If you are reading this blog, you know how Retrouvaille helped save my marriage. Here is a video from an interview I did with a local Catholic television show here in Phoenix. If you have any questions on Retrouvaille please let me know. You can also check out their website here.
Let me be your wing-man on winging it
My wife and I had to give a presentation for a Retouvaille CORE meeting recently, and we were asked to give a title to the talk a month ahead of time. When my wife asked what we were going to present on, I said, “I don’t know, I like to wait until the last minute and just wing it when it comes what to write about.” When she pressed for a subject I said, just call it “Winging It” and we will figure something out.
Then just before the presentation, I had to come up with something that fit “winging it” for a marriage group.
Luckily I am a runner, so one morning I had a lot of time to think about it while on a run.
There is something to be said for winging it. I am often the king of it many days. I wake up with some thoughts in my mind on how the day will go and then life happens. And when you have seven kids, that life happening and disrupting usually happens before 6:30 AM. With kids fighting, to kids getting sick to schedules changing at the last minute, something seems to always get in the way of my plans and the rest of the day. I try to just make adjustments, and I just figure it out as I go.
I am also that stereotype guy when it comes to things like packing. The last trip we went on was a family camping trip last summer. While my wife had had all the kids and herself packed well before we left, I waited until about 20 minutes before we left and packed up all my stuff.
My wife loves to plan, and I love to just wing-it. Can you relate guys?
When I look back at my life, I can now see how if I had paid more attention, things could have been different and maybe we would not have had some of the issues in our marriage that we did have because I was winging it.
Sometimes life happens, and you need to be willing to go with the flow. But what about the big things in life? Think of the most important things you have done in your life for just a minute.
If you are a practicing Catholic, you go to church every week. It is not a thing where you wake up on Sunday morning and decide maybe I will, maybe I won’t, we will see how I am feeling at 9:30 when it is time to leave the house. No, it is important, so you make the time and do it intentionally.
If you are married, what about your wedding? Do you wake up in the morning and say ok today is the day I am getting married. What should I wear? Where can I go to before the service to get a ring? Where should we have the party after? Of course not, you plan well ahead of time, so every detail is just as you want it to be.
What about your children’s birthday or your desire to make your kids Christmas a memorable day. Do you wing it by waking up and say ok what can I get today to put under the tree and what are we having for dinner? Or do you plan ahead of time to make sure everything runs smoothly and everyone is happy?
Smaller things are not as important. When you wake up in the morning, you may decide between an omelet or having your eggs medium on the leftover steak from last night?
There are other small decisions you may often make too such as should I sit down and watch The Last Man Standing on Hulu, or should I watch House of Cards on Netflix.
The difference between the first few major examples and the last two are pretty obvious. Important aspects of your life such as Mass, Weddings, important family dates or vacations are planned and done with intention. Little decisions that don’t matter in life, like what show to watch, or how to have your eggs in the morning, you can just wing it.
So when it comes to marriage, is that something that we can just wing it because it doesn’t matter or is it something we should do more with more intention because it is important? I would argue it is the most important thing we do in our lives.
Men, and when I say men, I am pointing the finger right back at myself, have a tendency just to wing it when it comes to marriage. We may think we are living our vocation of marriage intentionally, but are we really doing that? Do we have set things we do with our spouse such as praying with them or dialoguing or spending a certain amount of time with them each day or do we just wing it and figure it will work itself out? Is a man more likely to plan three hours on a Sunday around watching a football game or plan three hours a week with their spouse in a quality way?
I need to stop winging it when it comes to my marriage. I spend time planning each week and each day my calendar. I plan how many hours that week I want to spend working on different projects. I plan how many hours a week I will spend at school coaching the track or cross country team. But how often will I put time into my calendar that says spend time with Jess? Hint… I don’t.
When things get put into my calendar, they tend to get done. If I have an hour block in my calendar to edit a podcast, it will almost always get done. If I have a two-hour block to write or work with a client, I do it. So why am I just winging it when it comes to my marriage and hoping it will work itself out. Why am I not calendaring it?
