A Love Letter

This weekend Luke and I attended our Pre-Cana retreat on the south side of Chicago. Pre-Cana is the day long preparation class all couples who get married in the Catholic church are required to attend.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to spending my Saturday in a room from 9:00 – 4:00, but it ended up being a pretty enlightening day. The purpose of the retreat was to prepare Luke and I not just for our wedding, but also the life-long marriage that comes after it.

It’s easy to get caught up thinking about the wedding portion without spending much time preparing for the marriage. During the day we talked about everything including: how we define the word commitment, how many kids we want to have, how we’ll manage our finances and how our faith will play a role in our lives.

My favorite part of the day was when we were asked to write each other a love letter describing our feelings about our upcoming wedding. It was nice to have a moment to document my thoughts and also to read Luke’s in return.

The letter was to start with the line “the biggest emotion I have about our upcoming marriage is…” I won’t go into detail, but some of the words used in our letters include: excitement, hope and anticipation.

I’m planning to keep those letters locked away safely, so on our anniversaries Luke and I can pull them out and re-live the emotions we’re feeling leading up to our wedding.

I wonder if we’ll have the same feelings years from now or if we’ll laugh at how naive we were! Either way, it will be a sweet memory to relive.