Moving Through Illness & Pain into Healing & Wholeness: Part 2

The Grace of Healing & Wholeness
 

The truth of God’s love is not that He allows bad things to happen.  It is His promise that He will be there with us when they do happen & in that, is great comfort & renewed strength & faith. Faith does not make things easy, but it does make all things possible & in that lies hope that heals our mind, body & spirit.  Hope is trust that God will fulfill His promises to us in a way that leads us to true freedom. The person of hope lives in the moment with the knowledge & trust that all of life is in God hands.

Bad things do happen; how we respond to them defines our character & the quality of our life. We can choose to sit in perpetual sadness & fear, immobilized by the gravity of our loss or our situation, or we can choose to rise from the pain & to treasure the most precious gift we have, LIFE itself in all of its fullness.  In the Gospel of John 9:1-38  we read of the story of a man who was born blind.  Though he was questioned & judged by the people of his town & though he did not understand 1 it happened,  ultimately the man was healed to have full sight by Jesus, who he had been blessed to believe was the Son of Man, giving thanks for God’s healing grace that had been bestowed upon him.  This man who once was blind; physically & in faith, was now able to see fully. He chose life & moved forward spreading his newfound faith trusting his life was in God’s hands.

Suffering, fear & pain are real & it is hard to ignore them. However, when we are able to shift our focus from the “WHY” question & chose to trust the reality that God loves us & promises to be with us when they do happen, we can make room in our heart for hope.

Everything that God created is potentially holy, & our task as humans is to find that holiness in seemingly unholy situations. When we can do this, we will have learned to nurture our souls.  As those who have faith in our living Lord, it is our calling to intercede & to witness to others so that they too might experience God’s healing grace & live into the fullness of Life.

In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul writes that; “We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”, then saying; “I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creations, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

As we all continue to move through our days of beauty & suffering, may we each prayerfully embrace the graceful truth that God will never leave us. As declared by the psalmist in Psalm 46: “God is our refuge & our strength, a very present help in trouble.”, His steadfast love will see us through all our days.  AMEN  

~Posted by Rev Kathryn Bindig, MDiv. MS; Pastoral Care Minister with assistance from Rich Muscatello; Director of Business Development & Strategy