Chrysostom
Beloved of All
You ask for prayer for your overall healing and wellness, and this is a right and necessary thing. We are right to flee to the Physician of souls and bodies. But consider what health truly is, and what sickness. You see the body and its fevers.
Our Lord touched Peter’s mother-in-law, and the fever left her, and she had perfect strength at once, needing no convalescence. He can do this for you in an instant if He wills. But far more often, our bodily afflictions are a mercy sent to rouse a soul grown dull. For what produces this dullness?
Continual afflictions, yes, but also a settled neglect that makes the hearing sluggish. You ask for overall wellness, but what is the state of your soul? Do you not treat it as a game, giving it forty days of medicine for the sins of a whole year, and then rushing back to the very food that made you sick? If a man recovers from a long illness and then returns to the ruinous diet that caused it, has he not destroyed his former labor?
Do not mock God. The true wellness you seek is not merely the absence of fever, but a will changed utterly. For there are souls no different from water: cold, weak, and always rushing downward. They love glory, feed on luxury, and are swept away by every changing current, laughing one moment and weeping the next, never stable.
The glutton’s table is the mother of sickness, cramming the body till it bursts, only to crave more. The Lord still changes water into wine. He can take that unstable, watery will of yours and give it body and strength, making it a cause of gladness instead of a torrent that eats away the banks of your health. Cry out to Him then, not only to cool the fever in your limbs, but to change the very temper of your soul.
For there awaits a punishment beyond all telling for those who remain in their sickness without turning. Yet do not despair. How many have heard ten times and seemed insensible, and yet at last, by a single blow, the tree fell, and all the fruit came at once? Lay hold of the medicine we offer.
Strive not for the fleeting calm of a healthy body alone, but for the solid, heavenly citizenship of a soul secure in virtue. That is the harbor. That is the healing that cannot be lost. May you obtain it, and with it, the everlasting blessings.
Our Lord touched Peter’s mother-in-law, and the fever left her, and she had perfect strength at once, needing no convalescence. He can do this for you in an instant if He wills. But far more often, our bodily afflictions are a mercy sent to rouse a soul grown dull. For what produces this dullness?
Continual afflictions, yes, but also a settled neglect that makes the hearing sluggish. You ask for overall wellness, but what is the state of your soul? Do you not treat it as a game, giving it forty days of medicine for the sins of a whole year, and then rushing back to the very food that made you sick? If a man recovers from a long illness and then returns to the ruinous diet that caused it, has he not destroyed his former labor?
Do not mock God. The true wellness you seek is not merely the absence of fever, but a will changed utterly. For there are souls no different from water: cold, weak, and always rushing downward. They love glory, feed on luxury, and are swept away by every changing current, laughing one moment and weeping the next, never stable.
The glutton’s table is the mother of sickness, cramming the body till it bursts, only to crave more. The Lord still changes water into wine. He can take that unstable, watery will of yours and give it body and strength, making it a cause of gladness instead of a torrent that eats away the banks of your health. Cry out to Him then, not only to cool the fever in your limbs, but to change the very temper of your soul.
For there awaits a punishment beyond all telling for those who remain in their sickness without turning. Yet do not despair. How many have heard ten times and seemed insensible, and yet at last, by a single blow, the tree fell, and all the fruit came at once? Lay hold of the medicine we offer.
Strive not for the fleeting calm of a healthy body alone, but for the solid, heavenly citizenship of a soul secure in virtue. That is the harbor. That is the healing that cannot be lost. May you obtain it, and with it, the everlasting blessings.
