World Wide Marriage Encounter

I think I may have mentioned a time or two that my husband is as devout an atheist as I am a Catholic. We were married at a time in our lives when my faith was weak, and I wasn't too sure if God really did exist. I also didn't know whether to trust the Catholic Church's teachings or not, so I wasn't really all that interested in what they had to say. I left the Church in search of the truth. The nice thing about the truth is that it is testable. You can hold it up and under examination it will be as true now as it was the first time you encountered it. The more I tested it, the more I found that the Catholic Church really did hold the truth and that yes, there really is a God and He really does love us and He really does care what we do with our lives.

When I came back to the Church, my husband was less than ethusiastic to say the least. Suddenly there was a being in competition with him for first place in my life, and it wasn't a competition my husband could win as he was neither omnipotent nor all good nor all loving nor all powerful. As God became a larger part of my life, a part which my husband told me he didn't want to hear about and wasn't interested in, we had less common ground on which to stand and found ourselves growing further and further apart. The gap between us just seemed to great for us to cross.

I spent a LOT of time in prayer on this, as it hurt my heart to lose my best friend. I had, years before, asked him to go on a world wide marriage encounter weekend, but he wasn't interested in anything that had to do with God. This year, however, I got up the courage to just mention it to him. He said he thought he would give it a try if he weren' so new to the company (the encounter weekend was advertised for June) and unable to get that time off. I looked it up, there was a weekend in August, and we scheduled time to go.

I have never, ever, been a really patient person. I like my results yesterday, please. I have been no different in my prayer time, usually, expecting God to deliver sooner rather than later. This year He has been teaching me patience. For instance, back in January He promised me that August 8th my circumstances would change and prosperity would begin to wash over our family as it has never before done. He explained to me that I would have to go through a lot of hardship before we got there, as we were in need of a lot of work. We would have to start respecting our prosperity and gifts more, using them wisely instead of wasting them and transforming our hearts and minds so that when we got the prosperity it would be used to help others in need rather than being wasted on stupid stuff for ourselves. August 8th seemed a world away for me back then, but I trusted God to be true to me. He told me one of the reasons He takes so long to do things is that He's building for eternity, and that takes time. If he built it quicker, as I had asked, it wouldn't last.

In early March, during Adoration, I receive a message that my husband believes but is not ready to admit this either to himself or anyone else and to watch for changes in behavior as signs of this new belief. I marvel at this but I do indeed watch. He backed me up when I insisted that Eddie should go to Mass, practically forced my son to attend a Mission they had at church the week before Easter, but he refused to go to Mass with us.

Later that month, I am feeling very depressed and my husband agrees to go to Adoration with me as I want both his company and the company of Christ. The next month I forgot to schedule someone to take my place in Adoration while I am on retreat. Nobody I asked is able to do it for me. The morning of, in desperation, I turn to my husband and ask for him to go. He reluctantly agrees. He knows that he must be there the whole hour, and knows who it is he will be sitting with that day and how important this is to me. I do not know that whole weekend whether or not he has fulfilled my request, or if he stayed the whole hour, or if he left the Lord alone, but I put it in God's hands. Not only did my husband show up on time, stay the whole hour, and make certain Christ had two others with him before he left but he brought my son with him as well. I was floored.

Now, July 31st comes - just weeks before we're scheduled to go the encounter weekend, and I'm thinking to myself that I cannot handle another day of our empty marriage. My loneliness has just reached an absolute peak. Furthermore, I had learned a few months ago that an unbaptized person and a baptized person cannot have a sacramental marriage - even if the marriage is recognized by the church - as a sacramental marriage requires that both parties are baptized. This broke my heart. I had begun to despair that we would ever have the marriage I had dreamt of. I tried several times that day to write him a letter saying Good bye. Each time I, who love to write and do it so often, could not find the words to say. I put the letter away, figuring that perhaps this was the intervention of the holy spirit, and turned on Catholic radio to see if God might be trying to speak to me about this matter. Sure enough, every program was on marriage and relationships that day. That night as I worked with my sister Julie on Communique, I told her about my feelings of despair for our relationship. She encouraged me to stick with it, though I didn't really appreciate it at the time. I listened as another sister gave her witness that night, and she talked about some of her own marital struggles. I knew now God was telling me to hang in there and have faith both in my husband and in my God.

