Summary
God wants us to surrender all our cares to Him. True freedom can be found in our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God. We may suffer from terrible wounds, but God can glorify all wounds.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”
Jn. 15:5
1. Nell relates that she tends to feel like a burden to God when she asks for His help, but that a priest helped her to surrender her cares and tasks to God. He helped her understand that God wants to do things for us. Do you ever struggle with feeling like a burden when asking God for help? How can you work on surrendering your cares to God?
2. True freedom means to belong entirely to God, to be utterly His. We can find this freedom in our identity as His beloved. How can You focus more deeply on your identity as His beloved son or daughter?
3. Though Jesus suffered severely and had terrible wounds, His wounds were glorified after His Resurrection. How might meditating on Christ’s glorified wounds change the way you look at your own wounds?
4. There are a lot of things that we need to do in our lives, sometimes too many things for us to handle. We need to allow God to take over. Do you ever struggle with trying to do everything yourself? How can you work on letting God take over?
Text: The Healing Jesus Desires for You
I am Nelle O’Leary. Welcome to this next part of our healing retreat, focusing on healing the Jesus desires for you. But first, let’s begin with prayer.
Opening Prayer
In the name the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, we give you everything. We give you our whole lives as a gift back to you and appreciation for the gift that you’ve given us with them. Please help to sanctify our time, open our hearts to your promptings. Turn off the inner critic, the inner doubt. Let us be fully present at that, which is before us right now. We ask all this in your holy and precious name, amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
John 15:4-7
Okay, this next part we’re going to talk about freedom. What does it mean to be free in Christ? What freedom does he desire to give us? And what’s our part to play in healing and freedom? going to Like, is it all on us? Are we just, are we just these patients who are knocked out on the table He’s doing it all to us. Just how do these things inter relate? So our freedom and our healing? Well, let’s begin with the scripture. because you know, I love scripture. Okay? We’re looking at John fifteen, four to seven. “Abide in me and I in you as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine neither can you unless you abide in me. I’m the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him. He, it is that bears much fruit for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he’s cast forth as a branch who withers and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.” Those are some huge promises. “Ask whatever you will and it will be done for you.”
I was on a retreat and was meeting with the spiritual director of the retreat. We were talking about this idea of me feeling guilty every time I ask our Lord for help, like I’m bugging Him again. Like I like got the hotline number and I won’t stop calling it. And I must be such a burden to our Lord. Comes and like it’s Nell again, I need help again. And the priest gave this beautiful story to me about helping his mom. So I think he was putting like Christmas boxes or, or something, and he’s a little arthritic and she’s older and he’s going up and down in like a basement with all these boxes, you know, all of her Christmas decorations she wanted put away, up and down, up and down, up and down the stairs and like stooping to get, you know, under like a basement that has like a pretty low ceiling on the stairs.
And he was, you know, understandably tired and kind of annoyed and said in prayer, like, Lord, help me a little more of maybe an exasperation than a prayer. But nevertheless, it was a prayer. And what really came to his heart was Jesus impressing upon him. It was Jesus who wanted to help this beloved of his, the priest friend’s mom. It was Jesus who wanted to do that work. So what Jesus said into his heart was, let me do it. Don’t ask me for help. Just ask me to do it. Let me do it. This is what I want to do. I want to be of help to her in this way. And I’m using you. I’m, you’re allowing me to use you as a vehicle for that, but let me do it. Just let me do it.
We Have to Do Our Part
And when he told that to me on the retreat, you know, of course in our session, I just was crying the whole time. Sometimes joy, I don’t know, tears, joy, sorrow. It’s held that Kleenex box on my lap just crying the whole hour we met. And I felt that really keenly Jesus, Jesus, you do it. You do it Lord, to, to turn it over to Him, not in an accusatory fashion or because I’m too lazy or I can’t be bothered to kind of dump it on Jesus, but all of my requests for help from Him, I’d felt like this burden, right? And really this reframing of saying, I’m free. I’m free, Lord. And that I’m turning it all over to you. So freedom and healing, looking like untethering. Like I have to do my part. And if I do my part and I do it well enough, then God will reward me by meeting me halfway and then he’ll do it. But I have to do my part. And of course our part looks different for different people.
