Delivered by Matt Fradd

Author:Matt Fradd
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Catholic Answers Press
Published: 2013-11-18T08:00:00+00:00

Anne: Early in marriage I expected Mike to be my “everything” and for marriage to be the fulfillment of life and living “happily ever after.” Not only did we have to deal with the crisis of an addiction, neither of us properly understood what marriage was. I needed not only to learn more about the way God intended marriage, but to build a better relationship with him.

Throughout our entire ordeal, we always went to Mass. We were faithful Catholics who went to confession and regularly received the Eucharist. However, as I learned more about TOB, I discovered that we had barely scratched the surface of our Faith and our vocation of marriage. Mike and I began to thrive, as we were using every tool we could find. We attended marriage counseling, and occasionally we did individual counseling; we were both attending groups and immersing ourselves in the hopeful message of God’s vision of sex and marriage through Theology of the Body. Mike and I began to heal, forgive, and raise our hopes to what our marriage could actually become and how it should be lived.

For the first time, I discovered that spouses are meant to help each other get to heaven. Now that we had practical tools, support, trust in each other, and a true vision of sex and marriage from TOB, we began to live our lives better than we had ever envisioned. It seemed as though God used that horrific time in our lives to draw us to him and to learn how to give of ourselves to each other as the gifts God had created us to be to one another. The work we were doing for ourselves and our marriage was paying off. We were rekindling that spark that we once had. We were experiencing the spiritual, physical, intellectual, and emotional intimacy we had learned about in NFP class but had never experienced before. The joy we began feeling for each other, our marriage and our future together was better than any fairytale. I now saw Mike as a precious gift.

As I continued to heal and learn to trust and open my heart to Mike, I knew I needed to turn to God regarding my feelings about starting a family. For years, I feared having children with Mike. But he had made tremendous changes, and although we both knew there would always be temptations, Mike knew what he needed to do to rise above them. He had developed virtues that made him a true man of God. I was ready to truly trust God and Mike, and God was ready to show me that he was listening.

Our most painful moment with Mike’s addiction was on April 9, 2003, when I had the miscarriage shortly after Mike said that he was probably going to leave me and find someone else. For six years, I grieved the loss of our little boy. Before we found recovery, I doubted that I could ever trust Mike enough to have children with him.

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