During the Spring semester of my freshman year of college at MO State, I was hired to be a Totus Tuus missionary for our diocese in the following summer. One Thursday night when Bishop Rice was at our CCM, he asked me about Totus Tuus and we talked about who would be on my team. I said, “I already know both Tyler and Maria. Then my other teammate is this guy named Simon Elfrink? Do you know anything about him?” Bishop said, “Oh you’re gonna have a great summer.” Per usual, he was right. Over the first few weeks of ministry, Simon and I quickly became best friends. By the end of the summer, I realized I had feelings for him and was absolutely convinced he was going to shoot me down. After Totus Tuus ended, we said goodbye to our fellow missionaries and headed back to Southeast Missouri. This hours-long drive led to a conversation about what the next few weeks of our lives were going to look like before we each went back to college. As this conversation progressed, Simon confessed that he had feelings for me (which was so incredibly shocking to me). I admitted that I felt the same way and we began to figure out what we were going to do with all that. After two weeks of going on dates and discerning, we started dating long-distance from Murray, KY to Springfield, MO. In May of 2023, after two years of dating, Simon graduated college and moved to Springfield. The end of long-distance was so exciting! In August 2023, a few days after our two-year anniversary, Simon asked me to marry him. I had to think about it for a few weeks… jk, I freaked out, said yes, and cried a lot. We have had a really amazing, fruitful, and exciting engagement! I’m so so pumped to enter into this sacrament with my favorite person ever. If you haven’t yet met Simon, I cannot wait for you to meet the absolute greatest, sweetest, high-energy, holy man. Please pray for us as we get closer and closer to this amazing day!!

It would be a lot more romantic to say meeting Caroline was love at first sight, but my first impressions of her are pretty underwhelming. When I walked into the Catholic Center in Springfield to meet my other Totus Tuus teammates for missionary training in May 2021, I was immediately approached by a girl who was entirely too enthusiastic to make friends with the total stranger she found in me. Upon approaching me to shake my hand and introduce herself—“Hi, I’m Caroline!”—all I could think was, “Wow, she has really curly hair and really big glasses.” I spent the next three hours sitting next to Caroline on our first day of training as she proceeded to ask our director questions that I was too shy to ask. I kept wondering what was with this girl, who acted like she was born in that room and talked to the rest of us missionaries like she’d known us our whole lives. There was something special about Caroline that I find difficult to articulate in this limited space, but suffice to say it didn’t take all 10 days of training for us to become friends. As we entered into our ministry, our friendship grew and deepened. In no time at all, seeing Caroline became the thing I looked forward to the most every morning when I woke up. I kept expecting my feelings for Caroline to plateau, but they never did. With each passing day, I came to know her more as a teammate and friend, and each passing day my love for her grew. Not wanting to betray our ministry, I kept it all secret from Caroline, of course, but as we drew near the end of our ministry and we all spoke about parting ways, I began to dread the end of our time together. To console myself, I crafted an elaborate scheme in my head of how I could keep my feelings from her secret for the next two years until I could move to Springfield and dramatically present my love for her that I concealed for so long. Buuuuuuuuut, that plan went out the window a few hours after our ministry for the summer ended, when Caroline and I were stuck in a car together and I treated her to a 20-minute yell-confession about every emotion, thought and feeling that had developed over the past three months. The rest is pretty much history, and I’m incredibly blessed and thankful to say that I am finally marrying my best friend! Please continue to pray for me and the lovely Miss Caroline, that we may continue to pursue Christ in our commitment to one another in marriage.