pains I could see that the roots of our marital tree were growing deeper and stronger and that tiny blossoms that promised rich fruit had sprung forth. Our arguments began to decrease in frequency and were replaced by sweet moments of romance and rebonding.
On some level this didn’t surprise me. It serves to reason that if you start treating your spouse better, your relationship will thrive. What did surprise me was that the previously implacable grips of fear that had imprisoned me for the last handful of years had slowly begun to release their hold on me.
I couldn’t see it at the time, but my putting a stop to the endless cycle of criticism allowed Dan to get off the defensive and return all of the love I was pouring into him, often tenfold. God parted the storm clouds, and I was able to see, once again, how much this man loved me. I was reminded by his every sacrifice (which were daily and plenty) that he would, in fact, do anything and everything within his power to care and provide for me.
Yes, we’d been threatened with eviction. Yes, our utilities were sometimes turned off. Yes, we were without insurance. Yes, we both worried about providing for the needs of our children, but what I began to see is that the entire time that I’d felt the need to micromanage our lives, Dan was doing everything possible to bring us to greener pastures. He was hustling like no man has ever hustled, working two, sometimes three jobs at a time, and humbling himself to borrow money when life demanded it. My fretful contribution had added nothing but animosity.
Do you know who was behind the fact that we struggled? God. With sudden clarity I realized that God had allowed these circumstances. It was he who had brought us to this season of want and allowed us to suffer. He had tied these crosses to our back and asked us to carry them. And though I hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, we had consented. As we were preparing for marriage, Dan and I had told God that we would follow him wherever he led, through rocky valleys and beautiful vistas. We wanted to do his will, trusting in his goodness. Well, as it turned out, his will was to remake us in his image, and his method was poverty. And to give credit where credit is due, it was effective.
God is endlessly creative and has an infinite number of ways to purify a soul. He could see that Dan and I had become far too reliant on, and proud of, our own abilities. Poverty is a surprisingly potent antidote to such a weakness. When all of your efforts to earn your daily bread prove fruitless, you quickly start begging God for help. And after enough of this begging, you begin to see (and have to concede) that everything ultimately flows from him, not you. That’s humbling.
The wonderful thing about God is that he’s always waiting to offer consolation and insight right at that very moment when you feel your knees start to buckle from the weight of it all. Every so often during this painful process he would part the curtains that hung behind his workshop windows and allow us to peer in, just for a moment, so that we could see how he’d been softening our hearts while pummeling away with his mallet. We could see that he’d somehow managed to make us a little more patient, a bit more kind, and a lot more humble.
That young woman who’d traveled solo around the world had an adventurous spirit, absolutely, but courageous? Only until she was tested, and then that “courage” crumbled so quickly you would have missed it if you’d blinked. She marched through life never once giving credit to God for her accomplishments, never thanking him for her gifts.
Pies and Peppermint
There’s a very satisfying high that comes from doing daring things. And I absolutely agree with my family’s assessment that challenges such as Feats of Bravery can serve to strengthen a person. But this brand of courage ultimately needs to be supported by valor, a sort of undaunted courage in the face of overwhelming odds. The kind of valor that comes from trusting God implicitly and knowing that he will never abandon you though the winds may batter and the waves crash upon you. The kind of valor that is free of pride and posturing. The kind of valor that knows that what God says is true — that strength is found in weakness.
I had become a victim of fear because I believed that everything depended on me and that the only way to overcome my anxieties was to assert control. Oh, how wrong I was. All along freedom had been waiting for me to meet fear head-on with love.
When I was worried about buying groceries, I found peace in taking our last box of cherry jello, preparing it lovingly, and serving it to our kids on our very best china.
When Dan seemed especially stressed about paying the bills, I found solace in lovingly rubbing his back, encouraging him, and thanking God that we’d been given the privilege of carrying this cross together.
When I was utterly weary from the challenges that come with a bank account that hates you, I found relief in praying for the poor, meditating on their suffering, and giving thanks to God for the many gifts he’d given us.
I was not then, nor am I now, perfect at this practice, but I suspect that if one could measure such a thing, we’d find that the degree to which we pour love into our lives and loved ones is the degree to which fear is forced out.
Someone once told me that if you pray for your enemies, you will no longer be able to hate them. That the moment you begin to advocate for goodness in their life is the same moment that your animosity will begin to exhaust. This is because the light of love and the darkness of hatred cannot possibly exist in the same space.
The same is true of love and fear.
Love creates life-affirming beauty, fear sets out to destroy it. Love is joyful, fear miserable. Love frees, fear imprisons. Love is kind, fear cruel. Love is honest, fear deceitful. Love is brave, fear afraid. And love is strong, while fear is weak.
For as long as we exist on this earthly planet, love and fear will be at war. There is no harmony to be found between the two. But though they may do battle over and over again, love’s victory is written in the stars. For love is God, and God is love, and both are omnipotent.
Later that year, on the Feast of the Holy Family, Dan handed me another letter for my See’s candy box. This one told the story of a family that was still young and had much to learn, but was working hard every day to choose love over fear and because of it had never been happier:
So, here on the Feast of the Holy Family, we heard in Mass how, after Jesus was born, an angel told Joseph to take his little family and live in Egypt so King Herod would not find them. They were there for about a year or two before Herod died and they could safely return to Joseph’s home in Nazareth.
And what did they do in Egypt? No one knows. But I know what we would have done, if it had been us. Knowing that we couldn’t leave — not yet — because God needed us to stay there for a little while, I would have gotten a job teaching theology. We would have chosen a small mud and brick house in the subsuburbs where our neighbors periodically crept by quietly on chariots and sketched drawings of our house to turn in to the neighborhood housing board as proof that we weren’t combing the sand on our property as often as everybody would like.
It would never rain, we would be exhausted and overworked, we would never see our families back in Palestine, and we would rarely have any shekels to spend since theology teachers don’t make much.
But we would settle in. And Christmas would come. And I would fret a little about how few presents we could buy. But you know what? I would be happy. I would be happier than I’d ever been in my life. How would that be possible?
The broad answer is that all things are possible for God. More specifically, I would look at our Christmas tree, festooned with baubles and glistening with colored lights (a miracle, and not because no one had discovered electricity, but because we had not paid our power bill and our service had not been disconnected). I would see the lights gleaming in the eyes of our children who, for all our lack of shekels, looked somehow healthy, and warm, and well-fed. I would look at my wife, plump with a new baby, smiling her beautiful smile, holding wrapped presents for the kids. I would smell baked pies and peppermint and chocolate, and drink wine, and kiss my wife on her soft, full lips and think what a magnificent thing it was that God had brought so much out of an exile in the desert.
That’s how it would be with us, if an angel told us we had to go to Egypt. Thank God