The Story...

So I wanted to somehow make sure everything is told in like blogging language and post it on. People kept asking me for the whole story and so I figured it would be a good place to put it on and to have it as a little bit of a surprise…


As best told from Mike Gassaway (Craig's Dad)

Cayla's family is from West Phoenix. She is from a really wonderful family that has been in the area a long time. Her grandfather is currently a stake president here in the West Maricopa Stake. Her father is one of our high councilors in Buckeye, and so forth. You get the picture, they are just really good people! Cayla's folks found a good deal on a new home here in Buckeye about 3 years ago and moved in, though they admit that they didn't really know why they were coming here. We arrived in January of 2009, and almost immediately became friends with their family and especially Cayla. By last summer Ayesha and I decided that we loved Cayla so much that we were going to give her one of our sons to be her husband! She became really good friends with both Sean and Tom. Then last summer, Ayesha was making up a birthday package for Craig, and she got the big idea to have some of the girls from our ward write letters to him which they did. Cayla was one of the girls that wrote to him…And well… They never stopped writing to each other. They quickly became good friends via the letters they wrote, even though they had never met before. Cayla says it felt a little funny at first to write to someone she had never met, but really enjoyed the letters, so they kept up. At Christmas time, Craig called home and we spent an hour or so talking to him with everyone on the speaker phone. Toward the end he bore a powerful testimony of the work that he was involved in and then he said good bye after telling Tom that when he came home Tom would have to go on the top bunk! What he didn't know is that Cayla was in the room visiting with us and got to hear the testimony that Craig bore and was very touched by the experience as she was at that time sharing the gospel with some friends from school. It was the first time she had heard his voice. Unbenownst to us, their letter writing increased significantly after that. Many other wonderful experiences occurred in the ensuing months, which have endeared Cayla to us all the more. She is without question the finest, the sweetest, and the most wonderful young woman that we have ever known! In all of our travels across the country, we have never met anyone even close to her (she is like our own daughters)! We hoped, we prayed, and she was doing the same thing at the same time. I'm not sure anyone really understood what was happening, but the bond between her and our family had grown very deep, and the bond between her and Craig was also growing very deep as they continued to correspond. Shortly before Craig returned home from his mission, we invited Cayla to come with us to the airport to welcome Craig home. She said she would like to but without mentioning it to us, she wrote to Craig and asked him what his feelings were about her coming. He told her that he thought about it and decided that he would really like it if she would come.

(Picking Craig up from the Airport)

She did, and things didn't take any time at all after that. He asked her to marry him 8 days after they met for the first time, and officially proposed to her at the Mesa Temple 16 days after they met. And she said yes happily on both occasions! We were thrilled!!!

The Proposal at the Mesa, Arizona Temple

The Ring

Craig Gassaway and Cayla Hansen