Your Goodness Can Heal the World
Can I Heal the World with a Chronic Illness?
Over the years, I’ve struggled time and again to accept my chronic illness. Sometimes I believed that I was a ‘victim soul,’ as some of the saints say; at others that I was supposed to learn something from my illness. I knew Christ had a hand in it, so I was always trying to find out his ‘reasons’ for keeping me in pain.
But never once did I dwell strongly on the thought that Christ would heal me. I occasionally thought a doctor might have the answer, or a life-style choice would solve the problem, and maybe God would heal me indirectly through those means, I thought. But dwelling on the thought of Christ’s healing power was uncomfortable. Because if I thought that Christ could heal me – that miracles happen, even today – then I would have to confront the fact that He has not healed me yet.
It wasn’t until I began praying the humility prayer daily, for several months, that I realized the arrogance of this thought.
Through my self-righteous feeling of misuse, I was closing myself off from the deeper healing that Christ was aching to give me. His heart was overflowing with love – more love than I could fathom – but by avoiding facing the bitterness of my heart, I had locked my gates against Him.
I thought the healing needed to come to my physical body, and because of this, I ignored the deeper wounds underneath. My pride, anxieties, insecurities, and sinful nature where a stumbling block in growing closer to His Sacred Heart, and I was bitter over the physical pain I felt.
“This, too, shall pass away.”
When I began to believe that Christ could heal me – that miracles happen even in our day – not only were my anxieties and fears deeply impacted, but I actually began to feel physical relief.
He has not healed me completely, and yet the pain I feel is nothing compared to the peace in my heart. At last, He has broken through my defenses and shown me that I don’t need to worry about the ‘reasons’ for my ill health. I need simply trust, and by doing so, I enter ever more deeply into his Divine Plan for the world.
Even with a chronic illness, God is using me to spread His goodness where He wants it to go.
God Wants to Reach You with His Love
God is constantly pursuing us with his love, but because of our sins, insecurities, anxieties, and inner falsehoods, we have closed ourselves off from receiving all the love He wants to give.
God created us good. “So God created Man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them…. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:27, 31). But we are also fallen creatures. Our fallenness prevents us from shining a full and healing light into the world. We need to open ourselves to God’s goodness, and every time we do, we approach closer to His love. We allow Him to enter into our hearts and overwhelm us with His unbounded adoration, and then, even unconsciously, we spread the overflow from our hearts to the world.
This goodness is so innate to us – we are literally created in the image of goodness – and we can never fully warp our nature into pure evil, while on this earth. Even the most despicable person is fundamentally made from and for goodness, and God can work through their natural actions[1].
If this is true, then how much more can willingly openning ourselves to God’s love make His goodness manifest in the world!
The more we open ourselves to His will, the more His goodness is made manifest.
He Wills that His Goodness Be Made Manifest through YOU
Saint Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure says that, “Nothing happens in the universe without God allowing it. This statement must be taken absolutely of everything with the exception of sin.” God’s will is active at all moments in each person’s life, in even the most seemingly insignificant moments. Yet we can only experience his Grace, Healing, and Presence if we open ourselves to that possibility.
God is a gentleman – He will not go where He is not wanted. “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.” (Mark 6: 5-6)
When we trust that He will take care of us, we allow Him to heal our problems, weaknesses, and hearts, and we begin to believe ever more deeply in the true glory of His ever-present goodness. He wills for this goodness to spread, and glories in spreading it through you, His beloved creation. When you open yourself to that belief, it becomes contagious. The more we believe, the more we spread that belief throughout the world!
Christ is changing the world, one human heart at a time!
[1] Saint Jean Baptiste says that God works through our natural, ambivalent actions, but not our evil wills. So if a man sins by stealing a Blue-ray player, God can work good in the previous Blue-ray owner’s life by bringing him to a deeper trust in His care and providence, but God did not cause the thief to steal. Without the thief, God would have found another way to teach trust to the Blue-ray player’s owner.