Sometimes, winging it is necessary. Sometimes, winging it is fun. But when it comes to our marriage and what is important we should not always rely on winging it.
There is a reason marriage was formed in the Garden and not the desert
There was a reason God formed marriage in the Garden of Eden and not the desert.
Did God use symbolism in the Bible to describe how the world was formed? Personally, I think so. That symbolism that he used to represent marriage is important. To me, it actually would be stronger than the literal interpretation. God gave us marriage as a gift in the Garden of Eden.
God chose to create marriage, the bond between one man and one woman, in the Garden of Eden. He could have done this anywhere, but he chose the one place that represented abundance and pleasure. The symbol of Eden gives us a different sense of what marriage should be than if marriage was formed in the desert where things are dry and barren.
God wants us to know marriage, our marriage, is supposed to be full of abundance. Everything good that man needed was in Eden. All the food, all the life source they needed was there, and it was there in abundance. They praised and thanked God for everything.
Our marriage should mirror that. When we take our wedding vows, and we pledge to each other to love honor and obey each other for life, we become one. That one is not meant to be a dry and barren place, but a place full of life, excitement, joy, pleasure and God.
Communications
We should have an abundance of joy in our communications. Communication is the grout that keeps us together. Just like a tile floor that had no grout, without quality communications, we would soon start splitting and cracking and falling away from each other. It is important to learn how to truly and joyfully communicate with each other.
I used to think that my wife and I talking about what we needed to do, who needed to be where and when and working out the kid’s schedule was communications. While that may be a form of communications, our relationships need a deeper level of communications.
For the first 40-years of my life, I am not sure I ever discussed a ‘feeling.’ That was not something real guys did. I wanted my wife to give me the facts, only the facts of what is going on. I did not care about the why or how she felt about it. Going to our Retrouvaille weekend, I learned about the importance of communicating and digging deeper to find out not only what was going on with Jessica, but why and how she felt about it.
We were given the tools on how to start communicating and bringing us closer together through communications. Compare this to how I used to behave around my wife. If she told me something, I would snap and say that is all I need for information. I still may slip back into these old habits from time to time, but I try not to live in that barren desert where our communications were superficial and not deeper. Communicating and understanding between us now brings us joy, most of the time.
Spiritual Life
Our spiritual life is also meant to be a bountiful harvest between us. There were times in our lives where either we did not go to church, or we went on an occasional Sunday, but that was it. Prayer? What was that?
Think back to how God described the first husband and wife. They knew who God was, and they were thankful for all that he provided. Man was very thankful to God that he gave man women. We were lonely, and God cared enough about us to give us exactly what we needed.
We are meant to have that same relationship with God. Today, not only do my wife, and I go to church together, we also will occasionally go to adoration, and we try to make time at home to pray. Even recently there was a Novena that we are both doing. Our relationship is a lot stronger because we now have God in the center of it.
Family
The family is another place where we are designed to have abundance. I understand that not everyone can have children. But you do not need to have seven children in your house like us to have a bountiful family relationship. We should always be open to children. When God designed us, he created us to procreate and to multiply. Our family can be a place we can always fall back on when we need help. We have a lot of kids because that is what God gave us. My wife also has three sisters, and they have kids too. My sister has three kids of her own.
The family is someone you can always turn to and trust, but only if you work to build that relationship. The family doesn’t need to a bountiful harvest. If you have seven kids, but everyone is always doing their own thing, and you never eat together, you don’t go church together; you don’t ever travel together, then your family is more likely to be a dry desert.
Physical intimacy
God gave us physical intimacy to procreate. Intimacy is also a way we can grow a lot closer as a couple, which is why he made it enjoyable. We were meant to be shared with each other inside the bonds of marriage. That gift of intimacy should not be used as a tool or a weapon of punishment. The physical intimacy helps bring us closer together as long as we do it with love and respect. As long as do not treat each other like an object, but use it in a way to bring us closer together, this is another aspect of our life that God gave us in the Garden of Eden that was meant to be part of the abundance of joy instead of a barren desert.
