This year, we gonna celebrating 15th years wedding anniversary and as a gift for ourselves, we decided to attend Marriage Encounter.
This is our 2nd ME retreat, the first one was 10 years ago on our 5th year Wedding anniversary. Even so we haven't forgotten everything. The only take away that we remember is expressing "I feel..." and writing love letters.
Before coming to ME on Friday, we were full with baggages, bitterness and resentments. We pretended that everything was well, we tried to be lovey dovey but we knew deep inside our heart, we have been hurt.
Whatever we said was just critics and sarcasm which came from the root of bitterness and resentment.
On Friday night, we had a long talk especially the unresolved issues. Thanks God for the solitude time and no distraction, we were able to focus to one another. We listened each other's feelings and understood the reason behind. We clarified things that we assumed, we tried to understand each other's point of view and needs.
We had a long night and couldn't sleep well, but we felt peace transcend in our heart. We started to be open to each other.
The next day, the topic grilled us deeper, it's like peeling the onion.
We were required to write love letter describing our feelings and even the most difficult topic to be discussed. We were challenged to reveal the stumbling blocks that hindered us sharing our feeling.
On Saturday night, we got clarity, love and peace are transcending to our heart. Hubby was prompted to a new mission which was "Adventure to Unknown". We discussed what did it mean ?
And it seemed God affirmed it when we had dinner together with other couples, and one of the couples shared how they decided to travel and stay in Singapore from the other part of the world with just 2 luggages, no job to start, no family and no house to stay. Not only that, they decided to go to China to learn Chinese also. It's really a leap of faith testimony. We were so inspired about this couple.
Thanks God, we had good night sleep on Saturday, it felt that our burden and yoke have been lifted.
On Sunday morning, again God gave us a sign to affirm about the new mission when we had breakfast with other couples and one of the couples shared about their spiritual adventure how the wife decided to be babtized and persuaded her husband and their daughter and the whole family were babtised together last year and how they started to learn more about Catholic faith together regardless the age.
It's getting clearer what God wants from us and we closed the retreat with Sunday mass and apparently the topic was about the light of the world and the reading was about salt and light which is my favourite reading for my mission.
We went back home full of love, joy and hope. We saw our kids missed us so much and they were very excited to hear our stories.
The take away we had from this retreat :
1. Cleansing our souls
We had a lot of bitterness and resentment that disconnect us and making us having difficulty to communicate to one another, but by the power of healing and forgiveness, it cleansed our souls
2. Rediscovering our marriage life purpose
As we have moved to the next stage of life where the kids were growing up, we became complacent. Thus our marriage was shook by small waves. We lost our vision and purpose.
And now we understood that we need a new "adventure" with the kids, to serve 2 purposes so we can be humble, working together to survive in the new quest and able to see our kids's potential blooming.
When we are in the space that we have superior knowledge than the kids, we couldn't see our kids' real potential instead it hinder their growth.
3. Homework
I need to be mindful with my words and hubby needs to take his role again as a king, priest and prophet in this family.
We also want to recreate this ME style to our family by asking each of us including the kids to write love letter to explain their feelings about something. Hopefully it could help in their emotional being.
We really grateful to God and because of His grace, we are able to reconnect, reconcile and rediscover our marriage's purpose again.
Thanks be to God !
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