#TheSW30: Day 16, I Don’t Want To Go To Heaven If I Can’t Get In

Day 16: What are your spiritual beliefs and how do they impact your relationships/relationship status?

When your mom works in a church, you spend a ridiculous amount of time there growing up.  From helping out with bulk mailings, to cranking out a zillion lemon shakes during the annual church festival, to years as an altar server, to playing cello at mass...yeah, I spent a lot of time in the Catholic Church through the end of High School.

That changed when my parents divorced and I was working overnights at my old station back in Ohio.  Mass was no longer the family affair that it once was and it was hard to make it when I was trying to sleep on Saturday evenings to prepare for a 10 PM start time at work that would put me home in bed at 6:30 AM on a Sunday.

I got better about it when I was dating my ex fiance because getting to mass was very important to him, so I'd try to make it work with him and my work schedule.  I tried to make it every weekend in Boise while we were still dating and preparing for our wedding, but after we broke up I haven't been great about making it to mass on a regular basis...and trust me being asked to write about this prompt stirs up all kinds of Catholic guilt inside me.

But, that doesn't mean that my faith in God isn't important to me on a day to day basis.  I see Him in the beauty of creation when I'm running, hiking Table Rock, hanging out by the river, watching an Idaho sunset, etc.  There's never a moment where I don't feel like he's by my side.  Like I've mentioned before I'm a firm believer in the idea that God never gives you anything that you aren't strong enough to handle.  The break up with my engagement, my destructive situationship with the salesman and the devastating way things ended with my last boyfriend (who I still think is the only man I ever truly was in love with.)

All of those things sucked and the emotional pain they caused me was so great that it became physical.  They caused me to be so tense that my body hurt all the time.  They caused me to be so exhausted that I would rather sleep away a day than go out and socialize. In hindsight, the time I spent being miserable about those things seems trivial, but in the moment they seemed earth shattering. Deep down I knew that if I was really going to crumble and not be able to come back stronger, God would never have taken those people out of my life.

Like I said on Day One, who am I to question God's plan for me?  He knew me before I was born.  He'll continue to know me more than I know myself as I get older.  Those past situationships were never meant to be my happily ever after.  They were His way of teaching me something I needed to learn about men or myself.  Do I understand why it had to hurt me so bad at times?  Hell no.  But I agree with what Mandy says in Life, Love and A Dash Of Sass.  It takes heartbreak to shake us awake and help us see we are so much more than we're settling for. 

Until I started reading Mandy's books and examining things in my life, my spiritual beliefs didn't play much of a role in my relationships.  I acted on impulse and a need to feel validated by men wanting to be with me.  Now that I've started this blog challenge I can tell they really mean a lot more to me now when it comes to relationships.  I'm far, far, far from the perfect little Catholic girl that I was raised to be, but I feel like my relationship with God is stronger now than when I was going through the motions made standard by my family or ex.  I'm going to live my life by my own design with no specific direction and realize that everything is in between everything I love in life and everything that I need in the long run.

I know that talking spirituality and religion is sort of taboo in today's society, but at 26 I'm realizing how much it really does play a role in relationships.  Ladies, I'm interested to see how your response to this prompt.  Tweet me your responses at @michelleonkiss!