Abundance and pleasure are good when they are used how God intended. God created this holy matrimony in the one place that provided everything we needed in abundance. Now let’s bring that abundance into our marriage and live as God intended us to live.
Love your spouse as Jesus loves the Church
Let’s take a look at a very well known and very controversial Bible passage, Ephesians 5:21-33
Wives and Husbands.
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.*
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.s
As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
“For this reason, a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.”
This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.
Of course, the part that people love to get hung up on is “wives should be subordinate to their husbands.” But as I am going to show, that goes both ways.
The part that I want to focus on for you men is not that. This passage calls for us to be willing to give up even more. This passage clearly states that husband and wife are to give up everything and become one. We become one in every way, physically and spiritually. We are no longer two I’s but we become one us.
When I hear that passage, the one thing that always sticks out to me is I am called to love my wife as Christ loved the Church. How much did Christ love the Church, he literally gave his life up for her. Christ accepted his fate of being crucified on the cross so he could save his Church and free its people forever.
Loving my wife in this way is the best thing I can do for not only our marriage but for our kids and anyone else who sees and knows us. We are called to love each other forever. Jesus tells us, they became one. When we take our sacramental vows and become one, no man is to separate us. That includes ourselves breaking this sacramental bond. When God brings us together, it is forever. Of course, I didn’t always think that way, but that is because I didn’t think of our marriage as a sacrament. I never thought of our relationship as being like Jesus’ is to the Church. No matter how flawed the people in the Church may be, would Jesus ever give up on the Church? Is there a situation where Jesus would not lay down his life again for the church? No. Jesus would never give up on the Church just as we should not give up on our spouse.
When God brings us together, it is forever. Of course, I didn’t always think that way, but that is because I didn’t think of our marriage as a sacrament. I never thought of our relationship as being like Jesus’ is to the Church. No matter how flawed the people in the Church may be, would Jesus ever give up on the Church? Is there a situation where Jesus would not lay down his life again for the church? No. Jesus would never give up on his spouse just as we should not give up on our spouse.
I believe our kids see that now. I now know the stories of how our kids used to huddle in a bedroom when we fought and feared we were going to blow up again and end up in divorce. Why wouldn’t they be worried about it? It was an option that we did consider more than once. Now I judge our kids know it’s ok if mom and dad have a fight because they know that our marriage is the most important thing, and we will get through it.
This passage is about the Church and how our marriage is like the Church. The two go hand in hand. What would Christ be without the Church? What would the Church be without Christ? Love and respect are working together to make a bond that cannot be broken. That is marriage. We are there for each other. We are one body – especially when it comes to being parents. When we create a united front with the children, it helps them to see how a marriage comes together. This works so much better for everyone involved than when they think they can get between us. We hope to give our kids a good idea of what being in a marriage means. We don’t want them to take it lightly.
Being in Retrouvaille has made this a passion for us to want to help others’ marriages because we believe so strongly in the value of marriage as a sacrament.
Men, you and your wife are now one. She is your body. Don’t abuse it. Love is a decision. Make the decision to love her today just as Jesus makes the decision every day to love his Church and never give up on her. Jesus promised when he formed the Church that the gates of hell would never prevail against it. Even when his Church struggles, Jesus will never give up on her, it is his spouse. We should never give up on our spouse either.
Love is a decision
I remember walking into my Retrouvaille weekend on Friday night and looking around the room seeing all these banners on the wall. A bunch of silly slogans and I judged the silliest was one that read “Love Is A Decision.”
Well, if that wasn’t one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.
We are all taught early on that love is a feeling. Watch any prime time television show and what do you see? You see people falling in and out of love as often as the calendar changes to a new month. Society had completely masked what love is. Love is a decision.
I know, BS you are thinking. As I said, I thought the same thing.
