Learning the Healer's Art ~ Part Two

   Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening,

this post should take approximately five minutes to read from start to finish.

This post focuses on Brigham Young University (BYU) Devotional in October 2002, and it is called "Learning the Healer's Art" by Sister Elaine S. Marshall. This post is part two. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the Devotional. 

Sister Marshall has mentioned the following; "... 

Healing Teaches Us

The fourth lesson of the healer’s art is that healing teaches us. When we have a terrible loss or pain, we may seek to “get back to normal” or to the way things were before, but they will never be the same. Pain changes us, but not in the same way that healing teaches us. Healing can help us to become more sensitive and more awake to life. Healing inspires repentance and obedience. Healing invites gifts of humility and faith. It opens our hearts to the profound complexities of truth, beauty, divinity, and grace.

Orson F. Whitney wrote: No pain that we suffer ... is wasted. All that we suffer ..., especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God ... and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven. [Quoted in Spencer W. Kimball, Faith Precedes the Miracle (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 98]

We Must Help Others to Heal

The fifth lesson of learning the healer’s art is the obligation and great gift it is to help others to heal. President Hinckley admonished: ... Every day someone in your path is hurting, someone is afraid, someone feels inadequate, someone needs a friend. Someone needs you to notice, to reach out, and to help him or her to heal. 

You may not know who that is at the time, but you can give encouragement and hope. You can help to heal wounds of misunderstanding and contention. You can serve “in the cause of the Master Healer” (Hinckley, “Healing Power,” 52).

Healing Is the Gift of the Savior, Who Calls, “Come unto Me”

The last and greatest lesson of healing is that it is a divine gift that is always there from a loving Heavenly Father. If you have a pain or sorrow or disappointment or sin or just a grudge that needs healing, the Savior simply says, “Come unto me.”

... As Jesus healed, the scriptures say, “All the people were amazed” (Matthew 12:23). They brought their sick, their “blind, and dumb” (Matthew 12:22), those that were “possessed with a devil” (Matthew 12:22; also Mark 1:32), and their dead. They sought Him every day and into the evening. 

So great was His reputation and His healing power that they sought to “only touch the hem of his garment; and as many as touched were made perfectly whole” (Matthew 14:36). “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching . . . and preaching the gospel . . . , and healing every sickness and every disease among the people” (Matthew 9:35).

... When the Savior appeared in the Americas, He healed “every one as they were brought forth unto him” (3 Nephi 17:9). ... Elder Holland reminded: That is why we make solemn covenants based on Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and that is why we take upon us his name. In as many ways as possible, both figuratively and literally, we try to take upon us his identity. 

We seek out his teachings and retell his miracles. We send latter-day witnesses ... around the world to declare his message. We call ourselves his children, and we testify that he is the only source of eternal life. We plead for him to swing open the gates of heaven in our behalf and trust everlastingly that he will, based upon our faithfulness. [Holland, “Come unto Me,” 188]

Elder Holland further noted: ... For some of you that is simply to live with greater faith, to believe more. For some of you it does mean to repent: Right here ... For virtually all of us it means to live more by the promptings and promises of the Holy Ghost and to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men.” . . . (2 Nephi 31:20). [Holland, “Come unto Me,” 189] ...."

If you would like to read the whole Devotional, here is the link below.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/elaine-s-marshall/learning-healers-art/

Stay Tuned until next time.

Learning the Healer’s Art ~ Part One

  Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening,

this post should take approximately five minutes to read from start to finish.

This post focuses on Brigham Young University (BYU) Devotional in October 2002, and it is called "Learning the Healer's Art" by Sister Elaine S. Marshall. This post is part one. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the Devotional. 

Sister Marshall has mentioned the following; "... 

Healing Hurts

First, healing hurts. ... I have learned that healing hurts. Life hurts. Healing really only begins when we face the hurt in its full force and then grow through it with all the strength of our soul. For every reward of learning and growing, some degree of pain is always the price. 

Author M. Scott Peck reminds us that if you do not want love or pain, you “must do without many things” (M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978]: 133). I think you would do without dating, graduating, getting married, or having children.

Sometime in your life you will know a crashing crisis or heavy heartache that will threaten all sense of logic or hope or certainty from which, no matter how you emerge, nothing will ever be the same. Hurts come as unique losses, unwelcome surprises, fading hope, or grief.

... Perhaps that special person did not have the same “revelation” you think you had. Maybe this is the best you will ever look. Maybe someone you counted on wasn’t there for you. Perhaps someone in your past hurt you deeply. I know that pain.

