Meekness, Healing, and God's Will
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: May 4 - 10
Revelation is available to everyone, but God guides His Church through His prophet. The Lord wants me to follow His prophet.
“Moses was very meek.”
I struggle with meekness. Not just the acquisition and practice of it, but the idea of aspiring to and emulating it. I feel a tension between wanting to follow Jesus’s examples and how I’ve come to define and experience meekness. And I think what I wrestle with is not the doctrine itself but the way we have shaped this word.
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Meekness is not fear. It is not shame. It is not silence or self-erasure. Those are the conditions Adam and Eve felt when they hid from God in the garden, afraid to be seen. Christlike meekness is not a diminished self. It is a self in a state of readiness. We become ready to act, ready to repent, ready to speak up, ready to grow. It is the courage to be seen, the humility to be taught, and the faith to move forward
—Greg Christensen, “Vulnerability, Our Modern Day-Meekness”
Many believers and critics alike have misunderstood Christ’s call to meekness as a call to weakness, to indifference or acquiescence to injustice or to pain. This is a profound distortion of the truth. Christ does not right wrongs like a mighty knight errant, but when we turn to Him in our brokenness, He rewrites the meaning of our story. The facts of our lives do not change, but His power seems to rearrange the furniture of our minds where facts have settled, freeing them from the appearance of inevitability and of fixed meaning.
—George Handley, “Falling into Paradise”
With faith in the Lord, I can have hope for the future.
Jesus brought unfaltering hope into the world quietly. Only those who were already oriented toward Him could see it at first: the magi watching the skies; the shepherds who followed the angelic summons to witness Him in the manger; the imperfect but willing mother who risked her social standing, her marriage, and even her life to bring the Savior into the world. Hope might have felt far away to the families whose babies were killed in Herod’s decree or the followers gathered at the foot of the cross in Golgotha. It might feel far to you as you navigate the bruises and pains of mortality, tangled in situations that feel like they have no solution. But Jesus Christ keeps His promises. We can’t see the way it will all work out quite yet, but we can hope with surety and without shame. The Light has come into the world. Every one of us will fly again.
—Lorren Lemmons, “A Thrill of Hope”
As modeled by Joseph, we Latter-day Saints are called upon to be active participants in shaping the outcome of prophecies. Where prophecy speaks of disasters, we are not, like Jonah, to hope for its fulfillment; we are, rather, called to help avert those disasters, as Jonah did inadvertently. Where prophecy speaks of hopes ahead, we are called to be coworkers with God in actualizing them. Scripture is a script. Reading it actively opens us to performing its best lines and avoiding its worst.
—Don Bradley, “Hope, Fear, & Creation”
If I look to Jesus Christ in faith, He can heal me spiritually. I can look to Jesus Christ.
Sinning is a type of woundedness, like blindness or lameness. It is an infirmity, a brokenness. As a Healer, He ministers to the entire range of our afflictions: psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual.
—Terryl and Fiona Givens, All Things New
I feel so at home in Jesus Christ’s gospel, not because he’s wiped my slate clean and made me this perfect, pristine daisy. No, I feel at home because he invites me to use my wounds to aid him in what he does best: heal others. When Jesus appeared to the Nephites in America it was his wounds that made the people shout “Hosanna!” Jesus Christ heals just as much through his wounds as he does through his perfection. He asks each of us to do the same. The vulnerability of others, when they bear their wounds to me, has made me feel welcome and whole. I know that the commission within my patriarchal blessing, the one that urged me to go out and heal, is because I have wounds of my own. This does not make our wounds desirable and we all rightly avoid fresh pain whenever we can. But it does mean that through the pain we inherit, we can better bear the wounds of others, that Christ can heal and that we can help. Connecting with Jesus through our wounds has turned a solitary bitterness to a shared joy as I’ve realized that wounds are what connect us through Christ.
—Louisa Packham, “To Hurt, Heal, and Celebrate It All”
When sin is woundedness, Atonement is radical healing, and the “radical” is very important.
Healing is an everyday, mundane part of our lives—think scraped knees, sunburns, and white blood cells fighting off the latest mutation of the latest virus. But radical healing is a grand, supernatural miracle—think Christ healing the blind man (John 9), the woman with an issue of blood (Luke 8:43–48), or the ten lepers (Luke 17:11–19).
If we used the metaphor of everyday healing to explain the Atonement, it would be very similar to the metaphor of restoration. After all, when an injury or sickness is healed, the injured party has been restored to health. But “radical healing” is about more than mere restoration in the same way that Christ healing the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5) is a greater miracle than the recovery I made after the cold I had last fall.
—Chanel Earl, “Atonement as Radical Healing”
I can follow God’s will, even if others try to persuade me not to.
Moral Courage in an Age of Approval: a conversation with with Fr. James Martin, SJ
Today, we’re honored to share a conversation with Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of Outreach, a ministry for LGBTQ Catholics.
I believe there is an innate and even sacred desire within each of us to discover our own deep wells of passion, creativity, and self-determination. When we see obedience as the path toward conformity, it remains a perpetual struggle for self-mastery. If we see it instead as the freedom to truly love him as we are loved, it becomes the path toward fuller self-realization. Obedience does not gain us more love from God, but rather more power from his love to free us to do the good in the world we were born to do.
—George B. Handley, “Obedience as Gratitude”
Sometimes in the Church we like to think of ourselves as special or different. I remember learning very early that we are a peculiar people. We are blessed with knowledge, while “the World” sits in darkness. They need us to bring them the truth, to help them change their ways. We are the ones who have something to offer Them. But when I read Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan, I see something different. I see the importance of an outsider perspective. I see an other who has something to give. Maybe we aren’t the only peculiar people. Maybe heaven and earth are both populated by scores of peculiar peoples, each treasured by God, each with special callings that have been informed by their talents, skills, and cultures.
Tribalism is important because it creates Us. It gives us places to feel that irreplaceable sense of belonging. But another paradox of tribalism is that it is just as important because it creates Them. The true lesson of the Good Samaritan story is that They exist not to just be tolerated until They change into Us. They exist separate from Us, and we need them, just as they are.
—Jeanine Bee, “Peculiar Peoples”