Making the decision to love is the foundation that our marriage is built on. Love is not something that jumps up and hits us when we are not looking. Therefore, it is not something beyond our control. When you are young, you think of love as a fleeting feeling, but mature love is a decision you make. Feelings can come and go and change quickly with outside influences. If love were a feeling, then it would come and go quickly. No relationship would ever survive a struggle. A lasting love relationship has to be a deliberate and conscious decision to love, no matter how we feel.
The idea “Love is a Decision” was new to my wife and me, but it was good news. We felt empowered because we knew it was more than just a fated thing. We had a hand in it.
Marriage is not just a decision to love when you say I do on your wedding day; marriage is a decision to love by saying I do every day of your marriage. Every day when we say I do is a day we add another nail to our marriage to help make it stronger.
Love required more of us focusing on “what can I do for you” rather than “what is in it for me?” Every morning I wake up I make the decision to love my wife. I show her I love her in the small things. When she is trying to get dinner ready, and she has a fussy baby in her arms, I will sweep him out of her arms and entertain him. When she is sitting at the breakfast table in the morning reading a book to the three-year-old, I will get her a refill on her coffee without her having to ask. Small actions throughout the day help reaffirm out love for our spouse.
Commitment is more than just staying in a marriage or fidelity to our spouse. It means working on the relationship and making efforts to improve it. Our society tells us that commitment for a lifetime is outdated, but God’s truth never changes. God’s truth, will always be the truth. Commitment is a decision; it is not conditional. It is deciding to love each other for a lifetime, no matter what. As long as both parties are willing to love each other, any troubles can be overcome.
We are called on to love our spouse as Christ loved the Church. That is what I will talk about tomorrow.
So what is this new website?
So who am I and why am I here blogging? That is a fair question so let me give you the quick answer then the longer more interesting one.
I am a married catholic guy (hello captain obvious). I got married to my lovely wife in 1991, have seven amazing kids that live with us here and four who are intercessors praying for us in Heaven. Can’t wait to see you guys!
We had a broken marriage. Broken beyond repair or so we thought and others judged. But we found a way to repair it. My goal is to provide resources to other Catholic guys, or any guys of faith really that are out there who may be searching for answers. To share some of the tools and ideas which have helped us completely rebuild a loveless and shell of a marriage.
Married Young
We were married young (22 and 19) and we had a great marriage until we really started falling apart. As I fell away from God and the Church, our marriage started doing the same.
I moved out, I filed for divorce, but never went through with it. Then a few years later I would fill out all the paperwork to file for divorce again, this time, I meant it.
That is when we found Retrouvaille and when I rediscovered, there was a God and he loved me.
So that is the short version of the story. The key to our survival as a couple was me rediscovering there was a God. I actually reached the point where I did not believe there was a God. If there was a God, how could he allow my wife and I to hurt each other so bad like we were doing?
Our marriage was over. If you took our story and posted it in an online poll and asked if these two should remain married, or get divorced? I am fairly certain that the overwhelming majority of people would have said it was time to end it. Society teaches us that if we don’t love each other and we are hurting each other emotionally over and over, then it is easier to just go our own ways. What society does not teach us is that our marriage was a sacrament, it was meant to be forever and when God brings two people together, no one is supposed to come in between and separate them. They are one.
But to believe that, you need to believe that there is a God. I had reached the point where I went to church occasionally on Sunday’s with my wife and kids. But I was just going through the motions. I was not there. I was thinking about what I would do when I got home or how boring this was.
Then, things hit their absolute bottom.
Jess and I were on the verge of divorce again. I did not believe in God. I had moved out again and for a while was mostly living in my car.
Jess asked me to go to Retrouvaille. This was a Catholic ministry that tried to save broken marriages. Their unofficial motto is when you are ready for divorce, let us be your last resort. I agreed to go. Not to really save our marriage, but I judged if I went, then I could always tell the kids, hey we tried everything. While Retrouvaille did not instantly heal our marriage, it put a little crack in the wall that we had built between us and allowed us to start communicating for the first time in probably a decade.
