Marriage Vision
We stopped and asked our selves "What do you really want our marriage to be?' What is the vision for our Marriage? Our thoughts were often generalized and vague. When I mentioned vision to Delores she looked puzzled. I said why and asked "Delores what is our vision for our relation ship?" Businesses have visions all the time, so why not us. Once we started focusing on each other more we realize we needed to be touching each other in some way. One of the ways to make this vision work is by holding hands, touching each other, putting an arm around each other, our way of paying attention to each other, getting a scence of each other feelings during prayer, reading scripture, especially during the homily at mass the easiest thing for us to do is hold each other close for a short time just be for we fall asleep, a chance to remove the stress of the day by rubbing each others back gently for several minutes our favorite has been to cuddle close in the morning after the alarm goes off and take advantage of snooze alarm.
I read in scripture In Proverbs 29:18 "Where there is no vision, the people perish." This thought keeps coming to mind for me daily. Are we living this vision yet? To paraphrase this "Where there is no vision , a marriage relationship stops growing and begins to crumble."
We spent time discussing this and what to do to bring back that freshness back into our relationship. We realized we were just going through the motions at times. Since our children were on their own now it was time for us to focus on each other again.
Earlier in our marriage we always turned to prayer, and God, through retreats and couple related activities and now we felt we needed a jump start to bring back this vision of years ago, bring back those feeling. Our Marriage Retorno experience has done that for us. We spent time in prayer, on what to do, we recalled the things we did before the children became part of our lives. We would get away for a weekend just the two of us at least once a year again as we used to do before the children entered our lives. We started having a date with each other again just a few hours to go to an inexpensive dinner or just some place to talk and just focus on each other maybe just a walk in the park. As part of these "dates" we always included prayer, something from scripture as a focus for the day or event. With retirement we have set aside Wednesday as our date day, by attending Mass and going out to breakfast together and maybe do some shopping or just spend the day in a couple activity
When you have vision you may find yourself swimming upstream, But you’ll experience God’s blessing and his presence as you corporate with his work in your life. When you see things as they could be, especially in our marriage we don’t let the odds overwhelm us. Vision can be described as foresight, an awareness of current circumstances and possibilities and a value of learning from the past.
Vision can also be described as seeing the invisible and making it visible. It’s having a picture held in your mind of the way things could or should be in the days ahead.
Vision is also a vision of things that don’t yet exist. It’s being able to focus on the future through prayer and scripture, vision is process of creating a better future with God’s empowerment and direction. Vision is love, our unconditional love for each other and God.
Norman and Delores are members of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Waterloo, Iowa.They are married 41 years have 5 children and 13 grandchildren, and they are also retired. They attend First Tuesday regularly. For Information on First Tuesday, call 319-233-5241 .
