Hi everyone! It’s Jacob and Sarah.

The story of our relationship can be summed up as God choosing to show His love to us by giving us each other’s love at a time when we were least expecting it and could never have deserved it. While that’s what we most want you to know about our love for each other, we’ll give you some of the details just for fun…

We have been friends since the summer going into our freshman year of college (2018). Our houses in Illinois are only ten minutes apart, but we had never met until our friend Amy introduced us. We don’t remember the moment we first met, but we have a good guess that it was while playing sand volleyball with a group of friends.

For college, Jacob attended Iowa State University (Ames, IA), and Sarah went to the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA) — house divided! Many hours of our early friendship were spent in the car traveling between Iowa and Illinois. Sarah didn’t have a car, and Jacob’s drive from Ames to Illinois took him through Iowa City, so Jacob would periodically drive Sarah to and from home.

After three years of friendship, mostly seeing each other for football games and summer hangouts, we went on a road trip out West with a group of friends (July 2021).

We had both separately had difficult and painful summers going into the trip. However, during that time, God had also brought each of us to the independent conclusion that we wanted to put our relationships with Jesus above everything else in our lives. During the trip, the two of us couldn’t stop talking about our lives and what God had done to bring us into His love.

We may not have realized at the time exactly how deeply we felt for each other, but over the trip our admiration for each other as fellow Christ-followers grew and continued to grow in the months following.

After the trip, we continued texting and had scheduled Sunday facetimes. At first, we’d mostly talk about what we were learning about Jesus in our Bibles and what we were seeing God do in our lives, but every week we’d keep talking for longer and longer. In the fall of our senior year, Jacob shared his feelings for Sarah and a few weeks later we started officially dating. On May 27, 2023, Jacob asked Sarah to become his wife, and she said yes! (Actually, she mumbled “Mhm” because she was in such disbelief that the moment was real.)

We are so excited for our wedding day and for you to join us in celebrating what God has done in our lives. Every gift that we have received from God is a reminder of how much He loves us. He sent Jesus, His only Son, to live a sinless life, die a death we all deserve, and rise again to give us eternal life with Him. It is only because of this perfect, sacrificial love that our relationship exists!

“But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)