It all started with a Lord of the Rings movie marathon, a conversation at 2 am, and a lie about a middle name. 


Brian and Katie first met at Concordia Wisconsin. They were both in the same friend group and often hung out together with the group but nothing more. Their friend group started hanging out more and more thanks to a campus ministry group called Y-Min. After one of the meetings, everyone was discussing middle names. Brian asked Katie what her middle name was, and Katie told him to guess. She has a common middle name so Katie thought it wouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Brian’s first guess was Gretta. Katie was surprised that that was the first guess so she sarcastically said “yes!”. For the following 8 months, Brian believed it and it later became Grettta with three T’s. Brian believed it for so long, that Katie never wanted him to feel bad about it so she waited until the end of the school year to tell him the truth. While Brian now knows Katie’s middle name, he still calls her Grettta. 


As the school year went on, Katie and Brian started going on lots of lock ins for Y-Min. It was a fun opportunity to go to Churches around the area and hang out with the youth. Towards the end of the year, Katie and Brian went on the same lock in. It was during this lock in that the two got to really talk to each other one on one. It was 2 am and the youth were playing a game called Go fish (not the card game). Katie and Brian were in the gym sending the youth to do different tasks in order to get clues to a puzzle. During that time, they started to really get to know each other. 


As the school year was coming to an end, Katie and Brian’s friend group wanted to do one last hurrah before everyone went their own way for summer. The hurrah happened to be a 3 day long Lord of the Rings extended edition movie marathon. The guys of the group were very much into the movies. The girls were not. The girls sat on the back couch and made jokes the entire time. Once Brian made it back to Washington and Katie to Nebraska, the two continued to text and stay in contact. Brian mentioned that he had a lot of fun watching the Lord of the Rings at school and they should watch another movie using the long distance Netflix party feature. Soon the two were watching movies every night and facetiming during it. The facetimes got later and later into the night and pretty soon they were talking until 4 in the morning. That summer, Katie started working at a camp with limited access to a phone. That did not stop the two from talking. On weekends, they continued to facetime and talk until early hours of the morning. Brian asked Katie to be boyfriend and girlfriend at the Youth Gathering in Houston, Texas. A year later, Brian got down on one knee and asked Katie to marry him during a sunrise walk on the bluff of Lake Michigan.