Married for life...

Married for life...

Marriage in the Catholic Church is a sacrament, a Holy institution designed by God. I believe this and take Jesus' words seriously, when He said, "what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

I am married to my 2nd husband, but he is my first husband in the eyes of the Church, thanks to a process called an Annulment, but I have jumped ahead. Let me back up a bit.

I as well as most Americans, have grown up during the "Age of Aquarius", the so called "baby boomers". From our generation came Rock & Roll, the "Hippie" movement, and "free love".
Our generation has seen the results of unprotected, unmarried sex, with the onslaught of STD's and AIDS. We wanted to go against the grain, fight against the conventions of our parents. We wanted to free our minds, and tried using drugs of every sort, to experience euphoria. The women burned their bras, refused the "gentlemanly" gestures of our parents, and began to put ourselves beyond the norm, reaching to break the barriers that had been in place; "womens Lib"and Helen Reddy's "I am Woman"became our theme song, and we made ourselves into "Career" women. We wanted it all, to manage corporations, have a husband,( but not necessarily on paper) and family.
Women turned to "uppers & downers" to get through their day. Stress and heart attacks became the new killers of women. 

During this time, marriage became something that was no longer permanent, but convenient. We get to have a fancy wedding, we were the center of attention for a whole day, romantic notions that we would be happy, but if we didn't like it, we could always get a divorce, a once frowned upon resolution to marital discourse.

        Genesis 1:27-28 
27 God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.

People used to work through their problems, with love and prayer, and sometimes the help of a pastor.
Our children were sometimes the glue that worked out those problems. But during the "Baby Boomer" rage, and then beyond to our children's generation, single moms with children growing up with one parent, we spawned the "Latch key" kids. Children coming home after school to an empty house and left to their own devices, lead to more and more gangs, under age crimes, and seriously messed up kids!
The "family unit" and the strengths it provided for our children was gone for the majority of our country.

    Matthew 19:3-9

3 Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?”

4 He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’

5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

Now I'm not saying that all the single parents, and parent-less kids were messed up, but you have to admit that there were a lot of them. Just look at the self-help section of a bookstore or library. The increase in psycho analysts, counselors. Children going into schools and shooting other children and teachers, shooting their parent, robbing stores, stealing cars; there are more children on death row and life in prison today than at any other time in our history!

Marriage is a blessing and should never be entered into lightly, but with love and consideration.
The Catholic Church requires couples seeking marriage in the church to go through a series of counseling with clergy and then with a married couple. They are encouraged to discuss their goals in life, their openness to children, their faith, finances and in general, how they feel about everything that they may face as a married couple. Usually, this is about a year, a good long engagement, to make sure that the person you want to marry is the right one. The USCCB website has a page just for Marriage.  You can find out more specifics there, and you'll see that marriage is indeed a very important matter.

Matthew 19:7-9

7 They said to him, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss [her]?”

8 He said to them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

9 I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.”

When I first met my husband, he was a wounded puppy, so lovable, I couldn't help but fall in love with him. I was a single divorced mom, who had been married to the wrong man for nearly ten years and finally divorced and returned home to Florida. I had entered into the marriage under the wrong reasons, and stayed to provide a stable home for my son. My Ex had been married previously, in a Catholic Church, and divorced his wife and four kids, "because she got fat". I was young and should have seen this as a warning, but no, I was naive.

     Colossians 3: 19

Husbands, love your wives, and avoid any bitterness toward them.

Anyway, when my new love and I decided we wanted to marry, we found that it wasn't possible to marry in the Catholic Church when we wanted, much to my frustration as a Baptist protestant at the time, I was indignant! My new sweety had been born and raised Catholic but was not married in the church but in a civil union. Needless to say, I was getting married when I wanted, and we found a protestant pastor to marry us in our outdoor wedding. So began our future together.

As time passed, and I continued to attend Mass with my new hubby, and our Catholic friends I had made when we met, (in a previous post I talked about the CYL games as his son was in a Catholic School) I started Inquiry and my sweety talked about how his mother had wanted him to marry in the Church.
So I did what I thought was only practical, I wanted his wish to come true and we went to the church to see what we had to do. As it turned out, the Church didn't recognize our marriages to our previous spouses, mine because my Ex was married in the Church to his first wife, and he because they were married by a notary public. I also had not received my Sacraments. I was Baptized when I was twelve and was able to produce documentation during the annulment process, so it was accepted as my first Sacrament.

        1 Peter 3:1-4

1 Likewise, you wives should be subordinate to your husbands so that, even if some disobey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct

2 when they observe your reverent and chaste behavior.

3 Your adornment should not be an external one: braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry, or dressing in fine clothes,

4 but rather the hidden character of the heart, expressed in the imperishable beauty of a gentle and calm disposition, which is precious in the sight of God. 

