Engaged and Unengaged and Then Married

And Then Married

Less than a month after we started dating, I proposed, she accepted and we set a date for the wedding.  Of course I had to break the dates I had made with the two old flames.

After a few weeks Ann began to have second thoughts.  She began to wonder if she was marrying me because I was a preacher, or if I was actually her knight on a white charger.  Actually I wasn’t much of a knight.  My charger was a black and chartreuse 1956 Chevrolet, which she hated, so she gave the ring back.  It was not because of the ugly Chevy, it was because she wasn’t sure we were establishing a marriage on the right foundation.

I was devastated.  I was certain that Ann was the person God had chosen for me, but that person had doubts.   It always strikes me as strange that one person thinks he or she can discern the will of God in a way that involves another person, and the second person doesn’t get that message.  Could it be that our understanding of God’s will is flawed?

We continued to date, however, and things sort of rocked along without much movement one way or another.   A preacher named H. I. Taylor came to preach in a meeting for us at Rosebud.   I drove to Waco every night and picked up Ann for the service.  H. I. was staying in a motel, and didn’t have anything in particular to do after the service, so he thought he needed to ride back to Waco with us every night to keep me company on the ride home.  It was O. K. with both of us.  The 44 mile ride back to Rosebud late at night sometimes made me sleepy.  Once I rode through the town of Lott and never remembered seeing it afterward.  So it was probably a good idea.

H. I. considered the way our relationship was going.  On the way back one night He said, “Norman, do you want to marry that girl?”   I assured him that I did.  He said, “Well, you’ve got to do what I did.  My wife hesitated when we were dating and I finally said, ‘This train is leaving one time, and if you want to be on it, you’d better get on it.’”

I didn’t put it exactly that way, but that’s what I ended up doing in principle.   I had given some serious thought to going back to Abilene to do graduate studies.  I told her that I had made a decision.  I was going to return to Abilene for graduate study if she was not going to marry me.  I gave her a week to decide.   After a week, she said “Yes.”  But there was one provision.  She said, “I know you want to go to graduate school.  If you’ll enroll in graduate school, I’ll marry you and we’ll live in Abilene.”  I resigned my position in Rosebud the next morning, and moved to Abilene within a month.

Her brother, Robert, decided he would like to enroll at ACC, so we moved into a house on East North 14^th Street in Abilene, and I enrolled in school.  We were married at the La Vega Church of Christ on December 26, 1959.