Brian
& Anne's Courtship
If marriage was anything like my parents relationship, I didn’t want any part of it, so as a young person, I decided I would never get married. Then I met Brian Bercht and immediately re-evaluated this decision. We had a whirlwind romance, and were married 5 weeks after the day we met. To the left is a picture of us leaving the church on our wedding day in the pouring rain in Houston, Texas, October 31, 1981. It was one of the best days of my life!
Today, we don’t recommend others get married as fast as we did. At the same time, we have no regrets. Because of the distance between Texas and Canada where we respectively lived, and our commitment to refrain from sexual intimacy before marriage, we were counseled to get married right away and our parents gave their blessing. Imagine phoning your father at the age of 20, “Yeah dad, you see there's these two guys from Canada that came down on motorcycles and well you see, I want to marry one of them!”
We knew just about zero about being married 25 years ago when we made this commitment, but still we did a couple of things right. 1. We made a real commitment to each other, that we were both determined to keep. 2. We made the commitment before engaging in sexual intimacy. Brian told me “you’re far too valuable of a woman for me to sleep with before I’ve made a promise to be true to you and take care of you for a lifetime.” My heart melted.
And so started our adventure,
and were any of us to see the whole future
that lay before us, I suppose we would be
too frightened to start. Or we would try
to take a short cut and miss the blessings
the universe holds for all of us when we
determine to live our lives with integrity,
and no matter what happens to us, to never,
never, never quit.
Life seems to lead us upon
a zigzagged path rather than straight to
the goal, but I am convinced that each detour
along the way holds a lesson uniquely designed
to prepare us for our greater destiny, if
we are only courageous enough to learn.
As the saying goes, joy comes in the journey,
not just in the final destination, and where
we come from is not nearly as important
as where we are going.
©Copyright 2005 Anne Bercht. All rights reserved.
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