Love Letters

For those who have yet to get married in the Catholic Church, consider this your warning, pre-cana classes are no joke. And if you're taking them online, it can be a bit of struggle to convince your fiance to sit down and do them with you on such a nice Monday evening.

This is round two of the pre-cana worksheets for Josh and I, all joking aside, these are some heavy things. My poor Baptist-raised fiance is being asked what the sacraments are, what symbols represent them, and what grace the sacraments give us. And so we sit there and work our way through this dense material, a lot of which is unfamiliar territory for him.

But the most valuable part of these lessons is not the actual material we are learning, although it is valuable information. It's the teamwork, the discussion, and it is the love letters. At the end of each worksheet, we're supposed to write one another a love letter, and Josh sighs and mutters about how he's not the best at writing things down. But he does it anyways, leaving me this tangible piece of his love, showing me that he will provide the love I need, even if it isn't in the way he would like to provide it.

We all love a little bit differently, and the value of understanding that we each love a little differently helps us to better understand how God loves us all, all the time. All of those different love languages, all of those different gestures, they are all rooted in the original Love, the all-consuming Love.What grace does the sacrament of marriage give us? An opportunity to better understand God's Love.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 1 John 4:7

Tota Tua,

LeAnn