What Did I Learn At Our Church’s Marriage Retreat?

A few months ago last year, my husband and I were invited to attend our church's very first marriage retreat.

I was so excited about this because I felt it was an answered prayer.

Last year, I chanced upon a friend's Facebook post of him and his wife attending a marriage retreat that's organised by their church. Then I thought to myself, how nice it would be if our church could do this too.

So imagine my surprise when we received an invitation from our church to attend their pilot marriage retreat.

It's not that we're having problems in our marriage. We've been married for over 10 years, which isn't very long or short. We're still happy together. But I felt like we could be even better.

We've never attended a marriage retreat before, so we were not sure what to expect. We just decided to let God lead us to wherever He wanted us to be.

In one of the segments in their programme, the organisers invited a number of couples to share their testimonies. As we listened to these couples' sharing about their struggles, we resonated with them even as we laughed along with them to how ridiculous they seemed when they were said out loud.

There was a couple who very bravely shared about the husband's problem with pornography when the world grappled with Covid-19.

Another couple shared about how a spouse squandered away their family's savings.

But in spite of everything they all went through, they all shared about the grace and mercy of our Lord, and how they experienced victories.

After this session, we were asked to break out into our small groups of 6 couples to discuss about what we just heard or share our own struggles.

Most of us agreed that we all had similar or slightly different struggles due to our personality differences. I mean which couple doesn't, right?

Finally, this couple who had been married for over 40 years shared very genuinely that they didn't face any of those issues mentioned by all the couples who shared.

All our jaws dropped.

They went on to say that they had never had any explosive fights before. They're not saying that their marriage was perfect, but there were also no major challenges at all.

The rest of us were amazed and thought they must be a match made in heaven.

After the group discussion, we were asked to further break out to have a private time of sharing with our spouses. If we didn't know what to talk about, we should share at least 1 thing we'd like to appreciate our spouses for.

I must admit that we probably don't do this quite often enough. We were both pleasantly surprised that the other paid attention to some things we did only because we loved the other. We had never properly showed our appreciation to each other for those things. We thanked God for this opportunity.

In the evening, the church organised a time for all of us to renew our marriage vows.

As we held hands and looked into each other’s eyes, our Pastor read out loud each line of the vow so we could repeat them.

Before I knew it, I was tearing even when my husband was declaring those words to me.

They might have been the same words he declared on our wedding day over 10 years ago, but which couple could truly be present in that moment while a whole bunch of people were staring at us? All we could probably think about then was to not fumble on our words and what’s going to come up next.

As we were declaring those words to each other again, I felt the reality of those words on our marriage.

I realised how we both still fell short of being a good husband and wife. I realised that we needed the grace of our Lord in our marriage all the more, regardless of how long we’ve been married.

I’m so thankful He helped me to see this.

After the retreat as I had more time to process everything I learnt, God reminded me of that couple we envied who didn’t have any big fights.

It might seem to most of us that this couple is very blessed, and I’m sure they are. But God told me that growth comes only through tension and struggles. Because the rest of us had to rely on God so much more for our struggles, we also experienced so much more of His victories in our lives.

So essentially, we’re actually MORE blessed than that couple! Hallelujah!

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