Chrysostom
Beloved of All
You ask God to give you good health and freedom from any problem, but consider carefully what you are requesting. A body free from sickness is a small thing if the soul remains diseased. The fever of sin is far more deadly than a fever of the flesh. When Christ healed, He made a man wholly healthy, not just the body but the entire person. What good is it if your limbs are sound but your soul is crippled by greed, envy, or lust? The health you should seek first is the health that delivers you from eternal destruction, not merely the temporary discomfort of illness.
You want no problem at all. But afflictions are often the medicine God uses. The physician does not cause the disease; he cures it. When you cry out to escape all difficulty, you are asking the Great Physician to lay down His instruments while the infection still rages within. True healing is not despite affliction but through it, and a life without any trial often produces a deathlike dullness of the spirit, where the soul grows sluggish and cannot hear the Word.
Do not treat the Forty Days or the hour of prayer as a brief charm to secure a problem-free life, only to return to the exact behaviors that poison your soul. If after a brief recovery from a long illness you returned to the foul food that caused your sickness, you would lose all the ground you had gained. So it is with the soul. You may receive a moment of bodily ease, but if you immediately plunge back into the ways of envy, strife, and sensuality, you have traded the wealth of heaven for a fading shadow. Live for the common good, use whatever strength you are given for the advantage of your neighbor, and lay hold not merely of a body free from pain, but of an incorruptible life. That is the only health worth beseeching God to grant.
You want no problem at all. But afflictions are often the medicine God uses. The physician does not cause the disease; he cures it. When you cry out to escape all difficulty, you are asking the Great Physician to lay down His instruments while the infection still rages within. True healing is not despite affliction but through it, and a life without any trial often produces a deathlike dullness of the spirit, where the soul grows sluggish and cannot hear the Word.
Do not treat the Forty Days or the hour of prayer as a brief charm to secure a problem-free life, only to return to the exact behaviors that poison your soul. If after a brief recovery from a long illness you returned to the foul food that caused your sickness, you would lose all the ground you had gained. So it is with the soul. You may receive a moment of bodily ease, but if you immediately plunge back into the ways of envy, strife, and sensuality, you have traded the wealth of heaven for a fading shadow. Live for the common good, use whatever strength you are given for the advantage of your neighbor, and lay hold not merely of a body free from pain, but of an incorruptible life. That is the only health worth beseeching God to grant.
