Praying for Joy in our Poverty: Battling Desolation in Tough Seasons
/DOMINIKA RAMOS
I recently had a conversation with a friend on the fair division of labor in marriage.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Four Loves Photo & Film
I had to keep from laughing as for the past five months my husband and I have been living long distance due to a career transition we've made. Our division of labor looks like me doing absolutely everything on the list of things the marriage gurus tell you that you should divide up.
And for the previous year, we were in a completely unfeasible situation of my husband working multiple jobs so I could stay at home with the kids--including a fresh newborn. I did nearly every night time wake up with the baby and put all the kids to bed most nights on top of the normal tasks of cooking and cleaning.
If I wasn't armed with a sense of humor, it would be easy for my thoughts to turn sour every time I heard conventional marriage and child rearing advice for married couples in conventional circumstances.
And sometimes my thoughts do turn sour. Once after hearing the oft-repeated advice for burnt-out moms to "ask for help," I wanted to scream. As if asking the question would make a fairy godmother appear who would lift my burdens.
Yet amidst all the non-applicable advice, an incredibly moving way I've heard to contend with extreme circumstances is to pray for "joy in our poverty."
Any kind of extremity, financial, emotional, physical and so on, is a type of poverty, a lack of something essential. So this prayer is a challenge to my automatic response to difficulty of simply gritting my teeth and soberly, rather than joyfully, enduring.
And surprise, surprise the prayer doesn't make me instantly joyful. I still battle crankiness and desolation on a daily basis. But it's a continual reminder to me that my marriage and my life is a gift.
Too often it feels as though marriage is a gift in the abstract. Of course the sacrament of marriage is a gift, but not today, not when I'm a thousand miles away from my husband and my children are all conspiring to push me to the outer limits of my sanity. God clearly meant it to be a gift and only meant me to experience joy when we're making memories and getting along.
But our God is a God who emptied Himself out and became a visible image of poverty on the Cross whence He made all joy possible.
And so this prayer, short and sweet as it is, grounds me in reality and reminds me that our difficulties are not incidental, but part of the life in which God has placed me and my family to become holy.