... Some of us suffer the wrenching consequences of sin or just poor judgment. ... We hurt when we see our own failures or helplessly watch the unwise decisions of others. Our lives are changed forever not only by the pain but by facing our need to heal.

Sometimes we simply have too many demands or feel like we just don’t measure up. Daily life’s hundreds of additive stresses can drain hope and energy, drop by drop, toward spiritual depletion leaving a need to heal. Pain is part of living. Pain brings us to the source of healing.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland warned: The world around you is an increasingly hostile and sinful place. ... You can change. You can be helped. You can be made whole whatever the problem. All he asks is that you walk away from the darkness and come into the light, his light, with meekness and lowliness of heart. ... (Isaiah 53:4–5; Mosiah 14:4–5). [Jeffrey R. Holland, “Come unto Me,” Brigham Young University 1996–97 Speeches (Provo: BYU, 1997), 189; emphasis in original]

We can partake of the healing medicine of the Atonement of our Savior, who promised, “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee” (2 Kings 20:5).

"As our FAITH in the Lord increases, we trust in him
and have confidence in his power to redeem, heal, and
strengthen us." - David A. Bednar.

Healing Is Active - You Have to Be There

My second lesson is that healing is active - you have to be there. Your friend or your husband or wife or your mother cannot do it for you. You have to face the problem and the pain. 

To begin healing, you must acknowledge and feel the hurt. Only those who don’t feel, those without conscience, cannot heal. My mother once told me of an experience she had one winter morning as she drove down to check the cattle in the lower pasture. 

She noticed a car off the side of the road. Inside she recognized a young mother and three children. When my mother asked if they needed help, the woman tearfully reminded her that this was the place of the accident two weeks earlier that had killed her husband. She answered, “We are just here to feel the hurt.”

... Healing is not cure. Cure is clean, quick, and done often under anesthesia. ... Healing, however, is often a lifelong process of recovery and growth in spite of, maybe because of, enduring physical, emotional, or spiritual assault. It requires time. We may pray for cure when we really need healing. Whether for cell reconstruction, for nerve and muscle rehabilitation, for emotional recovery, or for spiritual forgiveness, healing needs work and time and energy.

Healing cannot happen in a surgical suite where the pain is only a sleepy memory. Cure is passive, as you submit your body to the practitioner. Healing is active. It requires all the energy of your entire being. You have to be there, fully awake, aware, and participating when it happens.

Healing Is Private

My third lesson is that healing is private. ... Healing is not only private, it is sacred. Private healing is not healing by abandonment. There is something so sacred about partaking of the power of the Atonement to overcome suffering, disappointment, or sin that it happens in the privacy of that special relationship between the mortal and the divine. 

Healing involves a private personal communion with the Savior, the Master Healer. It inspires a very personal reverence and awe. While on the earth Jesus often healed in private and then departed. When He healed, He often charged, “See thou tell no man; but go thy way” (Matthew 8:4; see also Luke 8:56).

To say that healing is private is not to diminish the marvelous power that comes from the help and compassion of others. Indeed, private healing often may not happen without the help of others. But much of the work of healing is done alone, inside the heart, in the company of the Spirit of the Lord.

Such secret healing is not a single event. It happens as a process of living. You cannot simply take off a day or start tomorrow like a new diet and return healed. It happens quietly while you face the pain. It happens over time as you live, work, study, and give to others." 

Stay Tuned until next time.

To Be Healed ~ Part Two

 Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening,

this post should take approximately three minutes to read from start to finish.

This post focuses on a April 1994 General Conference talk, and it is called "To Be Healed" by Elder Richard G. Scott. This post is part two. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the talk, and I hope that you would be able to learn something new while you are reading throughout this post. 

Elder Scott mentioned the following; "Faith in Christ means we trust Him; we trust His teachings. That leads to hope, and hope brings charity, the pure love of Christ that peaceful feeling that comes when we sense His concern, His love, and His capacity to cure us or to ease our burdens with His healing power. ...

When discouraged do you feel overwhelmed and in desperation seek for others to solve your problems, overlooking your own capacity to make much improvement? Do you understand the necessity to do what you can so that the Lord can do what He will to help you?

Your access to the Savior’s help comes in different ways. The most direct and often the most powerful way is through humble, trusting prayers to your Father in Heaven, which are answered through the Holy Ghost to your spirit. Yet this help is sometimes difficult to initiate and hard to recognize when you are learning how to pray with faith.

If so, begin elsewhere. Trust someone near to you; then as you learn, that trust will extend to God and His healing. Begin with a friend or bishop who understands the teachings of the Savior. Often they have personally obtained healing through application of truth with faith in the Redeemer. 