Our part, honestly, at its base looks like opening ourselves up to receive. But we get it all mixed up, right? There’s a little bit of the pride that comes during in there. There’s a little bit of the self-reliance. There’s a little bit of the embarrassments sort. Like, ugh, I’ll just, I’ll try to get there and, and then he can see me in all of my woundedness. But I have to kind of get myself presentable and kind of get further down the road. It’s like all the times you think I can’t go to a gym and get a personal trainer until I’m in better shape. I can’t go to see the physical therapist for my problem until I’ve done my own stretches.
Like you guys, if you’re like me, you’re never going to do your own stretches and you’re not going to do the plethora of workout videos that you’ve saved from like, you know, whatever streaming social media. I’m like, oh, these will be the stretchers I’ll do. I don’t do them. But the idea that we have to get ourselves there first and then we’ll let Him see us, is just another barrier to allowing His healing to take place. So what is freedom? Again, we’re going to define our terms. Like what is freedom even in and of itself? And I would say that freedom is being utterly, His being free to give ourselves to Him messy, wounded, warts and all to just turn ourselves over. Like that’s the ultimate freedom. It’s, it’s an identity As His beloved, which is beyond what we do, how we look, how much money we make, where we live, how many kids we have or don’t have where we vacation, how many grandkids we have or don’t have. Uh, if we have a spouse or if the spouse does X, y, or Z.
We Are God’s Beloved Children
Like all of these externals that we base our identity on, some of them very beautiful, our family, our richness of family life, our richness of friends who love us, but our identity is not all those things. So a freedom from detaching from that notion of I am what I do, I am how I look, I am how society sees me, how other people see me. That’s who I am. No, no, who you and I are God’s beloved children, a son, a daughter who is beloved. That’s, that’s our identity. So if we can start from that place, if, I mean it’s a big if guys, I need of reminder every day starting from that place. Now when we look at this healing and allowing Him to heal us, this freedom that Christ wants to offer us seems much simpler. We’ve unburden ourselves of all of these other parts. I’m got to do it myself. I got to make myself better. I got to do these five steps for self-improvement. And instead say, Lord, I’m yours. I’m yours, I’m His, that’s who I am. And I want to be, I want to be that. To let go of the hope that all of these other things in life are going to give us what we desire, which is a sense of purpose, a sense of worth, a sense of belonging. All of that can and does fade away. What are we left with Him? What a freedom my friends. What, what incredible freedom to be free is to be as we were made to be.
So, to be free in Christ is to be unfettered by our insecurities, our extra weight, our hidden embarrassing debt, what our in laws think of us. Be free of all of those things and to simply be ourselves as beloved sons and daughters. I love the baptism in the Jordan, I think that fundamental moment, that foundational moment, Christ already knew. Of course he knew he was gone. But the unveiling of that, the opening of the clouds as John baptized Jesus in the river Jordan, and God the father sends down these words. This is my beloved son and who I am. Well please listen to Him. This is my beloved son. I’m a beloved daughter, your beloved son or a beloved daughter. And that’s the freedom Christ wishes to offer us, to model our lives after His, to be transformed in Him and into Him and in Him and through Him deeper and deeper and deeper into our most foundational identity.
The Link of Our Wounds and Freedom
And like, what do our wounds have to do with this freedom? Our wounds are, it sounds weird to say, but I genuinely have lived this and believed that our, our wounds are a gift for me. They’ve been a gift in showing me you can’t do it all yourself. You cannot fix yourself. This self-reliance thing isn’t working out. Is it because the anxieties that you’re living with and the day to day stresses that you refuse to let go of and the cumulative effect it’s had on my body, very, like I hear this a lot from other women too. Like early middle aged autoimmune disorders caused by immense amounts of stress that I refuse to let go of, like holding the stresses in my body. Well that’s a big physical reminder to me that I’m not God and I can’t, I can’t do it all. And I deeply and truly need Him. I need Jesus as my savior because I can’t save myself. And the harder I try, the worse it gets. Like more I’m determined to get out of my own problems.
