I could write a novel with all the details of how I met this guy. I could tell you story after story about how our love blossomed over the course of a year, and I could recount, with all sentimentality, how special it was to fall deeply, madly, truly in love with him. Just the thought of him warms me up from the inside and I count myself lucky to be the girl he’s chosen to spend the rest of his life with.

Don’t let the following story fool you: not everything is perfect. Our first year of marriage is proving to be an adjustment for both of us, to be sure, but this crazy, messy story is ours and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

How We Met: the Highlights (for the impatient among you).

Sometime in early August 2018: Izzy has a full-on God moment. Hears God tell him to pack up his life in Seattle and head back to San Diego, so he does.

August 24th, 2018: It’s Jess’ 27th birthday. Izzy is officially hired at Nordstrom Escondido (where they will soon meet). Jess always says Izzy getting hired was God’s birthday gift to her.

September 13th, 2018: Izzy & Jess meet in the stockroom of the women’s shoe department. Izzy is invited to church & decides he will go.

September 16th, 2018: Izzy goes to church, Jess sings in Spanish for the first time — you couldn’t make this stuff up, people! They talk that night on the phone for 3 hours.

December 14th, 2018: Izzy & Jess make things official!

December 14th, 2019: One year later, Izzy asks Jess to marry him. She says YAAAAASSSSS!

She Says…

We met in mid-September, that’s when everything changed. I was right at the beginning of my first semester at Point Loma Nazarene University where I was studying Theology. In my experience, that little detail was a conversation ender. Nobody wanted me to convert them, and certainly, nobody wanted to talk to me about God. That was okay with me, though. I had my people, I knew where I was headed, and I had sort of resigned myself to be single for the rest of my life. I was so uninterested in dating, and I had been for about two years. Maybe God wanted me to just live into this singleness, to embrace it and be happy with my lot in life? I was learning to do just that. I started a blog about singleness, and I decided that if God wanted me to be married, He would have to orchestrate everything because I wasn’t going to go out of my way to find anybody anymore. The only man I was going to chase from here on out was Jesus, himself.

I was just getting familiar with this new normal when I met Izzy – my Israel. I wasn’t looking for anybody but Izzy found me. He asked me about school, then he asked me about church. When I invited him, I was sure he wouldn’t come. I was used to guys always pretending to be interested in things I was interested in, but Izzy was different. He looked up my church on his phone right in front of me, “You guys meet at 10am?” He asked me. I nodded. “I’ll be there,” He said. Then he got up and walked away without even asking for my number. Imagine my surprise when early Sunday morning, my church family came up to me during worship rehearsal saying, “Jess, your friend’s here – the one in the suit.”

After we’d both gone to work, I’d asked him to call me because I wanted to hear how he liked it (I’d given him my number some time before this). We talked on the phone that night for something like 3 hours. There was something about his honesty, his transparency that allowed me to trust him with ease. There was an earnest yearning for Jesus – the kind of desire only God can cultivate within us – that grabbed my attention immediately. “I just want God to give me a new heart,” he’d said. “I want to be a new person, I want him to make me a new Israel.” That was it. I knew it then. Izzy was the culmination of everything God had been teaching me over the past 4 or 5 years in a person. I saw that God was already at work in Izzy’s heart and I decided that day over the phone that I wasn’t going to miss my opportunity to watch God call this man, shape him, and mold him into Christ-likeness. I couldn’t miss that.

The rest, as they say, is history.

He Says…

It all started at Nordstrom North County when I was standing in the Women’s Shoes sales floor. I saw this beautiful girl coming down the escalator with a few things in her hand. Immediately, three people went up to her and started having a conversation. I remember seeing and thinking how happy and excited everyone was to talk to her. She had this indescribable, beautiful glow to her that to this day I cannot explain. She gave me all of the feelings that I had never felt in my life.

I remember thinking in the back of my head, “I love her” but I didn’t think I stood a chance. Later that day I ran into her in the back of the Women’s Shoe department and I overheard her talking about going to school for theology. That was the LAST thing I would have ever thought she’d be about but it was so interesting to me. With the assumption that she was going to school for that, I immediately thought, “She must go to church.” I had just moved down here from Seattle and needed to find a new church so I asked her. She immediately responded with grace, and gave me a time, date, and location and there I was. Standing at a new church, while, surprisingly, seeing her onstage worshiping God brought me so much joy.

I immediately loved everything she was and it felt right this time. It felt like God was involved in every aspect of it. And that was the beginning of the rest of our lives.

It’s so easy to think, “wow, and they lived happily ever after,”

but again, my friends, don’t be fooled. Nothing’s ever as perfect as a blog post or an Instagram photo makes it seem. Nevertheless, we love each other through it all, and I guess in that way, we’re living out our happily ever after, even if some days are not so “happy.”

I’m curious to know – how did you and your person meet? Are you married? Happily together long-term? Tell me more about you in the comments! I’ll see you there.

xo,

Jess