The Missionary Married Couples Discernment Course in the Philippines culminated the month of hearts with a Formation on the Beauty of Marriage.  Prayer guidelines were given by Fr. James McTavish from faraway UK and a Formation Talk was delivered by Bimbo Abrio from Cagayan de Oro, the City of Golden Friendship. All the couples had the opportunity to reflect and share about their history of love and marriage.
 
Ten Things We Learned about the Beauty of Marriage
 

1. Always ask for the grace to see your spouse as Christ sees them, to see the beauty in the other and to keep re-discovering that beauty. Strive to take notice of the goodness of your spouse.
2. From the moment of waking to when you close your eyes to sleep at night, the small things you do for your spouse and vice versa, are signs of great love.
3. We possess the grace to always go back to The Author of Marriage.
4. The call to love is the innate vocation of every human being.
5. The mutual love between a woman and man is the image of absolute and unfailing love.
6. The common work of spouses is to be fruitful and to watch over God’s creation.
7. God's image is the married couple, a man and woman, together. Not just the man. Not just the woman. No, both of them. That's God's image.” (Pope Francis)
   
8. Marriage is a school of love.
9. We have to find the treasure that is in our marriage, and announce it!
10. Remember the beginnings. Remembering our love story is precious.

 
BONUS Many are digging for treasure in the wrong places! Living marriage well means helping people find the right place to dig.
 
How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news! (Romans 10,15)

​I am Zimon Claudio G. Romero and I found out about the tweens recollection from the Teens group chat invitation.  We, Verbum Dei Teens helped out to make the recollection possible on January 30, 2021 with Tiffany as host, Santino doing the welcome greetings, Angel and Jojire sharing the talks, James and Louise doing the games and Tonet as registration head.
 
The theme of the Tweens recollection was “You are My Hope.” It started at 10 AM and after the welcome greetings done by Santino we had some games to keep us energized and to have some fun. After the games we had a talk about hope and we learned that we should always have hope in God and as teens we should grow up carrying this learning that he is really our hope.
 
Growing up we will face many challenges, problems, disappointments and successes. And to know that God is our friend gives me the confidence that he is always there for us, so life ahead of us should be very interesting. Other than that we also had case studies where we were grouped and given different situations and we had to share what we would do in that situation with our group. For example, we were given a situation “Because of quarantine you were not able to talk to your best friend for a while but you made new friends with your neighbors and when you meet your friend again your friend is jealous and sad,” we had to share to our group how to act with hope in that situation.
 
We also had candle drawing where we had to draw and decorate our own candle of hope and write our own message of hope in the candle. To summarize the recollection, it was fun, and we learned that God is our hope. And if you read this you should attend our next activity and invite other young people to attend too!