Saturday, August 2nd, I am sitting in Eucharistic Adoration just writing the small things which I hear God saying to me. He whispers to me that even if my husband should leave me, He will bring him back to me. I think that's a pretty odd thing, but I write it down and reflect on it. Monday, August 4th, and I decide to write my husband a letter. I tell my husband that if he wants to find out whether or not God is real, he should know all the ways in which God has protected our family from a major fall even though my husband is not thankful for the protection. I tell him also that I am praying that God stop protecting him so that he will see that God is real and, perhaps, on his knees find his way to God.

My husband is furious. He tells me he wants a divorce, that he no longer loves me. He says I've changed from the girl he married and he doesn't love the woman he's married to. I spend all night thinking, and in the morning write him another letter. I agree that I have changed, but I remind him of who I really was when he met me and how much he really didn't like the ways in which that girl hurt him, rejected him, treated him. I also explained to him that I was only praying for God to take away His protections because the only time I had ever seen my husband pray was when he was being crushed by adversity. I told him also that if prosperity would have the same effect for my husband, I would have been praying for that instead.

The next day I am furious. I am thinking of all kinds of letters to write the man. How dare he leave me! Heh. I'm so glad the Holy Spirit intervened, as it was a really busy day and I had no chance to write anything. Around 11 am I realize that my phone hasn't rung once. I check it, and it's off. I turn it on and there are four messages from my husband. One of which says "You have some valid points. We need to talk". We meet for lunch. He tells me that he will start going to Mass with us on Sunday and that I can try to convert him all I want as long as all of our conversations aren't about God. I agree.

The Friday of the weekend, neither of us know what to expect and we are both very nervous, but my husband is a ball of nerves. I try to reassure him that things will be fine. He's worried he'll be rejected by others because of his atheism, that we won't get to spend much time together, or that others will try to convert him. The weekend is like nothing we had expected, and in the process we begin to reconnect. Saturday, though, we fight because of my misinterpretation of something he said. I confess this to the priest, who reminds me to be more patient and more loving, and admonishes me to apologize for my part in the disagreement. I do , we make up, and by the time the weekend is finished, my husband has agreed to daily prayer in addition to weekly mass. We both walk out of the weekend feeling as if we have our spouses back, and are deeply in love and deeply committed with tools to help us communication and connect on a deeper level than ever before.

Since then, my husband has been faithful to his promise of daily prayer with me and the daily dialogue exercises recommended by the encounter weekend. He attended Mass. He has expressed a desire to get "a little" involved in the Church and has made suggestions on ways to change and improve the prayer I wrote for us. He has also suggested that we start a website to help other couples like us. I am amazed every day at the little changes I find happening, and the way in which God is clearly working to transform my husband. I know that things will be brighter in our future, and I hold great hope for each new day.

God Answers Prayers

There's an atheistic website entitled God is Imaginary which states that it has 50 proofs that God doesn't exist. Proof number 2 is that God doesn't answer prayer. His argument is that God doesn't answer prayer EXACTLY THE WAY WE WANT HIM TO, and therefore God doesn't exist. He goes further on to say that we who pray and believe are silly, and if he's right about God not existing then he has every right to say we are silly. He doesn't have courage enough to permit comments or even provide an email address to allow rebuttals. I do feel sorry for this person, though. I wonder what prayer it is that he thought God didn't answer, it must have been something very close to his heart like a girlfriend, a child, a wife, or a mother he lost. Maybe a father or a best friend. However, I will write a response to him and hope that it makes its way to him. I invite him to reply to me. I invite him to comment. In the meanwhile, I will pray for him that he has a change of heart.
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You cite proof # 2 of God is imaginary as “God never answers any prayers”. On a scientific level, this is patently impossible to prove; therefore it cannot be a proof. In fact, all it takes is ONE occurrence of God answering prayers to debunk this “proof”. I have personally had many prayers directly answered, and many that have been indirectly answered, and several answered with a “no”. No, by the way, is a perfectly acceptable if sometimes disappointing answer frequently used by loving parents and by God.

You act as if God would have to play the big sugar-daddy in the sky in order to be believable, but I challenge that such a God would be less believable. Love has limits, love has boundaries, and love thinks of the greater good, not the immediate want. You cite as an example that if one million persons who were holy were to gather together on a single night and pray for everyone with cancer to be cured, that it wouldn’t happen. You’re right. Most likely, it is true that not everyone would be cured. God’s view of good isn’t always our view. You say that the overnight curing of cancer for everyone in the world would be an obvious good. I challenge that this is not necessarily so.

