How God Speaks to Us Through Our Sin

Giotto di Bondone, The Crucifixion, The Capella degli Scrovegni, 1305 AD

I'm a Roman Catholic.  I haven't always practiced my faith. There were twenty years during which I walked away from the Church.  I still believed in God, but I didn't believe that I needed the Church.  For some reason, it did not occur to me that Jesus had a good reason for giving the Church to us.  At that time, I believed in my own goodness and abilities.  This is when God speaks to us through the consequences of our sins.  I had some whoppers.  I lived with a man without being married who suffered from chronic depression and who eventually killed himself (after I left).  Obviously, my parents were not happy about me, and our relationship suffered because of what I was doing.  I believe that both of my parents prayed continually for me.  And after that relationship ended, I was briefly engaged to a man who I discovered was a convicted child molester.  Fortunately, I found out and broke off the engagement.  But this hit me like a ton of bricks.  Why was I making such poor choices in men?  When I thought about my parents, they had been happily married for over 40 years at that time.  Perhaps, they deserved a second look, because they were modeling a healthy marriage.  For some reason, I had this stupid idea that I wasn't going to be like my parents.  Well, why not?

At the same time, I was practicing family law.  I had never seen dysfunctional relationships in a marriage before.  While no marriage is perfect, our parents and our home was pretty happy.  I got an eyeful during my years practicing family law.  I quickly understood from my law practice all the different ways that marriages fail. 

1. Being lazy in a marriage,  and not communicating with your spouse.  Marriage requires work, and two people can grow apart if they don't work at staying together.
2. Infidelity, to which I would add the epidemic of pornography.  61% of all divorces in California are impacted by pornography.  That's a huge number.  At the time I was practicing, the internet and pornography were not as common as they are now.
3. Alcohol/Drug/Gambling Addictions.
4. One spouse is a saver and the other is a spender.  Many people just don't know how to manage the family finances, make a household budget, and don't know how to resolve financial problems.
5. Domestic Violence.

My years practicing family law were some of the best life lessons that I ever learned, and prepared me for what NOT to do in a marriage, in the same way that my parents positively modeled a good marriage to all of us children.  So, I made some changes in my life.  I got healthy and dropped about 40 lbs.  I also made a list of the kind of values that I wanted to see in a potential husband. 

1. Emotionally stable.
2. Financially stable.
3. Someone who had a good relationship with his mother, and who could remain a friend with a previous girlfriend.  I believe that how a man treats his mother is often how we will treat his wife.
4. Someone who had lived in the same place for many years.

I still wasn't practicing my faith, so I left that dimension off of my list.  If I had to do over again, I would have added it at the top of my list as something essential.

It was at this moment, that my future husband walked in my life.  I found him online, we corresponded for a bit, had a couple of telephone conversation (a bit one sided because my husband is Norwegian and not naturally talkative), and then we went on our first date to the Saddlerack, a fun country western bar with live music and dance lessons.  He was a trooper, and still is an awesome dancer!

After four months we were engaged, and were married about a year after we met in September 5th.  Importantly, I didn't make the same mistakes that I had made previously.   During our engagement, he wanted me to take one of theses human potential movement courses called The Landmark Forum.  Three really great things came out of that:

1. The emphasis on living your life with integrity.  (A concept related to virtue!)
2. I began to repair the damage I had done to the relationship with my parents, first by apologizing to both of them.  It took time, but it became much improved.
3. I was introduced to idea of putting structures in place which forward your goals.  This is when the idea of the Church that Jesus gave to us actually began to make sense, as a structure intend to support our faith.  I had done quite poorly without the structure of the Church in my life.  I realized I was quite fallible and had made many mistakes.  Pride does go before a fall!