Engagement Story

(Written by Jeff)

After getting Dr. and Mrs. Chan’s approval, we went up to Cornell for the weekend. Faith seemed to wonder why we were going, and afterward she told me she suspected something but didn’t want to get her hopes up. We arrived pretty late Friday Night and met again Saturday Afternoon. After having some lunch with her brother Caleb and sister Ruth, Faith decided to go and watch her siblings rehearse for an outreach event their fellowship was having. Meanwhile I scouted out the location that I had intended and found out that we could only get into the Engineering building with a key card. Slightly panicked, I picked up an ID card from one of my friends, who was an old USC alum.

Picking her up from the student center, I asked if she wanted to go for a walk and she said yes. I had expressed earlier that I’d like to see the West side of the campus which was in the opposite direction we were walking in, so she was confused about where we were going and asked a few times whether or not I wanted to go the other way. As we were walking, I said “hey, let’s go here!” The building had the very nerdy name of “Theoretical and Applied Mechanics”. We went into the building and looked around and eventually made our way to the basement level and Kimball B-11, which was the old room where my college fellowship used to meet. It was also the same room we met in almost 7 years ago.

There I asked her if she remembered this place and we sat and she said, “God was so faithful to us over the years.” To which I told her, “Speaking of which, I have a gift for you!” I whipped out a scrapbook of photos from all the significant locations we had been to over the years and we looked for about 20 minutes at the photos and reminisced. And then I asked her to marry me. And she said yes!

Funny moments along the way:

• The night I got permission from her parents she saw that I was hiding something.
• She asked several times why are we going to Cornell, to which I could not give a straight answer.
• The botched attempts to page her father so that he would call her at just the right moment.
• Walking toward the building, Thurston Hall- Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
• The morning at Cornell she poked my front jacket pocket which contained the ring.