God Wraps Us in His Love

Hillary Ibarra thanks God for a miraculous 25th engagement anniversary and for how He holds our marriages and families together.  

I was waiting with my daughter at a car dealership’s service center, stressed about more car issues, thinking about breakfast burritos and this article. I shared my thoughts with my daughter, and she said that I should combine the two and write about how God is the tortilla that keeps us all together.

She was joking, but I loved the idea.

God keeps the wholesome, life-giving ingredients of our marriages and families together. I can testify to this, and I hope it inspires hope for other moms who are struggling in their marriages and families.

My husband and I just celebrated our 25th engagement anniversary on Valentine’s Day. I have written about our serious marriage problems that began over two years ago and how Jesus held our hands when we pulled away from each other.

It’s still a struggle, and Jesus still holds our hands. He wraps our marriages and families up in His grace, mercy, and love. Sometimes it feels like my husband and I no longer go together; we’re eggs and potatoes, two ingredients that usually complement each other but can turn unappetizing. Thank God, Jesus wraps us up in His supple grace when we’re struggling!

God Protected and Blessed Us on our 25th

The week leading to Valenteine’s Day was not promising. We had a couples therapy session with our Catholic counselor that went well enough, but my husband started to feel ill mid-week. Our family had been passing around a nasty virus, and I was sure he’d caught it. It would mean the end of our family’s plans to celebrate the day 25 years ago when my husband proposed in front of a big blue bird at the San Antonio Zoo. (Even though I knew he was going to ask, I tried to flee when he got down on one knee, crying, “No way! No way!” He proposed at the zoo because I’m a nature girl, as my father used to say when I was growing up.)

Naturally, I wanted to return to the zoo to recall a time when things felt euphoric, so I prayed about our approaching anniversary, with my husband and on my own. And God blessed us with a miracle of healing.

Though my daughter and I had been ill for several days with the virus, my husband’s illness rapidly improved instead of getting worse. We were able to keep the plans I made for Valentine’s Day. Our younger children accompanied us, and my eighteen-year-old daughter’s boyfriend came with us, and the weather, which had been gloomy that morning, improved. February may not be the best time to stroll around a zoo, but it was a beautiful day — and not only because of the weather. My husband felt well, and I remembered our engagement with joy.

A Miracle Wrapped in God’s Love

It was miraculous. We were eggs and potatoes complementing each other again, wrapped up in the tortilla of God’s love.

But how did we get to such a miraculous day after so much strife and hardship? Prayer! It may not feel that it has immediate results. God may not remove the cross, but I know He supplies the strength to bear it because my husband and I just celebrated our 25th engagement anniversary, and that celebration wasn’t guaranteed. God protected our memories and our special day. God accompanied us on the journey to this Valentine’s Day.

I often say being a spouse or a parent is not for wimps. But the truth is, we all want to throw in the towel sometimes, exhausted as we are. Marriage and parenting demand immense resources of patience and understanding and require greater sacrifice than we ever imagined. That is when family prayer, Scripture, Mass, Reconciliation, Adoration, and Communion bolster and revive us, so we can keep going. When we make it through every challenge that threatens to break us, we realize that we’re not keeping ourselves or our families together by our own strength of will or our own virtue. It is the grace of God enveloping all our messiness and redeeming it.

So we keep embracing that grace, and we trust that God will always embrace our marriages and our families, holding us together in a great pillowy tortilla of love, mercy, and grace.

Amen.

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Copyright 2026 Hillary Ibarra
Images: copyright 2026 Hillary Ibarra, all rights reserved.