Dear Kate:

I am sorry to hear about this and will certainly pray for your family.

There is no reason for these tragic issues to effect your marriage. That it is damaging your marriage and from the other information you posted, I can see that you are not letting go, that you are trying to control your children. You cannot control them. Even God cannot control them as He will never violate their Free Will. There is nothing you can do about your children other than prayer and lifting them up to God. The rest is up to the children to make whatever decisions they make.

Prayer will not "force" the kids to come back to God. Rather, the value of your prayers is that it "may" soften their hearts so that they may listen to the Holy Spirit and be inspired to come back to Him. Your prayers can help to keep demons from them who seek to inspire your kids to rebel against God. As a parent, you have spiritual authority in your prayers that I do not have when I pray for them. Use that authority, but remember that not even God will force them to repent.

The reason that things got worse after you prayed is that the devil does not want to let go of your children. He knows your prayers are powerful. Thus, by increasing the harassment, stepping up the heat, the devil is hoping that you will lose hope and stop praying. You cannot do that. Do not give in to the devil's tactics. You must persevere in prayer for your children no matter what until the day you die. Never give up. Never allow your own relationship with God (or with your spouse) be damaged because of this. You must keep up your spiritual strength in order to pray effectively. Thus, work on keeping your relationship strong with your spouse and with God.

You may never see the results of your prayer during your lifetime. St. Monica prayed and prayed for her reprobate son and never stopped. Finally, only a few months before her death her son finally came back to the Church. Her son, of course, was St. Augustine, one of the greatest Saints in the Church. His mother never stopped praying.

The source of your despair is that you are expecting God to do something for which He cannot do. You are expecting Him to fix this against the wills of your children. God will never do this. He will never force anyone to do anything. He will never intrude upon our free will. He loves us to much to do that.

Free Will is like pregnancy, either you are or you are not. One cannot be 98% pregnant. The same with Free Will. Either we have it or we don't.

God gave us a bit of Himself as a gift. He wanted us to be able to love, to love Him and to love each other. Love cannot be forced, it must be freely given. Thus, we must have that freedom to choose love. Otherwise love is not possible for us.

With this capacity to choose to love, comes the opposite capacity to choose to not love, to reject God, to do evil. If God were to force us to choose Him then we have no free will at all and thus we cannot love at all.

You need to stop expecting God to do what He cannot do — to bring the kids back to Him against their will. That will never happen. And that false expectation is what is causing you to lose hope; that, and impatience.

Perseverance is the key to the Christian life. Impatience is the devil's trick. In addition, your wanting to see results when you want to see results is Pride on your part.  You want done what you want done when you want it done. Stop it. Humble yourself in realizing that you cannot force your kids to return to God.

Instead, lift up the kids to the Father. Let Him deal with your children. Continue to pray with perseverance for your children, continue to counsel them (in a non-nagging way), and leave the rest to Him. God will not force them, but he can perhaps persuade them in time. That time may not be during your lifetime.

No one goes to hell by mistake. God is a merciful God and wants all His children to be with Him in heaven. Thus, He will judge the hearts of your children with perfect justice and compassion. Even if they seem to have rejected God, it does not mean that they actually have. You and I do not know their hearts.

In addition, if there is any psychological or spiritual impediment to their ability to choose God, our Father takes that into consideration and may bring them to heaven anyway. This is Church teaching. It is called diminished responsibility. We must have complete and total freedom to choose against God for us to go to hell. If anything impairs that ability to freely choose, then we have a diminished responsibility that may save us. This is like a murderer who is found innocent by reason of insanity. The insanity impaired his ability to choose not to murder. This idea in law actually comes from the theology of the Catholic Church.

Thus, even if it seems that your children are living in rebellion to God for the rest of their lives, there is still hope. There is always hope.

That hope is increased by your continual prayers, in perseverance, and letting God deal with it.

Pray and pray hard. Ask St. Monica to help you. Never give up. Do not let the devil convince you that there is no hope. That is a bald-faced lie. With God there is always hope.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary