Even from childhood, Emily Adams has beamed with a caring demeanor and showed a tendency to laugh and smile. Whether she was baking with her Mom, watching her Dad play, or spending summers in Colorado, Emily was always in her own world that was somehow brighter and more cheerful than everyone else's. Emily grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, the daughter of a basketball player and a director of a local charity. Since her younger years, Emily has shown a love of food, friends, travel, and competition. She traveled in the U.S., Caribbean, and Europe with her grandparents, friends, or just her parents and her older brother Justin. She played several sports (including basketball) and had numerous interests, but ended up focusing on volleyball and played with several elite travel teams as a teenager. At Xavier College Preparatory School, Emily's private school, she was asked to be on the varsity volleyball team as a freshman. She wisely chose to get playing time and experience on the JV team and was only pulled up to Varsity when Xavier made the State Championship. Subsequently, Xavier went on to win the Arizona State Championship 3 of the 4 years she played there and Emily was named the 5A Arizona State Player of the Year as both a junior and senior.

Coming out of Xavier, Emily accepted a volleyball scholarship to the University of Southern California. Luckily for Emily, two of her best friends from Phoenix went to SC while she was there: her cousin Christina and her best friend Alicia Robinson. A testament to her love of travel, Emily majored in International Relations and minored in Cinema Studies. In volleyball, all she did was win 2 National Championships while getting named a first team All-American 3 times. As captain of the team, she was given the honor of presenting a volleyball to President Bush on the White House lawn for the recognition of their national championship. She then preceded to almost kiss the 43rd President of the United States of America. She eventually trained with the United States Olympic team in Colorado Springs and played professional volleyball in Puerto Rico. While at SC, she studied some. She was named a 2nd team Academic All-American for her sophomore and junior years, 1st team Academic All-American her Senior year, and was named a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. She loved her time at Southern Cal and still has fond memories of time with her friends, life in the "Pink House" in John Wayne's old room, talking trash to would-be muggers, the internship in Geneva, and hanging out with Coach Carroll after the Orange Bowl. If you asked her, I think she would say her years at SC were the most influential of her life.

I have been fortunate to be around elite athletes for most of my life, and I have noticed an unsettling trend. Many of the athletes who are at the most elite level of their sport define themselves, or let others define them, by their ability to play that sport. That is, I know great baseball players who truly believe that their only value to anyone is their ability to throw a baseball. I can think of examples in football and basketball or any sport really. That is where Emily continues to astound me. She may have been one of the greatest college volleyball players of all time and yet she rarely talks about it.  She has so many more assets and so many deeper levels to her personality that nearly every day I find something new to love about her. Not only is she incredibly intelligent, but she is also exceptionally kind, inquisitive, playful, aggressive, beautiful, moral, funny and whatever I need her to be. Simple is boring. Emily has levels and depth. So much so that no level of business or athletic success can rival the excitement I get from getting to go home and just talk to her. She is a profound thinker, a kind speaker, and a great hugger. She gives me something to look forward to every day and you get the impression that you could have known her for 80 years and still learn something new about her today. Perhaps most importantly, she is a curious Christian woman who will help me keep focused on what truly matters and Who is truly in control of our lives. If you ask me about her or simply mention her name, expect to see a smile across my face. Let me translate that smile for you: "That is my sweetheart and everything in my life, every conversation I have, every meal I eat, every book I read, seems better with her there." I like to consider myself an intelligent man, but obviously I didn't truly know what to look for in a woman until God sat her down next to me in a crowded bus from London to Brussels.
 

Matthew Bryan came into this world with dimples flashing and muscles already bulging.  At least, that’s how I imagine he did.  I wasn’t there.  I was somewhere else just learning to read upside-down books to my dog.  But bless his mom, Matt was not a tiny baby.

Matt probably said “Go Dawgs” before I even knew what a football was.  He grew up in Lilburn, Georgia and while I’m not sure when the town’s moniker came to be, I am certain Matt had a hand in making it the “City of Champions”.  I have heard stories about Mountain Park Park and wondered at the redundancy of it.  I have seen the community lake in which Matt and Chris fished for carp that they insisted were mutated.  I have eaten funnel cakes in downtown Stone Mountain, just like Matt used to when he was little.   

 While I wondered if the boys in Arizona would EVER grow, Matt was already taller than me (yet two years younger) and probably executing perfect Power Cleans and other difficult Olympic lifts before I even knew what those were.  As I understand it, Matt began lifting and serious football-playin’ in 7th grade.  Apparently, Parkview High School took their sports seriously and training for those boys began early.  They obviously did this well because Matt went on to win state championships by the handful in both football and baseball. 

 I learned quickly upon moving to Atlanta that most everyone in this city knew about Parkview’s football and baseball heydeys, which just happened to coincide with Matt’s time there.  It struck me as odd that Parkview’s colors were orange and blue when Matt seemed to bleed black and red for his still-to-this-day beloved UGA Bulldogs.  But thankfully, Matt chose a red-and-black college and shed those orange and blues for good (unless, I imagine, he chooses to mock those Gators, throw on a pair of jean shorts, a blue-and-orange jersey and make snide comments about Tim Tebow, but otherwise, I think he’s done with that particular color combination). 

 Matt, who had qualified for Georgia’s Hope Scholarship which would have garnered him an academic scholarship to his favorite football school, chose instead to attend one of the most expensive and most difficult academic schools in the US: Davidson College.  Apparently these guys do a lot of homework.  Needless to say, my endearingly nerdy and charmingly dimpled Matty thrived here.  Part of the reason I can tell this was such an amazing fit for him is to know his Davidson friends, all of whom share some vague and not immediately apparent common thread that allows you to instantly sense that they are both intelligently sharp and steadfastly good-hearted.  Hard to explain, but it’s there. 

 At Davidson, Matt played on the baseball team, wrote essays in Spanish, jogged the roads surrounding the beautiful campus, played some more baseball, watched the Star Wars trilogies into the early morning hours, played even more baseball, had some nasty Tommy John surgery on his elbow, came back 9 months too early to play (yep, you guessed it) baseball and finally drank some alcohol (in case you don’t know him, Matt doesn’t drink and hasn’t, but that once). 

 Matt is an answer to several of my prayers: he’s taller than me (it was a request not a prerequisite), he’s stronger than me and as such could even perform the tradition of carrying me over the threshold if he so chose, he’s an athlete and understands sports (although this may be one of those that I wish could remain an unanswered prayer when fall football season rolls around), and most of all he is my spiritual leader and not just a good, but an amazing, Christian man. 

 If Matt’s my cake, the icing here is that he is also insanely smart (we argue over who is smarter; since I’m not a good debater, I usually cede victory, but really, I think that just makes me smarter…), has the ability to make me giggle at almost anything, possesses an uncanny knack of “talking me off a ledge” when I’m super stressed, and is a member of this amazing family whose loving arms enclosed me the moment I moved here.  My Matt has challenged me constantly to become a better woman, a better person, and a better Christian. 

 I’ll leave this account of Matthew Bryan now, since I can’t think of any better way to end it without using up all the cheesy lines I’m planning to put in my vows to him in January.