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Jesse and Carissa Bowser ’16 could never have planned the life they are living today.

A college transfer that made little financial sense. A friendship that slowly became something more. A graduation that sent them in different directions before their paths converged again. Career plans that changed. Years of waiting to build the creative life they had imagined. A painful turn in an adoption journey that seemed to lead nowhere.

In the moment, the pieces rarely seemed to fit. Some felt like seeds of something God might be growing; others looked more like barren ground. Years later, Jesse and Carissa can see how God was cultivating each season to prepare them for the work they would do, for the life they would build together and for two children whose names they did not yet know.

“If I would have written that story, it would have looked so different,” Carissa said. “God writes the best stories.”

Preparing the Soil

Long before Jesse and Carissa opened in Greenville, South Carolina, they sensed that creativity would somehow be part of the life they were building together. Today, the studio brings their artistic gifts together through murals, branding and visual design. At Cedarville, however, there was no business plan, only two friends who loved making things.

Even their meeting required an unexpected turn. Carissa left free tuition at the University of Akron when the practical path she had chosen kept closing around her. Transferring to Cedarville to study studio art made less sense on paper but increasingly felt like where God was leading.

Jesse was already there studying graphic design. They met their sophomore year through Cedarville’s Lawlor-Printy brother-sister units, and their friendship grew around creativity: drawing together, making chalk murals and gathering with friends in the Lawlor lounge for evenings they jokingly called “Drawlor.”

For most of college, friendship was all it was. It wasn’t until their final semester that the relationship changed. By graduation they were dating, but what came next was anything but clear.

Jesse moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, expecting his future would be in full-time church ministry. Carissa returned home without a clear plan. She remembers watching Jesse walk to his car after graduation and wondering when she would even see him again.

Then another unexpected turn brought them closer. After spending a summer with relatives near Asheville, Carissa felt drawn to the Carolinas and eventually moved to Greenville despite having little more waiting for her than one friend, a job at Starbucks and the conviction that she was supposed to go.

Jesse began making the two-hour trip from Charlotte to see her. As their relationship deepened, Jesse began to see that the future he had imagined in Charlotte might not be the future God was leading him toward. Building a life with Carissa meant leaving the full-time church ministry path he had expected to pursue and taking another step into the unknown.

In early 2017, he moved to Greenville and took a position at a respected marketing agency. The couple married later that year.

They still imagined creating together, but the answer unfolded slowly.

Jesse grew as a professional designer while Carissa continued making art and eventually took the risk of pursuing studio art full time. Their individual work increasingly overlapped until clients who approached one often found themselves working with both.

The delay was not always easy. They could envision working together, but leaving stable employment to build a business felt risky. Looking back, Jesse is grateful they did not attempt it in their early 20s. Those years gave them professional experience, rooted them in Greenville and, just as importantly, gave their marriage time to grow.

By the time they were ready, what might once have been two young artists trying to start a business had become a couple prepared to build something together.

When Victory Garden Studio finally launched in 2024, Carissa could trace its beginnings all the way back to those evenings creating with friends at Cedarville.

“It was just getting the soil ready,” she said.

A Well-Watered Garden

The garden had become more than a metaphor for their creative journey.

During a season of significant spiritual growth, Isaiah 58 and its image of God’s people as a well-watered garden took on deep meaning for Carissa. The passage challenged her to consider what a life shaped by faith should produce in the lives of others.

That vision became part of Victory Garden’s identity.

“We want to be a well-watered garden for people to experience the love of God,” Carissa said.

We want to be a well-watered garden for people to experience the love of God.

— Carissa Bowser ’16

For Jesse and Carissa, that begins with how they work.

Victory Garden gives them the opportunity to sit across from clients, hear what matters to them and create work rooted in those relationships. Jesse had experienced something very different at a larger agency, where he sometimes worked on an account for years without personally knowing the people behind it.

Now the people are inseparable from the project.

Their ongoing work with the Travelers Rest Farmers Market illustrates the difference. Through the visual identity they have helped create, the Bowsers have given artistic expression to what the market values about local food and the people who gather around it. Amber Williams, the market’s programs and marketing coordinator, said their work has helped connect the community and grow the organization.

Other projects take Jesse and Carissa into spaces where few people share their Christian worldview. They don’t enter those relationships looking for ways to turn every interaction into an overt Gospel presentation. They try to be present.

“I just want to be kind and considerate and a good communicator,” Carissa said. “I hope in that they just see something different in how work can be done and how people can treat them.”

The art itself can say something, too.