Cancer is the result of contagions and contaminates in our environment, our waters, and our air. We put those contagions and contaminates there, God didn’t. Thus, cancer is man-made. Now, if God cures all cancers overnight, our urge to find the source of these cancers and eliminate the source is gone. The contagions and contaminates linger, hurting us in other ways and in six months other people will have developed cancer. We would continue to think it’s okay to pour contagions and contaminates into our environment, becoming lazy and careless and expecting God to do the work of cleaning up a mess we have created. What parent that truly wants the best for the child doesn’t teach by allowing natural consequences? Those consequences may hurt, but they are important reminders of how the world actually works. Also, some of the people who get cancer will have changes of heart and remember the God who created them, turning back to him in prayer. If they become well too soon, they may not have this important change of heart. Some of the people who get cancer will cause other people to have changes of heart and remember God. God may save thousands of souls that would have been lost by allowing this one person, who loves Him and trusts in Him, to get cancer. Through that soul’s temporary suffering, God strengthens their already strong belief in him and converts many who would have been lost. God would rather save the soul and lose the body than save the body, which is temporary, and lose the soul. It may also be that some of the people who have cancer may need to die. These people may have allowed themselves to be so filled with evil that they hurt everyone around them, people like serial murderers, rapists, pedophiles, etc.

God doesn’t judge good by our standards, just as an adult doesn’t judge good based upon a child’s standards. A child believes that it would be good to eat nothing but candy and cookies all day long. An adult realizes that this behavior, in the short term will almost certainly cause the child to have a severe stomach ache and in the long run will cause the child to grow weak as the candy doesn’t adequately nourish the body, though it tastes good. Likewise, God doesn’t give us everything we ask for because sometimes what we ask for is short-sighted and over the long run will do us more harm than good. I invite you to read the parable I wrote in the post just before this, to help explain a little more.

Confession is Good for the Soul

Tonight was St. Ann's Lenten Penance Service. As Catholics, we are called to confess our sins to a priest at least once per year. This penance service involves a communal reflection on the two great commandments (To love the Lord God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself), reflection on when we have failed to live up to those commandments, private confession of those times when we have failed Christ to a priest, the receiving of absolution of those sins, and specific actions which are taken to demonstrate our intention to change.

During reflection, I came to the conclusion that the root cause of my sins was that I did not trust God to provide for me. I was spending too much because I didn't trust God to provide and I was being impatient for the same reason. I also realized that I had many talents and gifts which were just not being used, and that this is something I need to actively work to change. What good is a talent or gift if the Body of Christ does not benefit because of it?

Now, when I confessed what I believed my sins to be, the priest pointed out to me that I have plenty of trust in God. My problem is that I don't always like the WAY God chooses to provide things to me. He was exactly right. It isn't that I think God isn't going to give me all that I need, it's that I don't think He's going to give me what I want that causes me to overspend. I'm not willing to accept His will, and when He does choose to provide me with gifts if they aren't what I expected, I tend to reject them.

After doing the penance the priest prescribed of three Our Fathers, three Hail Mary's and three Glory Be's, it struck me how to share with others what I had just learned. I will call this the Parable of the Tin Can.

A man was lost in the desert. As he wandered, he became thirsty. He prayed to God to provide him with water that he might not die of thirst. Soon afterward, he spotted a rusted tin can. The can, however, was not the water he had prayed for and so he continued on, leaving the humble can behind. Frustrated and miserable, thirstier than ever, the man again prayed to God, “Lord, I am so very thirsty. Please give me something to drink that I might live.” After several more hours like this, the man gave up and sat down. Weeping in misery, the man turned to the Lord in anger. “Lord, I prayed with all my heart that you would send me something to drink and all that I found all day long was a rusted tin can. Why do you ignore my pleas?”

When the man had ceased his crying and was too exhausted and thirsty to complain any longer, the Lord at last spoke. “You asked me for water, yet you had nothing in which to hold the water. If I had provided you water when you asked for it, you would have had but a single sip and then you would have had nothing more to drink because the water would have seeped out from between your fingers. That rusted tin can was no small gift from me. It was everything you needed, for in it you can not only hold water and drink your fill, you can also use it to gather and cook food, and the parts of the can which are not rusted may be used to signal for help so that you may be rescued from this desert. In your urgency, you sought to take care of but one need. In my love I have provided for all of them. Go back and retrieve your can, and the next time you pray remember that what I send to you may not be what you have asked for, but it is assuredly exactly what you need.”