"The miraculous healing power of lips to scars…"

If anyone wonders what it means to be married and in love after decades together, Pat Gohn has this heart-stopping and beautiful answer:

Like many survivors of breast cancer, I have some serious battle scars. My un-bandaged body after breast cancer certainly made for some interesting pillow talk between my husband and myself.

Going into the crisis long ago, we barely considered what it would mean for our love. But when I was done with all the treatment, the question lingered unspoken in the air—what would our marriage look like? Stranger still, what would it feel like?

I knew he loved me before all the surgeries. Fourteen happy years and three children assured me of that. But we had never really,really been tested by the experience of heartache, loss, and fear that a cancer diagnosis brings.

In the aftermath, I could not begin to fathom what our intimate moments might be like, now that I had been surgically taken apart and permanently altered.

My husband just smiled and kissed the boo-boos. And he never stopped.

The miraculous healing power of lips to scars transformed the broken hearts and the marriage that cancer had tried to lay to waste, better than life-saving surgery ever could.

He later told me that it was graces of inviting Christ into our marriage on our wedding day at work. The power of the vows permeating every aspect of our lives, and even the blessing of chastity had come back, to aid us in those first post-cancer episodes. We had stood at that altar and vowed to love one another—sight unseen in terms of what was yet to be consummated—and pledging to accept the all of the other.

And it has been that way ever since. We will take it all, the good and the not so good, as long as we could stay by each other’s side. With God’s help, we will not alter the vow we made at the altar.

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