We originally met 7 years ago back in college. She was attending Dordt College (now University) in Sioux Center, Iowa and I was attending Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa just a few miles apart. At the time, my roommate was dating her roommate and had said to me that there was this cute girl that I should meet sometime from Dordt. He wouldn’t show me any pictures of her, but only had good things to say. After a little convincing, I decided to go with him on Valentines Day of all days, to hangout and go to a movie. When we got to Dordt, there was this girl that had a poster board made for Valentines Day but the titling said “Anti Valentines Day”! Kaman had made a poster where people could add posted notes to the board of “why we hate Valentines Day” and the rest was history. We dated for close to a year throughout college and had gone our separate ways and she had decided to do a semester study in Chicago and I had taken part in a study abroad in Romania.

Fast forward give or take 7 years, a lot had changed. I had moved to Kansas City from the small town life in NW Iowa, and Kaman had decided to move to Chicago after school as well. She had taken a job in Human Resources and I had taken a job within Agriculture but never in a million years did we ever think we’d reconnect again. 494 miles, give or take eight hours of driving would seem to be a big enough deterrent in reconnecting one would think but God had a different plan in mind!

With my job, I’ve been blessed with being able to travel quite a bit and one of my trips took me to Chicago in January 2023 and I just happened to post something on my Instagram story showing that I was in Chicago in which led my lovely wife to be to reach out and reconnect. We had made plans to possibly meet up for coffee one afternoon but my work schedule did not allow it. We said at the time that we could take a rain check and I had mentioned that if she was ever in Kansas City that she should let me know. Fast forward a bit, Kaman and I had separately been praying for direction in finding a future spouse. I will speak for myself here, but I had enough of the dating world and I was simply over it. Over the years, there have been several instances where I had been frustrated with situations I was in whether it was my job, my faith, or life in general but I have found a lot of wisdom in the simple saying a close friend of mine always says “give it to God” and we had both done just that. After a little nudge from her, we both took the leap of faith and decided to see where this could potentially lead us, and that leap of faith took us back to our roots back in NW Iowa at the Orange City Tulip Festival. Fast forward a bit, that cute girl I asked out on a date where she got to sit on my tractor led to me asking her the most important question of our lives right next to the same tractor back where it all began in Iowa.