In August 2006, my wife and I decided to go on a mission trip to New Orleans. More accurately, my wife decided to take this trip. Me signing up to ‘tag along’ was something that surprised her at the time but became an experience that we both still highly value today for a great number of reasons.
The parish, led by Helen Rutkowski, was planning a mission trip to help the rebuilding process in neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Katrina a year earlier. I was proud of Wen Dee’s conviction to more fully live out her faith, committing her time and energy to helping others she had not met. I was also quite interested, but was drawn more by a work ethic and curiosity of the damage done to a great American city than any expression of faith. I was not Catholic or a regular churchgoer. My wife asked me to join her on the mission, but knowing that the mission would include faith meetings, mass, and two van loads of eager Catholics she did not expect me join her. Besides that curiosity, I decided to sign up simply to spend a week with my wife.
That week brought us closer together as a married couple, but it also brought us closer together as a family of faith. “Life gets in the way.” A common refrain among those busy balancing work and family. Friends, even good friends, fade as the responsibilities of life get in the way. Marriage, no matter how deep the love, does as well without a conscious decision to make time for your partner. The week we spent driving to New Orleans, working incredibly hard next to each other, and driving back from New Orleans was planned time together enabling us to share a common experience. That experience brought us closer together not just due to time spent but by humbling each of us as to how much God has given us. How fortunate we are. And meeting those who have been devastated, those that have every opportunity to be bitter, but instead are filled with joy and appreciation for what God has given them is an awe inspiring experience. Helping the homeowner, Dorothy, gave both Wen Dee and me a sense of connection to our faith and fellow man that is very hard to recognize during the routine of day to day routines.
But in addition to bringing Wen Dee and I closer, our mission trip together helped ignite what became my conversion to Catholicism in 2010. Spending time with our members of our parish community made me more comfortable joining my wife at mass. I had attended the faith meetings each night during our mission in New Orleans. I was strictly an observer, sometimes impatiently waiting for it to end so I could grab my wife and get dinner. But during those meetings as well as during our work each day I saw that the people on this mission trip were people of sincere faith. Kind people with kind hearts that were truly interested in helping those we traveled so far to help, but also truly interested in the fellowship of the others (including me) on this trip. People that did not preach their faith to the non-Catholic in the group, but people demonstrating their faith through their actions. That example led me to become more involved with other families at school (our small children attend SJE) and in turn made me much more comfortable attending mass.
There was nothing wrong with our marriage back in 2005. This mission trip does, however, remain a memory that helps bind our marriage. All experiences that a couple share help in that regard. But this mission trip also helped bring us together as a family in Christ, and as a result our commitment to each other and to our marriage is stronger today than the day we were married.
-Mike Anderson
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