Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24 ESV
Hello, we are David and Cristine Berensohn and we are very encouraged and humbled to be asked to provide and pass along our insights on marriage and raising children that we have gained so far during over 30 years of marriage and building our own family.
As a young married couple just starting out, we had several things working against us.
We came from different cultures, literally: Cristine grew up in the United States where ideology is focused on self. She had the freedom to make choices for herself without concern for her safety or anyone else’s. David grew up abroad, focused much less on the individual perspective but on being a small part of a bigger entity with an obligation to contribute to its wellbeing.
Our personalities were opposite and still are, even though we have become more like each other over time. Cristine is spontaneous, she knows how she feels, and is ready and able to move forward in accordance with what she believes is best. David on the other hand tends to respond with intensity, caution, and practicality, often experiencing analysis paralysis for fear of making any mistakes.
Finally, our view of God was conflicting to say the least. Cristine came from a religious western world background, where she had been baptized several times and viewed God as someone/thing that we didn’t have to honor and would meet when we all went to Heaven. David was an atheist, characterized by an unapologetic arrogance that saw himself as his own God, where his achievements were his own while giving little to no credit to anyone other than himself despite having been raised by a single mother who provided everything for him…
What we did share in common was the fact that we both came from broken homes where divorce and remarriage, often multiple times, were the norm.
With all the odds for a successful marriage stacked against us, we didn’t stand a chance.
And yet, through a shared commitment to following the Bible and submitting to one another in humility, we are where we are today.
God’s design for marriage is for the two to become one. When you bring two broken, traumatized individuals into a relationship, becoming one is not easy or for the faint of heart. Despite the great love we have always felt for each other, we realized that marriage can be challenging.
One of the most effective postures that we adopted early on was that the journey of building our relationship and our family is a constant and repetitious cycle of learning, growing, and achieving.
Learning required accepting that we didn’t have all the answers and didn’t always know what we were doing, but with prayer, partnership, and the support of our village, we grew. Making mistakes, learning what works and what doesn’t, and applying those lessons to our daily life produced a bountiful harvest of fruit.
Achievement is a long game that happens every day through consistent life application of the lessons learned from the ups and downs along the way. This practice arms us both with the humility required to move forward when we don’t have the answers, when we say and do the wrong things, and when things don’t go according to plan.
For us, the decision to base our lives upon God’s design for marriage and family came from a personal awareness that we are broken; individually and collectively. We needed His direction at the start of our marriage and still do today as grandparents.
Being grandparents is new for us. These waters are murky and uncharted. We are in the learning phase of this chapter, have made many mistakes, and hopefully have learned from them all. We are growing as parents; understanding the complexity of being grandparents begins with making room for our child to be the parent to their child.
Our goal for this blog is to take you along our journey of becoming one according to God’s design. We will share our thoughts and experiences on various topics of marriage and family and would love to hear from you on any issues and challenges that you would like us to discuss.
We look forward to traveling with you on this journey of life as we strive to glorify our Father through our marriages and families.
