“Do You Want to Be Healed?”
“What can you even eat?” was a question I got asked often as I healed from autoimmune disease. My doctor had put me on a strict diet that eliminated most of the major food groups and made it nearly impossible to eat out or at other people’s homes. “Meat and vegetables,” I answered cheerfully (or as close to cheerfully as I could pretend). “I could never do that,” was often the bewildered and pitying response. “You could if you felt bad enough,” came my response, the memory of desperate, anguished days surfacing, along with the gripping trepidation that this respite was temporary, and that any day I’d be pulled back under without warning.
Only now, several months later, I am beginning to wonder about that last response. By the grace of God, I am learning to manage this condition and most days, I am myself and peace and joy flow naturally. My flare ups are not as severe, involve only one or a few symptoms, and the terrible blackness appears to have vanished.
As I have encountered others who suffer from similar conditions, I find that what I had said in the past is not, in fact, true: not everyone who suffers greatly is willing to make the necessary sacrifices to recover. And of course, not every kind of suffering is something that can be ameliorated by lifestyle changes — but many things are. And this is true of spiritual life as well. There is so much pain and loneliness that results from our own insistence on clinging to anger and resentment and our own sin.
“Do you want to be healed?” It’s a deceptively simple question. Of course, we want to be healed. Perhaps we just don’t always want to be healed enough. As this reflection is brewing in my brain, I discuss it with my 8-year-old. I explain to her about the man waiting by the pool at Bethesda from today's Gospel. Actually, she has just seen this scene depicted on The Chosen, so I don’t need to explain much. But I do ask her to consider how it might have felt to be that man, waiting his whole life for someone to carry him into the pool so that he could be healed. What must he have thought about this man Jesus who showed up and instructed him to simply pick up his mat and walk.
Was he irritated? Impatient? Annoyed? He knew what he needed to be healed, and Jesus is standing there offering him a different way. Was he willing to try it Jesus’s way? Or did he say to himself, “I could never do that?”
At this point, my daughter pipes up excitedly from the back seat, “It’s just like me, Mom!”
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“I prayed my whole life to be healed from my eczema. And we’ve had that medicine all along. If I had just listened to you and done what you said, I could have been healed years ago.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Do you want to be healed? We all have our illnesses. How many of us have the courage to say, “yes”? Whatever it is, however we thought it was supposed to be healed, let us give it to Jesus now. Let us surrender it all, even the cure we thought we needed. Leave it all behind.
It’s time to rise, pick up our mat, and walk.
Samantha Stephenson
@catholicmamaprays