FOCUS

We met with the priest on Friday. Got our results from the FOCUS evaluation we took nearly a year ago during the church class for engaged couples. We were fairly agreeable on most topics. Two that we had trickiness with: religion and personality match that weren't as high as our 90%-100% in other areas. Kind of amazing considering that we took the thing a year ago to have such high scores. The evaluation is more about having communication on serious topics that may come around when people get married. After 8 years together, we've talked about alot of things.

I'm getting married in a Catholic Church because in my heart it's like going home, it's where I need to be. But Catholic Churches haven't been a regular thing in my life recently, though we go on the major holidays. A year ago was the first time in a long time I had considered the church and I just wasn't sure of many of my answers. The past year I've been slowly coming back to the church but in a different way. I've known for a long time that I would eventually come to terms with the church in my own way: not the way when I was growing up, not the way when I went to high school, not the way it was in college, but a new way, a way in which the church could be my church.

But it's going to take more than a year for this to come about, though in the past couple of weeks we've run into a few people who will probably help me speed it up, but when we met with the priest, I had to be honest with him about not being a practicing Catholic and that we didn't go to church together.

That's the way it is often. I have to go to places where I feel I need to be. And often I know where I eventually have to go, but I won't go until I'm ready, until it is time. I don't want to go just because, I want to be able to go because I want to go. There's a difference between my relationship with the higher power, how I view Jesus in my life, and my relationship with a religion and my participation in a church. I feel good with the first three. I haven't quite come to terms with the last one. That one to me is more about a community around a religion, of which I have multiple spiritual communities, I just haven't figured out where I fit in the Catholic Church. But I do know that when I say "I do" in front of my family, my friends, and my God, it will be there, because my heart tells me so.