Love

This is one of a series of three posts on connections between faith and healing. The others are on Meditation and on Gratitude. These three are not of course exclusive to the Christian faith, or even to faith at all, but they are integral to the Christian faith. And they all support healing.

Dr Flavin wrote a lovely article on Love and it’s role in healing. I strongly recommend reading it HERE: In particular she emphasised loving ourselves. And illustrated her article with examples of people who unconsciously sabotaged their healing by not thinking they were worthy of it. Here again, health connects with faith. Christians absolutely believe that God loves each and every one of us. So who are we not to love ourselves? (And others!)

This is a bit of an eye-opener. Love in relationships is already well-documented to have a beneficial effect on health. But there isn’t so much on the importance of loving oneself and feeling worthy of love and worthy of healing. The importance of the mind in healing the body is now well-recognised, so we need to do everything we can to make our minds healthy, so as to promote healing rather than hinder it. I hope these three posts – Meditation, Love and Gratitude will help. These are things that we have to work on ourselves, all the time. They are the perfect medicine – without harmful side effects.

A necessary part of loving ourselves is also forgiving ourselves for the things we wish we hadn’t done (to put it mildly). But as Christians, we believe that God forgives us. So our reaction has to be to forgive ourselves and, where possible, apologise to those we have wronged and make amends where we can. Of course people may still not forgive us. It took me a while to recognise the blunt truth that it’s their problem. As we say in the Lord’s Prayer “Forgive us our sins (trespasses) as we forgive them that sin (trespass) against us”. That makes very clear our responsibility to forgive others, and this is now known to be essential for our mental and physical health.

Not forgiving leads to anger and resentment, which only hurts the person who doesn’t forgive. If we can make it easier for others to forgive us, we should do so, but ultimately it is their responsibility to themselves. Forgiving ourselves is not always easy, but we have to learn to do it. Guilt is a very negative emotion that can sabotage our health or prevent healing. It helps to be able to confess it to the Lord and ask for forgiveness and for help forgiving ourselves.

Loving ourselves means wanting to be the best we can be. We all have different gifts and different limitations, so we need to make the most of what we have and the least of what we don’t have. If we are sick, it means striving to be well and making the most of the life we have. It is not a case of “I’ll be happy if ….. “. Happiness is knowing where you are going and taking the journey. I am reminded of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Christian starts on his journey which is filled with joy, learning, struggles and mis-steps. And he gets to his destination. Not everyone does, but you have to love yourself enough to keep on trying.