May 21 – Saint Christopher Magallanes and his Companions
St. Cristóbal Magallanes Jara was born in the state of Jalisco in Mexico, in 1869. He was ordained priest at the age of 30, and became parish priest of his home town of Totatiche. He took a special interest in the evangelization of the local indigenous Huichol people and founded a mission for them. When government persecution of the Catholic Church began and the seminaries were closed, he opened a small local ‘auxiliary seminary’. He wrote and preached against armed rebellion, but was falsely accused of promoting the Cristero rebellion. He was arrested on 21 May 1927, while on the way to celebrate Mass at a farm. He was executed without a trial, but not before giving his remaining possessions to his executioners and giving them absolution.
With him are celebrated 24 other Mexican martyrs of the early 20th century.
– Universalis
Acts 22:30;23:6–11
Jn 17:20-26
“Courage! You have borne witness for me in Jerusalem, now you must do the same in Rome.”
There are rooms I walk into already braced. Not the presentation to the Board, fighting to launch a new product or market. Not the difficult client meeting. I have learned to hold my own in those. The rooms I mean are quieter and closer — a family dinner, a phone call that runs too long, a hospital corridor at an hour that does not feel real. The rooms where the people I love most are also where I am most exposed.
I am a husband before I am anything else in those rooms. And being a husband, lately, has asked more of me than I knew I had.
My wife is a daughter and a sister before she was my wife. I knew this when I married her. What I did not fully understand then was what it would feel like to watch the people who shaped her — her mother, her brothers — sometimes wound her, sometimes pull her in directions that hurt our home, and to feel largely powerless to stop it. To love her deeply and yet to find those closest to her so difficult. To want to protect her and yet not always know how, or whether stepping in helps or makes it worse.
Paul stood before the Sanhedrin — a room full of men in conflict, each certain of their position, none willing to yield. He was the outsider. The one who did not fully belong to either side. And yet in the chaos, he did not lose himself. He knew who he was. He spoke from that place. And when it became too much — when the room threatened to tear him apart — soldiers pulled him out.
Then, at night, the Lord stood beside him.
Not in the morning when Paul had rested. Not after he had processed and composed himself. At night. In the raw, unguarded hour. And what the Lord said was not a strategy or a solution. He said: take courage. He said: I know where you are going.
That is what I need to hear.
Not a resolution to the tensions in my marriage’s extended family. Not a formula for managing unreasonable people or protecting my wife from pain I cannot fully reach. What I need is the Lord standing beside me in the night of it and saying — I see you. I see this room you are in. Take courage. I have not lost the thread of your life.
Being caught in the middle is exhausting in a way that is hard to name. It does not look like suffering from the outside. It looks like attending functions I do not enjoy, because I will not deprive my wife of her family. It looks like never raising my voice at my mother-in-law, never being disrespectful, even when respect has not always been the currency returned. It looks like doing the quiet thing — driving the lunch over, making sure she is fed and cared for — while her two sons fill the room with loud talk about their responsibilities and commitments, most of it exaggerated, little of it translated into action.
I do not say this with bitterness. I say it because it is true, and because I have learned that the quiet doing is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything. It is what love looks like when it is not performing for an audience.
And then there is what happened to my wife.
She was in the ICU. I will not dress it up. There were hours where I did not know what I was going to walk back into, what the next conversation with the doctors would hold, whether the woman I have built my life with would come home the same — or come home at all. I held everything together because somebody had to. The children needed a father who was not falling apart. The household had to keep moving. Decisions had to be made. So I made them. I drove. I waited. I asked the right questions. I stayed composed.
But underneath the composure was a terror I have rarely known. The thought of losing her. The thought of her being permanently changed, of her not being fully herself again. The thought of our children growing up without the mother they know. I carried that quietly. I did not even let myself fully look at it, because if I looked at it, I was not sure I could keep functioning.
She is here. She is recovering. And I am supposed to be relieved — and I am — but I am also still carrying the residue of those days. The body remembers what the mind tries to set down.
I think that is part of why I have been impatient with her. Not dramatically. Not in ways that make a scene. But in the small withdrawals — the shortened answers, the moments where I was present in body but somewhere else entirely. It is fear that did not get processed, leaking out sideways. It is a man who held it together so tightly that pieces of him are still clenched. I am not proud of it. And I will not excuse it. But I am beginning to understand it, which is maybe the first honest step toward changing it.
I am also learning something about love and limits. I cannot carry her health for her. As much as I want to fix this, manage this, resolve this the way I resolve a complex transaction — I cannot. And perhaps the most loving thing I can offer is not to absorb her anxiety into mine, but to point us both toward the One who actually holds this. God is not a distant observer of her body, her fear, her future. He is the Father who wants the best for her — more than I do, which is saying something. She needs to bring this to Him herself. To own it. To trust it into His hands. I can walk alongside her in that. I can pray with her and for her. But I cannot believe on her behalf. And I am beginning to see that her health, going forward, is not something I can will into being from the outside. It is something she and God will tend together, with me beside them.
Paul did not resolve the Sanhedrin. He was taken out of the room. And God told him the room was not the point — Rome was the point. The mission was larger than the conflict he was standing in.
My Rome is the four of us.
My wife. Our children. The home we are building together — not just the physical space but the interior world of it. The feeling my children will carry into adulthood when they think of where they came from. The security my wife deserves to feel when she closes the door on the noise of the world and is simply home.
That is what I pray for. Not in grand terms but in the most specific, daily, aching way — that the four of us would be the closest unit. That within these walls there would be 100% trust. That my wife would know she is fully seen and held by me. That my children would never have to wonder whether their parents are solid ground. That whatever comes at us from outside — family tensions, health scares, professional pressures, the hundred things that pull at a marriage — we would return to each other, again and again, as the first and safest place.
This is not naive. I know what trust costs to build and how long it takes to grow. I have just lived through a stretch where I was reminded, sharply, of how fragile any of this is. And maybe that is the gift hidden inside the terror — that I will not take any of it for granted again. That I will keep choosing this woman, this home, and these children; with both eyes open.
Take courage, the Lord says.
Not because the room gets easier. But because He knows where I am going. And the four of us — He knows where He is taking us too. He has not lost the thread. He is in this, quietly, faithfully, the way He stood beside Paul in the night.
I will keep praying. I will keep showing up. I will keep doing the quiet thing.
And I will keep choosing my family as my Rome.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Gerard Francis)
Prayer: Lord, give me a heart that wants to keep showing up, and showing up strongly for my wife and children.
Thanksgiving: We give thanks for the messages you deliver to us to guide us along our way.
OXYGEN 
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