My first impression of my firecracker fiancé is some random girl at a church community group sharing her strong opinions regarding heaven visitation books, specifically how she considered them to be a bunch of malarkey. My second impression was that the same random girl sure seemed somewhat disrespectful, going by the sheer count of side conversations she was having under her breath to her friend, undermining the attention on the group leader. At this point, I'm pretty sure only God knew that that some random girl was going to be the same random girl that I was going to propose to and that it wasn't random at all.

As we got to know each other over the course of the next year at the weekly small group gatherings, I learned that first impressions aren't always the most reliable of criteria to make a judgement upon. Don't get me wrong. Savanna still thinks heaven visitation books are nonsense, and she will still start side conversations during small group, even though her fiancé has since taken a leadership role, but she has so much more to offer the world and I'm excited to be a large part of hers. Those of you who know her won't be surprised to learn that I find her incredibly attractive, particularly her passion through which she engages with life.

As an aside, during the Christmas gift exchange, everyone was being so nice and not stealing gifts from each other. I figured that had to stop, so I took the complete series of Firefly from Savanna when it was my turn. This becomes important later. She had shown interest in watching it and at the time, I thought it would give me an excuse to spend time with her outside of the church community group. I think the story I told the small group was, "We'll have Firefly nights and I will invite you all." Read on to see how well that plan goes.

Anyway, back to the story. One of the things that people tend to talk about in such church community groups are the current romantic interests that one is pursuing. As I'm a fairly open person and my groomsman David loves asking personal questions, I was telling him about one of the many hapless encounters I was currently having. Savanna happened to be there when I was sharing the story. For my single friends who are taking notes, this is ill-advised. Don't share stories about other girls you are casually dating with people who you are interested in. As is only natural, she assumed that I wasn't romantically interested in her. Which is a perfectly rational. Friends share these kinds of things with friends, not romantic interests.

This does mean that she was incredibly surprised some months later when I told her that I liked her. This is what I sometimes refer to as our-first-date-that-she-didn't-know-was-actually-a-date-but-it-was. It's a bit of a long title, but it best describes the outing. We went to a Thai restuarant under the ruse of celebrating my real estate licensing achievement. I told her that she knew a little bit about my dating life, but I wanted to invite her to be a part of it, the only and best part of it, if you will.

Savanna's not often speechless, so this was something of a fun, if nervous, moment for me.

In the following weeks, she mulled over the revelation and question. This is what is known as "limbo". We started hanging out more and more often, working our way through the Firefly series. I forgot to invite the rest of the small group. Oops. I was mostly enjoying the show, she was mostly admiring me while I wasn't looking. That's what I figure anyways, because after we finished watching the last episode of the series, she said to me, and this is a direct quote, "I think I want to do this for real."

After I made sure I knew what exactly she was talking about, we started dating officially on May 3rd, 2015. Over Memorial Day weekend, we went to Disneyland with 7 hours notice. You get to know someone pretty well after a combined total of 32 hours in the car. Afterwards, and as for me, I knew that I still wanted to date this girl and continued to do so.

Imagine a time-lapse montage here. We traveled together, moved residencies, continue to meet nearly every week at the small group, and have met each other's extended families. After all that and more, we were still together. We continued to date until May 2nd, 2016. And this is the part of our story where I hand off the narration to Savanna.

What began as a nice dinner to celebrate our one year anniversary became much more.

Stefan and I decided to get dressed up and go out to eat at the same restaurant where we had our very first "date-but-not-a-date" over a year ago. When Stefan came to pick me up, I was running late which was, of course, completely out of character. I found out later that as I got ready, it gave Stefan the perfect opportunity to ask my dad for my hand in marriage. We went to the Thai restaurant where we talked about our year together, and I decided to ask him what moments were his favorite and least favorite in our relationship so far. That conversation became very funny later as Stefan had to sit there and think about all of our worst moments as a couple before he was going to propose. Hey, he still did so that says something, right?! I ate an ungodly amount of drunken noodles, then Stefan said he had one more place to take me and that he had a gift for me. This was not a crazy thing to say as it was out anniversary so I figured he had just gotten me something nice.

We tried to get into a church we both loved only to find it locked, and we ended up alone in the atrium of a very nice church that neither of us knows the name of. We sat on a bench and Stefan handed me an envelope of letters. As I started to read them and looked at the dates, I realized that he had started writing these letters 10 months ago and there was one a month. I thought these were just incredibly sweet and romantic letters until I got to the last one that had been written that day, and Stefan explained all the reasons he wanted me to marry him and be his wife. As I finished the letter, Stefan stood me up and got down on one knee and proposed. I have never been more surprised or filled with joy as I said yes.

I have always had a "rule" that I wanted to date someone at least a year before getting engaged (so arbitrary, I know), so as I was processing everything Stefan acknowledged my rule and said that he technically proposed a day before our anniversary but said that "…it had been 365 days because this is a leap year and I couldn't wait one more day". I responded by saying I might barf because of all those dang drunken noodles and the sudden rush of adrenaline; so overall it was romantic.

As we jumped into wedding planning, we are just trying to enjoy every minute of our engagement. We look forward to having all of you stand by our side as we say our vows and celebrate with us on our special day!