A Prayer During Illness & Suffering

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For the past two years, I have suffered a particular type of severe physical ailment on nearly a daily basis.  This suffering has been debilitating and frustrating because I have never dealt with such pain, suffering, or limitation ever before in my life.  On many days over the past two years, I have found myself asking the Lord why He is allowing this to happen; asking Him how this is for His greatest glory.  I want to see that everything He gives to me, and everything I do, is for my good and His glory, but I just haven’t been able to see it all that well.

God has funny ways of answering my questions, which are usually more like complaints.  He gives me a little wink and a proverbial elbow-nudge in the side to remind me that He does know what’s going on and that He’s still in charge.

Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  I was reading one of Ignatius’s letters to a friend, and I came across another one of God’s divine winks.  Ignatius wrote: “I think that these illnesses and other temporal mishaps frequently come from the hand of God Our Lord, so that we may have greater self-knowledge and a diminished love for created things, along with a deepened realization of the brevity of this life of ours.”  Yep, that felt like a nudge from on high to me.  Through this sixteenth-century spiritual master, God has reminded me that my ongoing physical ailments are really a good thing.  They have provided greater self-knowledge; they have helped me to realize how precious this life is; and, they have brought me to a deeper love for my wife and children.

This reminded me of a short text that I also read early on in the midst of physical suffering: Uniformity with the Will of God, by St. Alphonsus Liguori (whose feast day is tomorrow).  St. Alphonsus, like St. Ignatius, tells us that we should praise God, even for our ailments.  If God has allowed us to be stricken with them, He knows that His greatest glory can come about because of them.  The tricky part is simply submitting, because our fallen nature wants to get up so quickly; and because our minds can’t conceive that God can be glorified more by our sickness than by our health.

Trust me, I haven’t perfected this recipe.  I’m still learning.  I fight pain with everything that I have in me, and I complain while I’m doing it.  But, it helps to know that I have a couple of saints setting a good example for me.  Sts. Ignatius and Alphonsus, pray for us who are ill and suffering!

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