Do You Believe?

A woman on the prayer team at St. Ann‘s taught me how to pray the gospels. The gospels that she had me focus on dealt with healing since this is an area that I needed much prayer. After reading the gospel passage, you are to “find one or more resting places in the passage. Let this be from God, don’t go searching for hidden meanings, just allow God to speak.” Two years ago I prayed with Matthew 9:27-29, about the healing of two blind men. The words that God spoke to me were, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” My husband and I were dealing with a very difficult situation and I was feeling hopeless. This situation had happened over and over and I didn’t believe things would ever change. If I didn’t have faith that this would ever change and that our marriage could grow stronger then it wouldn’t happen. In the gospel passage Jesus asks the blind men, “Do you believe that I can do this?” And he was asking me the same thing about my marriage. Did I believe that our marriage could be what the Lord desired it to be? My lack of faith was keeping me blind to the good things that were happening in our marriage. I was totally focused on our problem.

Today my husband and I are celebrating our 25^th wedding anniversary. We have been blessed. We have had our share of trials but the Lord has been with us through each storm. Our marriage is truly a gift from God. For many years I feared that David would leave me. Not for any specific reason, but since I had lived in fear most of my life and had dealt with much rejection, I just assumed that he would leave me too. I can look back and see that I never gave of myself completely to our marriage because I was afraid. I figured if I didn’t make myself completely vulnerable than a part of me would be salvageable when he left. The wall that I had built around my heart, determined to let no one in, prevented David from knowing me completely or from being able to love me completely. Sometimes our troubles seemed insurmountable and I didn’t believe that God could make it better. I felt hopeless.

But through my healing I have learned that it is ok to be vulnerable and that this is the only way that love can grow. It doesn’t prevent pain and as a matter of fact, until I learned that you can be vulnerable and protect your heart, I opened myself up too much, trusting others even when they had proven themselves to be otherwise. I have learned to find that balance. I also had to learn that after God, your spouse should be the next most important person in your life. I never believed this because so many marriages ended in divorce. My husband may leave me but I will always be a mother. But I learned that your children learn about love through their parents’ love for one another. If they see us united, even through the most difficult situations, they will learn to persevere. Even though David is not Catholic, we are united in bringing up our boys in the Catholic faith and this allows their faith to be strong. In are home we are kind to one another, we treat each other with respect and we all pitch in and take care of things. We cook together, work in the yard together and we have fun together. This is what love and family are all about.

I have learned to embrace my marriage, to make myself vulnerable, trusting in God’s love for us. And I know in my heart that we will remain together until death do us part.