Motherhood-A Masterpiece That Never Quits…

ERA II: Becoming Backbone - “ Faith in the Furnace”(Johanna’s quiet defiance) - letter 9

Dear friends

Here is a letter and reflection on Johanna’s enduring Catholic faith amidst life’s heat and hardship. This is a letter for every woman who has prayed through clenched hands, who kept her faith burning not in triumph but in survival.

Johanna,

They may have seen only the trouble, the police at the door, the shouting, the chaos inside walls that were too thin to hide the weight of a hard life.

But I wonder if anyone saw your candle.

The one you lit when the house was finally still.

The one you pressed into the evening silence as children slept and grief hovered like smoke.

Yours was not the polished faith of stained glass and quiet pews.

It was the kind forged in fire, the kind women keep alive with their bare hands when no one else is watching.

You didn’t quote Scripture.

You lived it.

You bore the cross of ten children, one very young and one buried in war, a husband who couldn’t always be steady, a world that judged loudly but offered little help.

And still, you knelt. You touched the holy in the hung laundry, the morning bread, the walking to and from Mass with sore feet and children trailing behind often complaining. Your rosary wasn’t an ornament. It was a lifeline. Each bead a cry, a plea, a whispered offering for strength, for protection, for peace.

I imagine you lighting candles not just for saints, but for sons out past curfew, for daughters you hoped would marry well, for the little ones coughing in the night.

Your faith was not fragile.

It was flame in the furnace.

It did not save you from hardship but it steadied you within it.

Johanna, you taught me that belief is not escape ~ it is endurance.

And every time I light a candle now, I remember yours.

🕯️A Reflection For You The Reader

Scripture for Contemplation:

“When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;

the flames will not set you ablaze.

For I am the Lord your God.”

—Isaiah 43:2–3

Reflection Prompt:

Have you ever kept faith alive in a furnace season?

What sustained you—and what do you carry from that fire still?

Till tomorrow

Lisa Raie xox