bible Church HB and made it our home church.

We never missed a Sunday, but as far as our relationship with Jesus Christ went, we were only “Sunday Christians”. When we weren’t at church, we were indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

However, God is faithful and He drew us and convicted us as we heard the gospel faithfully preached. We met friends at church who reached out and opened the Bible with us.

Six months after we first began attending Compass HB, God saved Ethan; then Jasmine, four months after that. Since then, by God’s grace, we have striven to be molded further into the image of Christ and are blessed to continue to be used to glorify Jesus joined together as one.