But this probably wouldn’t have happened if a small miracle had not set the wheels in motion just before the weekend. I had was still struggling with the God thing. I was still trying to work through that part, and if there was really a God. I wanted some clarification with that before our Retrouvaille weekend.
Testing God
Just typing that it sounds so absurd now. Testing God? Who does that? Well this guy, or so I thought. There was a small enough part of me that either believed there may be a God or maybe it was just enough of my Catholic guilt keeping me around. But I had a plan. I was going to give him a chance to prove to me he was real. If he was real, and if he really wanted me to believe in him, he had a chance to show me.
So I made a deal. “God I am going to go to daily mass for one week. You have one week to prove to me you are real.”
Monday: I walked into church ready to either be blown away or give up on God forever. I thought, God I am here. Show me you are real. You know something small like make a statue cry, make a host bleed, anything like that. I bet you will be shocked to hear that none of that happened. All that happened is the priest talked about some Polish Nun named Faustina who wrote a diary. Great, a nun. But where is my miracle?
Tuesday: I walk into the church with the same expectations. I wish I could go back and just smack myself up the head now. Yea, like God, was going to make a statue cry or something. Again I did not get my sign and again the same priest was talking about mercy and how that saint’s Diary talked about God’s mercy for us. OK God, 2 days down, you are running out of time, guessing this is a waste of time.
Wednesday: Cliff Notes: Expect Miracle. No Miracle. Priest mentions Diary during homily again, but this time, he waves the book in the air and says go buy it in our bookstore.
Ok, so I may be a little slow at times. But maybe, just maybe this was my sign? I had to at least check it out. So I went to the bookstore and laid down the few dollars it cost for St Faustina’s Diary.
I started reading it almost immediately. If you have read the Diary, you know it is not light reading. Every page I got pulled into the story more and more. The messages from Jesus to Faustina were so powerful. The mercy he wanted to pour out for us, there are not words to describe it. The miracles and vision he works can only be the act of a loving parent.
The more I read the more I realized I was a complete idiot. I could not believe that I did not believe in God. It became obvious to me that God was real and God loved me greatly. God wanted to not only forgive me, but he wanted me to forgive myself.
While this did not fix the issues with my wife and I, it did start opening my eyes and heart to the chance to fix things.
The wow moment
Yea, yea yea, so you read some book by some Saint and that made you believe in God again. Big deal right?
Well kind of, if that is where the story ended. Over the next year, I would develop a close relationship with Saint Faustina. I would tell my wife about her. I would get a Divine Mercy picture for our house. I would start asking her to pray for me and our marriage and I actually felt like she was doing that.
Over the next year as I felt her more in my life it lead me closer to God, and closer to Jessica. We really started to allow God to heal our marriage.
So let me start to wrap this up. Some little known Saint, who I had never heard of before, I now felt was one of the main reasons, along with Retrouvaille, that our marriage was growing stronger and stronger.
Ready for it?
This is where I break down every time I tell this story out loud. So on our anniversary, one year after our Retrouvaille weekend, I am driving into my office. I was listening to Catholic radio and there going through the readings of the day and the Saints of the day. Guess who’s feast just happens to be our anniversary saint. Yup Faustina. I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped and cried like a baby. It all came full circle. So this unknown to me Saint, who I had been asking her to pray for our marriage, who I felt helped bring me back to the church and back to my family, who I would have never heard of if I did not go to God asking for a sign, just happens to be the patron saint of our wedding anniversary date.
Yeaaaaaa, and I didn’t believe there was a God. What a schmuck!
You can call that a coincidence, but wow, that would have to be one of the greatest coincidences of all time.
Today, we present weekends and posts workshops for Retrouvaille here in Phoenix. And when a Catholic comes to me about marriage problems, I always recommend the first thing they do find out the patron saint of their wedding day and start asking them for prayers too. Then attend a Retrouvaille weekend.