Carissa believes beauty has the capacity to awaken something people recognize even when they cannot name its source. She describes creative work as bringing “glimpses back to the garden,” echoes of a world made beautiful by its Creator.

“As creatives and as artists, that’s a really cool thing we get to do,” she said, “actually partner with God in the work of bringing glimpses of beauty back into this world.”

That understanding has also changed the way she views her own creativity. Her identity does not depend on what she produces. God is the Creator; she gets to participate in His work.

Victory Garden therefore became an exercise in trust. Jesse and Carissa could cultivate relationships and create something beautiful. They could not control what God might grow from either.

They were about to discover just how much of their lives He had been cultivating at the same time.

A Family They Could Not Yet See

On Jesse and Carissa’s first date, years before Victory Garden existed, the conversation turned to adoption.

For Jesse, the subject was personal. He grew up with two adopted siblings and had watched his parents embrace both the joy and difficulty of bringing children into their family.

For Carissa, it was even more surprising. Adoption had long been a quiet desire she had never shared with anyone she dated. She didn’t want to convince someone else to embrace something she believed God had placed on her heart.

Then she asked Jesse whether he could imagine adoption being part of his own family someday.

“Oh yes, absolutely,” he said.

They had no idea what that yes would eventually require.

Years later, after a trip to Ethiopia stirred that desire again, they began the adoption process. At first, they expected to welcome an infant. But while they were completing their home study, another situation arose involving a baby in California who needed placement. Jesse and Carissa put their original process on hold and traveled across the country, believing this might be the child God was bringing into their family.

Ultimately, that child was placed with another family.

The loss hit Carissa especially hard. They had met and held the child, and now they had to return home and restart a process they thought had been leading somewhere else.

For months, they waited before they were ready to move forward again.

At the same time, another long-awaited decision was approaching. Jesse was preparing to leave the stable agency career he had built so they could launch Victory Garden together. Starting a business while trying to demonstrate that they were prepared to provide a stable home for a child hardly seemed like ideal timing.

They moved forward anyway.

In May 2024, they completed their home study. They expected another wait, perhaps months or years.

Less than two months later, the phone rang.

Two young children needed a permanent family, and the agency had exhausted nearly every other possibility. Jesse and Carissa had only days to consider whether they were willing to set aside the future they had imagined.

Years of unexpected turns had taught them something about responding before they could see where God was leading.

“The answer’s not no,” Jesse remembers them saying. “It’s not yes yet, but it’s not no.”

After prayer and conversations with people they trusted, it became yes.

A few months later, Jesse and Carissa found themselves traveling through the same part of California where their earlier adoption journey had ended.

The familiar road caught Carissa’s attention.

Suddenly, the experience she had viewed as a painful detour looked more like preparation.

“If it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t be here now,” she remembers realizing.

What had felt like wandering had brought them back to familiar ground.

This time, the road led to their children.

The Garden at Home

Only months before that phone call, Jesse and Carissa had taken another leap of faith by launching Victory Garden.

The timing once seemed questionable. Now it looked remarkably providential.

Running their own studio allowed them to spend weeks away from home during the adoption process without navigating two traditional work schedules. Today, it gives both parents flexibility to be present as their children adjust, grow and become part of the life they are building together.

Even the support surrounding them had been taking shape before they knew they would need it. Jesse’s parents had moved to Greenville. The same parents who modeled adoption for him now live nearby as Jesse and Carissa navigate it themselves.

Victory Garden was created from a desire to use what God had given them for the good of others. They see that impact when a client feels understood or a piece of art brings beauty into a shared space. They experience it through relationships formed with people their work has allowed them to meet.

Then they come home.

There, the idea of cultivating something for another person’s flourishing has taken on a much deeper meaning.

Their children are beginning to reveal their own interests and gifts, including sparks of creativity that feel especially familiar in a home shared with two artists. Jesse and Carissa now have the privilege of discovering who God has made them to be.

A decade ago, during those “Drawlor” evenings when two Cedarville art students gathered with friends in a residence hall lounge simply because they loved creating together, they could not have imagined what would grow from it.

They knew only that they loved creating together.

God knew what He was preparing.

The friendship would become a marriage. The creative gifts would become a shared vocation. The years that felt like delay would deepen their partnership. The business would carry their work into their community while providing the flexibility their future family would need. Even a road that seemed to end in disappointment would eventually lead them back to their children.

The fruit is still growing.

For Jesse and Carissa, that has become part of the lesson: They don’t have to know what every seed will become. Their calling is to faithfully tend what God places before them and trust Him with the growth.