Brian and Alyson Rockhold
"Emailing you my heart." At StoryCorps, Alyson Rockhold describes to her husband Brian how he won her heart while they lived an ocean apart, and she talks about the Tanzanian nun who gave her the courage to tell Brian how she felt.
- [Alyson] When I went to Tanzania, it's hard to leave all your friends and family, and it's a pretty lonely experience after the initial excitement wears off, and I remember I wrote a blog post about feeling lonely, and I hadn't heard from you for a couple months, and then you wrote me an email, and just from that point on, you were just such a faithful friend, always checking in on me and asking how I was doing, and praying for me. A lot of other friends kind of faded away because out of sight, out of mind. It's hard to keep up with someone when they live so far away, and I understand that, but you always seemed to take that extra effort, and I found myself more and more finding excuses to email you. You were in seminary at the time, and I was teaching a bible class. Students would ask me questions, and instead of researching them myself, just for an excuse to reach out, I would send them to you and ask what you thought about it. And so I was feeling more and more drawn to you, but it was actually a woman, Sister Columba who was a Tanzanian nun that I had started meeting with for spiritual direction and counseling, and I was telling her I was really struggling with being close to turning 30 and feeling very lonely, and struggling with being single, and wondering what my future held. We'd met for a few times, and I found her, she's just a amazing woman. She's strong, and smart, and intuitive, and about the third time that we met together, she looked at me, and she asked me a series of questions, and the answer to every question was Brian Rockhold. She asked me, is there any man in your life who is a really good friend, who is a good Christian man, who encourages you, who makes you laugh, who you always look forward to hearing from? And I'm pretty sure my jaw just dropped open because it was you, and she told me, well, then, you need to tell him how you feel about him, and I just kind of laughed. You know, I'm like, Sister, you don't understand. Americans have different customs around relationships, and I'm not gonna even be back in the states for six months. It wouldn't be fair to put this on him now. Maybe I'll wait 'til I get back, and she let me kind of drag my feet for a couple weeks, and then finally, when I still hadn't reached out to you, I remember she just looked me in the eyes, and she said, "Alyson, this is where faith comes. "This is where you step out in courage." She said, "You can't wait 'til the time is perfect. "You gotta do it now, and you may not know what's gonna happen, "but you gotta try." So I did. I gathered all my courage, and I wrote about 50 drafts of that first email.
- [Brian] Of course you did.
- [Alyson] I wanted to get it just perfectly right, and I wanted you to know how I felt, but I also was scared of losing our friendship, and I didn't want you to feel pressure, and so, yeah, it was like emailing you my heart and wondering what you were gonna say.