Three days was all it took. During a rather confusing, rough time in my life, I began casually perusing Reddit. I always had the application downloaded on my phone, despite rarely using it. Maybe once per year or so, I would pick a random community or two and browse them once per day, just to stop and repeat the process next year. I always found comfort in the TrueChristian forum, especially considering that the Christianity community is as atheist as it gets. So, to perhaps ease my hard times just a little, I gave my attention to the former. Some of the posts there tend to be people saying the same old things. When I encountered a post entitled “I want to be Christian again.” (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueChristian/comments/n4zev8/i_want_to_be_christian_again/), I expected yet another person briefly saying they forgot God in their youth, now in distress and half-requesting, half-demanding that they be shown proof of God, of His love for them. I'm not sure why I wanted to examine the post and confirm that what they had to say proved me right, but I did. I was wrong. Tess' lengthy post was by far the most fascinating writing I had ever read on the internet, and I was officially invested in her story, desperately wanting to see her find God. At the end, she said “My inbox is open. I'll be back in a few hours, or else tomorrow.” Now, I couldn't actually see her inbox to confirm, but I had the feeling most people were merely commenting, ignoring her final words. It's easy to put an encouraging comment and pat yourself on the back because you helped someone today. However, prolonged, personal messages are the best way to get the heart of the issue and would provide the greatest chance of her plight becoming a success story. So, I opted to send a message to her open inbox. She had put her intelligence on full display, which made sending a message difficult. No matter what I said, I knew she would have heard it already. I finally settled on sending her a video of a J. Warner Wallace interview I had attended with my brother at First Colleyville Baptist Church (https://vimeo.com/539902852). Though I almost didn't attend because I expected the interview to be marketing for book sales, it wound up being the most spiritually and intellectually fascinating event I had ever attended. I also fancied myself an intellect, so I decided she would enjoy the interview as much as I did. I let her know that my intention was not to send the video and bid her farewell, but to allow it to spark prolonged conversation, beginning with her thoughts on the video. After an entire day of frequently checking for a response form her (and frankly, wondering why I was being so silly in doing so), I finally heard back. She'd enjoyed the video as it gave her a lot to think about and set her more resolutely towards remembering God. She stated that she'd be more than happy to have this be a prolonged discussion and that she appreciated my desire to help her. Briefly keeping the discussion theology-focused, we mixed our interests into the conversation as well. I would say that that's when it started, that we discovered we had similar interests the rest is history - but I'd be lying. I was fascinated by her from her first reply onward. Discovering we had similar interests was just watering the proverbial flower that had been seeded, and I soon had a rush of emotions the likes of which I'd never felt before. Only in very rare instances in my life have I had very strong feelings for a girl, but these feelings were the deep end of the pool. For three days we chatted. Despite her merely sporadic replies during those 72 hours, she was entirely engaged in our conversations and we both seemed to be enjoying ourselves. I was wrought with jitters, smiles, and constantly-checking-for-replies syndrome.

That Sunday afternoon, the messages came to a halt. Frantically checking on Monday didn't help, either. Her messages had completely ceased. By Tuesday I was utterly distraught and confused. Thoughts were like a hurricane in my mind: “She was so interested in the conversation, why did she stop?”, “Her account was only made the same day she made the post, did she just throw the account away?”, “She said she has health conditions, did something bad happen?” Feeling overwhelmed, I took to thing that comforts me in my times of most extreme distress: Long prayer walks up the quiet road in front of my house late at night. Usually, these involve 1-2 hours of prayer and deep worship music. I took my walk every night from Tuesday to Saturday. Sometimes bawling, sometimes hopeful, I was a complete wreck. I remember, at one point, telling God, “She ruined me”, knowing I would likely never find a woman that would meet the new standard she had set for me after such a brief time. On Wednesday, not willing to let things go so easy, I made a bold move and sent another message, saying that I don't normally bother people in case they chose not to reply, but that I genuinely wanted to know if she was okay. I received nothing back. On Sunday, one week from her disappearance, as the time for me to walk approached, something changed: I got mad. I wasn't just mad at her for abandoning our wonderful conversation - I was mad at me. I let my heart feel things, I let my heart dream dreams of the future. I knew I should have learned this lesson by now: Never open your heart so readily. It ends horrendously, every time. I knew I should have never let our conversation be anything but professional, focused on helping her find God. After some time dwelling on this, I knew I was wrong. My former walks had been motivated by tenderness, wanting God to bring her back to me. Refusing to let the walk be motivated by anger, I reopened our messages, intending to let them soften my heart once more before I set off outside. The messages were there, but so was something else: an indicator that she was typing. Freaking out, I jumped off my bed, ran into the living room, jumped onto the couch, leaning forward and staring at my phone. I waited and waited, thinking it would be just my luck if the indicator disappeared and never came back. The message eventually came in, telling me that she had been bedridden for the past week and unable to focus enough to send a message. After talking for a while once more, taking her “with me” on my walk, I all but demanded we find a more permanent method of communication. We exchanged information and talked every day. I bought a PC so we could play a game together and give her less excuse not to talk to me. One more disaster struck when, shortly after, she told me she wanted to take a break from the online world for a week, maybe more. I figured, “This is it. She's talked for a while and now she's running away.” For six days, I didn't know what to do with myself. With extreme anxiety, I watched the clock tick by, unable to figure out how to occupy myself because nothing satisfied anymore. I sat there wondering how she could not want to talk to me when I was sitting there thinking about her every moment of every day. Did she not feel the same? The evening before the 7th day, I received a message from her that she was coming out of her week break and wanted to set aside time once a week for us to talk and play games, because she felt bad about being unavailable. My fears were immediately alleviated. We talked and played more frequently than ever. We joked about meeting each other. Then, we seriously talked about meeting each other. Then, I confessed to her. She confessed to me. Not wanting to influence how we fell in love solely based on each other's personality, we opted not to show our face to each other until we met. I was perfectly ready to date and marry her regardless of what she looked like.