"The gift of healing is a sign that will follow all that
believe, whether male or female." - Joseph Smith.

They can show you how. Or start by reading, pondering, and applying the teachings of the scriptures. ... While examples and anecdotes will help to understand principle, you will find that power comes from scriptural doctrine, ...

“I see that your faith is sufficient that I should heal you." “Come unto me with full purpose of heart.” “Return unto me, and repent of your sins, and be converted, that I may heal you.” 

“Turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him, and serve him with all diligence of mind, ..."

Even if they had unlimited time and resources, which they don’t, priesthood leaders could not provide all of the help. They are agents of the Lord, and His law requires that you do your part. They will show you the way. 

They can provide priesthood blessings. Your faith, purity, and obedience and that of the priesthood holder have great effect on the pronouncement and realization of the blessing. Healing can occur in the act, yet more often it occurs over a period of time determined by the faith and obedience of the individual and the will of the Lord. 

I feel that the pace is generally set by the individual, not by the Lord. ... Love is a potent healer. Realizing that, Satan would separate you from the power of the love of God, kindred, and friends, who want to help. ... He wants you to believe you lack the capacity to help yourself and that no one else is really interested. 

If he succeeds, you will be driven to further despair and heartache. His strategy is to have you think you are not appreciated, loved, or wanted so that you in despair ..."

www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1994/04/to-be-healed

Stay Tuned until next time.

To Be Healed ~ Part One

Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening,

this post should take approximately three minutes to read from start to finish.

I know everyone would have their own opinions and sometimes similar opinions about their definitions of the word, "healing." I often think about healing is the process of getting well. What does it mean "to be healed" to you? 

What does it mean "to be healed" to a immediate relative? What does it mean "to be healed" to a extended relative?

What does it mean "to be healed" to a friend? 

This post focuses on a April 1994 General Conference talk, and it is called "To Be Healed" by Elder Richard G. Scott. This post is part one. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the talk, and I hope that you would be able to learn something new while you are reading throughout this post. 

Elder Scott mentioned the following; 

"Easter brings thoughts of the Savior, His life, His atonement, His resurrection, His love. ... how we all need the healing the Redeemer can provide. Mine is a message of hope for you who yearn for relief from heavy burdens that have come through no conscious act of your own while you have lived a worthy life. 

It is based on principles embodied in the teachings of the Savior. Your challenge may be a serious physical disability, a struggle with lingering illness, or a daily wrestle with a life-threatening disease. It may have roots in the death of a loved one, the anguish caused by another bound by sin, or come from abuse in any of its evil forms. Whatever the cause, I testify that lasting relief is available on conditions established by the Lord.

Help from the Lord always follows eternal law. The better you understand that law, the easier it is to receive His help. ... It is important to understand that His healing can mean being cured, or having your burdens eased, or even coming to realize that it is worth it to endure to the end patiently ...

Recognize that some challenges in life will not be resolved here on earth. ... The Lord simply answered, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” He gave Paul strength to compensate so he could live a most meaningful life. 

"HEALING comes when we 
CHOOSE to walk away from darkness
and move towards a Brighter Light."
- Dieter F. Uchtdorf. 

He wants you to learn how to be cured when that is His will and how to obtain strength to live with your challenge when He intends it to be an instrument for growth. In either case the Redeemer will support you. ... When you feel you can do no more, temporarily lay your challenges at His feet. The scriptures tell you how. 

For example, when the oppressed people of Alma “did pour out their hearts to him; and he did know the thoughts of their hearts,” the Lord blessed them, saying: “I will … ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that … you cannot feel them, … that ye may know … that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions. 

“And … the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord.” Submitting “cheerfully and with patience” to all His will lets you learn precious if difficult lessons and eternal truths that will yield blessings. 

... The Lord will give relief with divine power when you seek deliverance in humility and faith in Jesus Christ. Don’t say, “No one understands me; I can’t sort it out, or get the help I need.” ... No one can help you without faith and effort on your part. 

Your personal growth requires that. Don’t look for a life virtually free from discomfort, pain, pressure, challenge, or grief, for those are the tools a loving Father uses to stimulate our personal growth and understanding. As the scriptures repeatedly affirm, you will be helped as you exercise faith in Jesus Christ.

That faith is demonstrated by a willingness to trust His promises given through His prophets and in His scriptures, which contain His own words. You may not fully understand how to do this yet, but trust that He will help you use your agency to open the doors for His healing to occur."

Stay Tuned until next time.