Does God Heal?
My need for healing became incredibly apparent while in the depths of postpartum depression. But what I learned from that experience was that I’d needed reordering and recovery much much earlier than that.
I wasn’t a stranger to suffering. None of us are. And I was particularly adept at compartmentalizing my pain. I was pretty confident in my ability to face a problem, deal with it, and move on. Other times I’d say to myself “this isn’t that bad”, put it in a box, and shove it towards the back of the closet.
The issue with that, I’ve come to find, is that neither strategy acknowledges the fullness of the human experience.
Suffering
God created us as integrated persons. Our spirituality, psychology, interpersonal relationships, and physiology all make up who we are. So, by only dealing with suffering at a surface level, we miss the opportunity to grow, to heal, and be redeemed. Slowly (or quickly), we become more and more wounded.
Suffering takes on many shapes and sizes. It can come in the form of trauma, sin, illness, loss…you know the list as well as I do.
The deep wounds become scars when we resign to being victims of our circumstances.
Freedom
Not only did God create us as holistic people, He designed us for relationship. With that must come the opportunity for choice.
In the beginning, He formed Eden a perfect paradise with one exception: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here is where God’s perfect Love is revealed, yet distorted by Satan. You see, God didn’t create the Tree to tempt us and to prove our faithfulness to Him. No, He created it to prove His Love for us by allowing us to choose Him. He created it so that we could experience freedom.
I don’t have to retell the whole Genesis through Old Testament story for you, you know the drill. Synopsis: over and over again, we God’s Children we’re given opportunity to choose. Some chose good and some did not. And so, we have suffering.
In order to redeem this suffering, God enters humanity and lives it. Faced with temptation, ridicule, resentment, mistreatment, and agony, Jesus willing chooses the good each and every time. He redeems suffering through His freedom.
Today, we are allowed the same opportunity: the freedom to live well, in the face of suffering. We’re invited to participate in that redemption, if we so choose.
Transformation
Choosing the good once becomes liberating. Making it a habit becomes transformative. Virtue leads to fulfillment of how we were created to be because it permeates every area of our lives.
Willingly picking the harder better path, while difficult, intimidating, seemingly impossible, and exhausting, brings about real affective change if your life and the lives of those around you.
True transformation comes from a life well lived. And living a life of virtue disposes you to God’s perfecting Grace.
Healing
Does God want us to heal from our wounds? Absolutely!
How? Now that’s the tricky question.
God can and does allow suffering, but never without the possibility of a greater good to come from it.
Sometimes He performs miraculous miracles. But more often than that, He invites our participation in healing.
Our cooperation with grace and virtue bears fruit in our lives and the lives of others. It prepares us and it perfects us for our home in Heaven. It’s our choice to enter into that journey with Christ.
To learn more about God’s healing, listen to our latest episode on Pre-Cana with the Pope: