Healing is a Journey, Not an Isolated Event
Over my years of active addiction, I was tired of relapsing again and again. I was longing for the last time masturbation or pornography would come up in confession. I wanted this compulsion to stop and never come back. And rightly so.
I wanted to feel clean, transformed, and forever healed. I even questioned what I would confess when this dream finally happened, and I was finally healed...
After four years of severe white-knuckling and experiencing short-lived sobriety, I had a deep fall, and a powerful confession in which the priest suggested I ask for Mary’s intercession. I then asked God to help me in this fight, and He did.
What I didn’t understand back then is that healing is a journey, not a one-time event. Once I thought I had closed “that chapter” of my life, intrusive thoughts came from repressing my sexuality; I completely ignored my femininity, and developed fears of relationships, marriage, the sexual act itself and many, many more wounds.
About a year later, I started opening my heart to the love of God and a powerful healing journey began: one of discovering His plan for sexuality,
of continually opening my story to Him,
of viewing myself through His eyes,
of truly repenting for my sins,
of deepening my awareness of His salvific plan for my life.
And it’s not like I have fully gone through each of those steps—there’s still so much work to be done. But I now have a disposition of desiring even more healing. I know I have wounds that still affect me and patterns of thought that are not of God. To the disappointment of my younger self, I’m not fully healed. I know I will keep discovering more wounds and learning more ways to be closer to Him like He intended.
But not forever. Only till the day when, because of His mercy, I enter into Heaven, and His presence fully heals me.
This knowledge of continual healing in the years to come doesn’t make me sad or hopeless anymore, and I’m grateful we have already made a lot of progress together. It gives me profound hope to know that, until Heaven, I will always have more love and more freedom to experience.
Until then, I’m in need of Him. I could choose to think that other people need Him more—that I shouldn’t exhaust His resources; that my needs are not as big as others’. But God is my Father, and He loves each of us with the same tenderness. Just as moms and dads of several children try to equally attend to the needs of all, He—who is a perfect Father—lovingly knows my heart and doesn’t compare my current struggles with anyone else's, even my past self’s.
I am His daughter: a daughter with needs and a daughter still growing. So I rest in His loving gaze, which doesn’t perceive me as needy, a mess, overwhelming, or a burden, but as a joy, a gift, a delight in every step of the journey.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come to me and fill me with Your love. I ask You illuminate in Your timing all of the areas that need healing in my life; that need to be evangelized; that need to know the love of Christ. Come, Holy Spirit. May I know You are always with me and You want to make me ever more free, transforming my love to be more like Christ’s. May I be joyful and grateful to be on a path of healing, to continue needing You again and again. I pray I'm always open to more healing—to inviting God deeper and deeper—and to growing in intimacy with Him. Come, Holy Spirit. In Jesus’s name, Amen.