With 2021's Hurricane Ida set to hit Lafayette, I wanted to leave my fragile mobile home, so I used that as my excuse to go see her (and take a needed vacation).I set out before dawn and drove all the way, set to meet her the following day. Due to health reasons, most her family drove and attended with her as we meet at a coffee shop in Hoover, AL. I didn't know what to say when I saw her the first time. We just laughed at first, as the craziness of everything leading up to this moment hit us. After spending a while talking with them for a while, I turned to look at her for one reason or another, and that's when it finally hit me: She is beautiful. As they say, the rest is history. History in the making.

How Sean and I met is actually tightly tied to my Christian testimony. My coming to know both him and the Lord God started with a spiritual crisis. When that crisis culminated in a desire to earnestly seek Jesus the Christ, the King, for the first time in my life, I searched out /r/TrueChristian on Reddit. It was an unusual move for me; I hadn't touched or even thought of Reddit in years. Sean told me he scarcely browsed the site, himself. There were many people who offered me some advice, some resources, even some praise for having come this far, and encouragement. Some of them even reached out to me in private. But it was all fleeting, and I remained unimpressed with the arguments against a godless world which were presented to me - that is, until Sean came on the scene. Sean was different. He saw not just words on a screen, asking for help, but a SOUL dying to live, flailing against the suffocating prison she had made for herself with her own flesh - and he wanted to personally see her through the narrow gate. Even if it was a great inconvenience to himself. He promised to stay with me until I found the Way of which Christ spoke. He presented me with arguments I'd never heard before, come from a former cold case detective; with truly sensical, truly Bible-based theology; and with simple companionship and conversation like I've never found in anyone before. It was an instant click. Our pieces all fit so snugly together. It wasn't terribly long before we moved the conversation off of Reddit. We played games and watched YouTube videos and movies together, and we called each other on the phone and talked for many hours, late into the night. All the while, he was rock-steady in his spiritual guidance and mentorship. A constant structure of support. God used him to speak to me - to give me answers to my questions, concerns, doubts, feelings, and arguments. To share in the experience even when he could provide no answers. We studied our Bibles together. We shared sermons and apologetics and other such materials with each other. We prayed together. We decided we had to see each other. I knew how strange it would sound to my parents, that I wanted so badly to meet in person a guy they only knew as someone I had been playing games with online. The toughness of the conversations I knew we'd have to have was daunting. But I pushed through the fear. Meeting Sean was too important to me. I wouldn't miss even my first opportunity. And then, I told them how far away he lived - that he would be driving a whole 400-something miles to see me. They exchanged a look. "Long-distance doesn't work," my dad warned me, with emphasis on the "doesn't." I had always thought the same as my dad before then, but this man was different. If he would be faithful to me, I would be faithful to him, no matter how rough the road became. Furthermore, if I didn't get to have him, I didn't want any man at all. I knew already that I loved him dearly. We arranged to meet August 29th, 2021. A hurricane almost canceled our plans - but Sean wouldn't have it. He left extra early, stayed ahead of it. And we first met for the second time that day - me, him, and my mom, my two sisters, and my little niece ("Safety in numbers," my mom claimed.) - in a quiet coffee shop in Hoover called Santos Coffee. It was the first time we'd seen each other's faces. Later that day, we held hands for the first time, too. With our fingers locked together, I'd figured my heart would somehow muster up the strength to beat even harder. Instead, I felt at peace. I knew already that I would marry him.

(Told from Tess's perspective.) It was a pretty normal afternoon, just the two of us in Sean's house. We were about to settle in to watch TV - or so I thought. "What do you want to watch?" Sean asked. "Oh I don't know. Maybe—" I had only just turned to face him. There was suddenly a bright flash of color, two words written in bold black marker, and then, BANG! Klink. I couldn't help but yell as I jumped in my seat and then sat recoiled, shocked. That was a ballon, I think. What was written on it? . . . "The Question?" Sean dropped to his knees, presumably to pick up whatever hit the floor with that klinking sound. He stayed down, on both of them. That was when the shock transformed into amazement. A balloon. "The Question." Bang, klink. He had "popped The Question," and he had caught me so thoroughly off guard. In his hands, he held the most beautiful ring out to me.