Happy International Gratitude Week
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I began this morning, as I often like to do, listening to the homily of Father Mike Schmitz from Ascension Presents. Today, he talked about the Catholics of Nagasaki, Japan. How they’d faced up to religious persecution and oppression for over 300 years, clung to the faith, and persevered in it despite all hardships. They’d prayed countless Rosaries for Mary’s intercession in World War II, asking for her to bring Christ’s peace to the world. And God granted that request on August 15th, the feast of the Assumption of Mary, but at a terrible price: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th.
Innocent Catholic families made up of men, women, and children lost their lives and their homes that day. Those who survived endured terrible suffering and unimaginable torments from the blast and the radiation. As one of the men who survived this terrible event said, their lives became the sacrifice offered to God in order to bring about the answer to their prayers.
Later, in Mass, I received a revelation so stunning I had to pull out my phone and make a note of it. I didn’t want to risk forgetting it. The revelation? Prayer is not meant to merely be a conversation with God, but a pursuit of a partnership with Him.
Whatever we pray for Him to do for us, we need to ask Him what He needs for us to offer up to Him in order that He can do the work we’ve asked Him to do. It’s not that He needs us in order to be able to do things. It’s that He wants our participation in it. He wants to make us partners. He knows our efforts, our offering, will be inadequate to match what He can bring. He’s gracious enough to allow us to participate with Him in the work being done.
In Matthew 14:14-21, the disciples had only five loaves and two fish to offer to feed over 5,000 families, He didn’t rebuke them for not doing enough or refuse their offer because it couldn’t match His. Instead, He accepted what they gave knowing it was their best and He multiplied their efforts to the point where it could not only feed the 5,000 families but there were 12 baskets left over – one for each of the 12 tribes of Israel. This is how God wants to work with us to achieve our ends. He wants us to bring to Him whatever we’ve got, the best we can do, and multiply our inadequate effort until it’s an abundance spilling over onto others.
I’ve been praying for the return to the faith of my son and the rekindling of the fires of divine love in my husband’s heart. I’ve been praying to be an instrument that God can use to reclaim the world for Christ. So, today, I took all the things I’ve put on my surrender tree and I made a list of them. I told God, “Guide me. Direct me in what you need me to do to partner with you in this work I’m asking to be done.”
My list of items surrendered was long. His response was short. “Focus on serving and promoting your husband’s work and the rest will come.”
Nine years ago, I recommended to my husband that he take his depression and he use it to serve others. Join groups of those who struggled with mental health and share his experiences, encouraging them.
A year ago, he started a YouTube channel, and he began sharing his journey to pursue a dream of his: becoming a rock guitarist. He called the episodes “Embrace the Suck” because – as he told his audience – when you first set out to do things, you’re going to suck at it. You’re going to hate how you sound and you’re going to be tempted to quit on yourself. Don’t give up. Just keep going.
Those lessons echo the lesson of Father Mark Mary on how satan uses discouragement to keep you away from God. He reminds us that when we’re setting out to make some change in our lives that will draw us closer to Christ, satan will often try to use our past failures to discourage us from continuing. He does this to rob us of the victory that awaits us if we continue moving forward. And now, rather than allowing discouragement to rob him of his God-given gift of music, my husband’s found not only the courage to keep moving forward in spite of his many struggles to grow as a musician, he’s encouraging others to fight past their discouragement, too.
Many souls stay away from Christ because they fear that what they’ve done is too bad, too terrible, for Christ to forgive them. They get discouraged by their repeated failures to live up to Christ’s call to love one another as He loves us.
My husband’s channel leverages his own journey to become the musician he would like to be to encourage people to forgive themselves for making mistakes and leverage those mistakes as learning opportunities even as they continue striving to grow in their skills and abilities. It’s a beautiful, if subtle, approach to doing the work every Christian’s been given: to be someone who encourages and builds up other people.
By promoting him and serving him, I’ll be helping souls who might otherwise never find Christ connect to and be served by my husband. And, by sacrificing my work to serve his channel, I’ll be helping more people discover and connect with my husband. It's also a way to draw the two of us closer together, to make me more of a helpmate than I’ve been, and demonstrate in a tangible way the love I have for him.
It’s a way of showing him rather than telling him that I believe in him and I believe in the work that he does. The example of a marriage that is made of two people working together in union to create beautiful things for the benefit of others out of a love of God will not fail to be noticed by the community he builds or our son.
We will become the light shining in the darkness that God intends us to be. And my prayers will be answered because I brought what little I had and offered them to God, doing whatever He tells me to do, in order that He might create abundance for all.
The next time you pray, I encourage you first to ask yourself: What are you willing to offer up to Christ so that He can take what you’ve got and use it to answer your prayers with abundance?
Award-winning international speaker and author, Brandy M. Miller is a Catholic revert. Raised in a culturally Catholic home, she left the faith at 16 in search of the truth and returned 12 years later when she found it right where she left it. Today, she is convinced that the Catholic Church is the cure to society's ills and is eager to help share the Gospel truth to those who have ears to hear it. When she isn't writing for or about the Catholic Church, she offers her writing talents to Catholics who would like help sharing their witnesses of Christ's work in their lives.