Long story short, we completed our instruction as required by the church, I became a Catholic as well and we are now married forever in our eyes, as well as the churches. 
It will be twenty years together this fall, since our first marriage by the protestant pastor, and the vows of "through sickness and health, for richer and for poorer", has taken on new meaning, but we have held on to each other for strength and courage through the bad times. I do not regret the decision I made over twenty years ago, and only wish that we had met sooner so that we could have had a house full of kids of our own. 

Our love is still strong, although taxed at times, neither of us will ever leave the other, and we find great comfort in knowing that commitment is ours.

We can also count on support from our church, should we need it, for the Catholic Church has many programs for counseling to help couples who may have hit a bump in the road and need help paving it smooth again. 

If you are in need of help, turn first to your Pastor, your church, for help, before heading to a lawyer. God wants us to be one in him, and with God, your marriage is a Holy Trinity.

Blessings, 

The Catholic Lady©

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Forgiving even when you can't forget

Forgiving even when you can't forget...

Forgiveness to me is the one and most important commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ. I don't know how I could breathe if I was holding onto every hurt, from every person, in my life, and trust me, there has been plenty of hurt.

Yet, there are people, some close to me, that seem to wallow in their hurt. They hold onto it as if it were a treasured black pearl, taking it out to roll it around in their fingers, to relish the darkness of it. Some even hanging it around their neck so it never leaves them and is constantly in front of them.
It's like Gollum, and his "Precious", the Ring of Power. He couldn't see that the ring was making him sick and forever changing him from the happy-go-lucky Hobbit that he was, to the mad creature he had become; an animal, suspicious, and vicious.

from The Hobbit: Gollum and his ring

It breaks my heart to see these people who can't forgive! They can't see what it, the un-forgiveness, is doing to them personally. These people are the ones who are always upset, who are never happy, have no patience, yell and scream and gesture in traffic, and are generally unhappy ALL THE TIME.
They have few or no friends because they don't trust anyone. Usually alone, or with a spouse, they become more and more anti-social and what I like to call, "hermits in community."

How did these people reach this point in their lives, we ask? By being offended. Offended by a family member who committed a wrong in their eyes. Offended by a friend who borrows money and never pays it back, and perhaps out of shame, disappears, not to be seen again. Offended by a former spouse who rejects them and never says why or attempts to reconcile. Offended by someone that has the audacity to take a parking space for which they had waited five minutes. 

I consider myself a forgiving person. I get over things quickly and forgive and forget. But I haven't always been this way. I probably have had ulcers and high blood pressure because of the hurt I used to drag around with me. It was mine, and no one was going to take it away from me. 
Then one day, I came to understand that my un-forgiveness and grudges were what was making me sick.

I had read, but never truly understood, Jesus' teaching on forgiveness. In the Lord's Prayer, or the "Our Father" as we Catholics refer to it, He taught us to pray "...and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" or in other translations, " and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our trespassers."
what I never really understood or possibly noticed, was the two verses after the prayer, Matthew 6:14 & 15 "If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions."

Jesus is telling us right here, that BELIEVING in Him is not enough, we must also OBEY, his command and forgive others or His Father, God, will NOT, forgive us! In fact the Catechism of the Catholic Church expounds a great deal on this subject, here are two poignant verses:
2840  Now—and this is daunting—this outpouring of mercy cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Love, like the Body of Christ, is indivisible; we cannot love the God we cannot see if we do not love the brother or sister we do see.¹³⁶ In refusing to forgive our brothers and sisters, our hearts are closed and their hardness makes them impervious to the Father’s merciful love; but in confessing our sins, our hearts are opened to his grace. (1864)
2843  Thus the Lord’s words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end,¹⁴² become a living reality. The parable of the merciless servant, which crowns the Lord’s teaching on ecclesial communion, ends with these words: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”¹⁴³ It is there, in fact, “in the depths of the heart,” that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession. (368)

I realized, my own inability to forgive and forget, was not only making me sick, but was holding me back from achieving Holiness in the Lord! 

The Gospel of Matthew has many chapters of Jesus teaching us to forgive. Matthew 18: 21-35 is the parable of the unforgiving servant. First Peter askes Jesus: 

21 Then Peter approaching asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

22 Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy times seven.” (Some theologians say that in the times this took place, it was not literally 490 times, but meant an infinite number of times.)

Jesus concludes the story of the servant with this: 34"Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt." 35 "So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.”

Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia Syndrome. One of the biggest factors in how much pain I felt was stress. Stress and un-forgiveness work hand in hand, and I learned in time that the only way I was going to feel better was to take control of my own body, and that meant making changes in my life. I had to change my job, my personality even, to recognize the things that were making me sick. When I did this, I was able to slowly turn my pain off. 
I stopped mulling over old wrongs. I learned to recover from hurt faster, meant forgiving and moving on. It wasn't easy. every time I started to make progress, the evil one would throw me a curve ball and knock me back. 
But I began to see that faith and prayer made me stronger. The more time I spent in prayer, the more time I spent in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the more often I went to Mass, made me stronger in my soul.
 I have to say that the last three years have been the greatest three years in my faith life since I discovered the Lighthouse Catholic Media CD's. I have learned so much about the Bible, about coping with pain and hurt, relationships, my relationship with Jesus and my own self image, that I could not have learned in another twenty or thirty years without them.

I just want everyone to listen to them. the problem is, the persons that are having problems with forgiveness, are the ones who refuse to listen! It's as if they are afraid that if they listen to them, they will lose their "precious" hurt and resentfulness that they have come to love!

One great talk by Jeff Cavins, is called "The Hidden Power of Forgiveness" 

I highly recommend this talk for anyone who is having issues with forgiveness. It is so important that we learn to forgive! After all, Jesus came into this world to pay the price for our sins, so that God might forgive us our sins. Jesus paid the ultimate price. Can we accept His gift? Can we accept His gift and thank Him, for paying our debt, by forgiving the debts owed us? This is His wish and command, to "Love one another", as "He has Loved us!"

Can we say and mean the words that Jesus taught us?

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name! Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory Forever! Amen!

Blessings!

The Catholic Lady©

What's next? Football and Christian displays

Well, we've all had a little break, the Christmas tree is down, the Decorations are packed away for another year, and now we think, "What's next?"

Some people immediately say, "Super Bowl!" I used to be one of those people but somewhere along the line, my husband and I found something else to do with our Sundays and Monday nights. I'm not sure when that happened, but one day I noticed, hey, we never watch football anymore!

I can't say that I miss it. I mean, it did tie us down to the TV every week, but in retrospect, I did enjoy the games. I knew the players, the coaches and I knew where to find my baby sister every week when the Bucs were playing. She'd be where so many people go to watch football, in a sports bar with her husband, cheering on the teams and getting mad about a bad call.

These days the only thing I watch the Super Bowl for is the commercials, and because the game starts SOOOOO LATE, I have to record it. I mean seriously, the whole country is watching this game and has to go to work the next day, why can't they schedule it for Sunday afternoon when most people are off work and the whole family can watch? But I digress.

Maybe it is the commercials that turned us away? We watch a game that is technically a 60 minute game, and it is turned into a 3 to 4 hour event with constant commercials and "commentary" by "has been" players with computer consoles and they have to bring up every bit of football trivia they can find to fill the space of a call on the field. It's exhausting! Give me a live Pee-Wee football game anytime!

But as it is, Football has become a controversial medium for Evangelization. Ever heard or the "The Tebow Rule?" Tim Tebow, Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida, and well known Christian with Missionary parents, had two things he was known for during his college play years. One, was his Bible verses written in his eye black. These became a sensation and went viral every time he changed the verse. Unfortunately the NCAA enacted a new rule against messages of any kind on the players eye black. Check this out HERE. Come on folks, really? The devil is out to fight Christianity and we as Christians are letting him win!

The other thing that Tim Tebow was and is still known for is what became dubbed as "Tebowing."
he goes down on one knee and bows his head, usually resting his head on his fist, to say a prayer.
This became such a sensation, there were whole web pages dedicated to pictures of people "Tebowing"

Tim Tebow, "Tebowing"

In my RCIA class last year, one of the teens said that they banned "Tebowing" in his highschool! He said he was reprimanded by a teacher when he did it in the hall between classes.

What's wrong with expressing your faith? Why does everyone have to get so "offended?" Why do we as Christians let a handful of non-believers get away with taking away our right to share, discuss and express our Faith in God? It has gone way beyond out of control!

One of the sites I have linked here on my Blog site is Catholicscomehome.org, a not-for-profit organization that is fighting not just to bring fallen away catholics home, but for our right to Religious Liberty. I've seen some incredible successes coming from their "Evangomercials"in bringing people back to church. Every city where they have shown the commercials has seen an increase in attendance.
It is a beautiful thing. Recently they added Coach Holtz to their list and aired the below commercial during College Bowl week. If they could get a MONSTER donation, maybe they could have got it for this years Super Bowl? Let's pray it happens!


Coach Holtz Catholics Come Home Add

Let's get back to basics, let's PRAY with diligence, STUDY God's Word daily, and LOVE one another through sacrifice, sharing, and ministry!

Blessings,
The Catholic Lady©