The more I realize, like I’m, I’m pretty helpless. It’s just fascinating to think that we have this God who came to earth took on human flesh, right? Fully human, fully divine, Lived this hidden like real basic life in the little backwater town of Nazareth, and then goes on to this mind blowing ministry and then dies this like profoundly egregiously, horrifically painful death. And the glorification of His wounds, like the glory that is His wounds, is actually really reassuring to me. And I hope it’s reassuring to you too. We can be met in our wounds. because He shows us His, He shows us the resurrection and the glorification, the keep saying that. But it’s true. I think of these like glorified wounds. That’s what God has done through the suffering that he allowed to happen to His own body. Now think of what he will do with and through our wounds, We hold back, we hold back, right? There are these impediments, always these impediments we hold back on. Like, oh, I do not want to show Him this guys. He’s got, he knows already, but I don’t want to show Him this. It’s too dark, it’s too painful, it’s too hard. And I’m exhausted by the way. And I just need to self-medicate with chocolate and, and Amazon Prime or Netflix or whatever doom scrolling to show Him our wounds is to see His and understand that the plan for the wounds is always the resurrection. It’s always the transformation. It’s always this deeper healing through unification.
Are You Willing to Receive God?
The wounds don’t just stop and then become this like hideous big old keloid scar I’ve got a couple of those, but even those get transformed in and through Him. But what about our participation in all of this? Like, like I said in the beginning, are we just this like totally knocked out cold patient on the operating table? He does His surgery thing, great. Our wounds are healed, they’re fixed. Thanks Jesus. We wake up, come to, it’s all done. Or are we having to run the race insofar as, you know, all those steps and all those programs and the self-flagellation and the like. I’m trying harder, I’m trying harder. I’m going to do it myself. Those are kind of two opposites. These two opposite examples. There’s really one thing that we need to do as part of our healing. There’s one thing that’s completely necessary that’s hours and hours alone. And that is even just a sliver, like a fraction, like a little hair of the desire to allow Him to heal us of a willingness to receive. There’s fancy ways to say it, a posture of receptivity.
But really it means am I going to let God in? Am I going to let Him in to heal and to see me? Am I brokenness? Am my sinfulness in my feeling like I’m just a big old heap of damaged goods? Am I going to let Him in the tender surgeon, the divine surgeon? And if there’s even like a glimmer of that, when He sees that, that’s our free will, that’s allowing Him to do what He desires, which is heal us tend to those wounds. So because we are creatures who are given free will, we have the choice we get to choose.
Do I want to allow Him to do this or not? And we can spend our whole lives fighting that many of us spend a lot of time fighting fending and fighting His offer of healing. But it’s funny that the, the level of participation it takes on our part is, is this little movement of our will again, this laying down of our will before His and saying, Lord, you desire for me to be healed and whole. And I’m not sure what I even desire. I’m so, I’m so, I don’t even know. But I know that you love me even when I can’t love myself and I’m trying to trust you. Even when I can’t trust myself, I’m trying to have hope. Even when it feels like all hope is gone and I’m just, I’m past help. Just that fraction of our will turn toward Him. That’s the level of participation it takes.
So we can do all the things. There are lots of things to do, especially in this day and age. There are incredible retreats to go on and to attend and talks to listen to and, and studies to participate in and programs and small groups that are parishes and all these beautiful ways to encounter our Lord. But if we think doing all the things takes the place of allowing God to do all the things, it really doesn’t. It just feeds into that self-reliant mindset of I’m going to get it done because I’m going to do all these things on my checklist. Check, check, check. So He gave us His free will, but what He’s asking of us is our consent, consent to be healed. I think that receiving sounds really hard too, because receiving means be vulnerable. And Being vulnerable means that we can be hurt. I don’t know a human being alive who hasn’t been hurt all the way from my outrage. Toddler like didn’t get a sucker after mass. His feelings are so hurt all the way up to my beautiful aunt in her late, late eighties, who’s suffered tremendously in her lifetime and still has an incredibly uphill heart for it.
Everyone has been wounded in, in a variety of ways. Isn’t none of us has gone through this without that. It’s just not, it’s not possible. We live this life and we experience the rupture of relationships all along the way. So to be vulnerable and to say, okay, God, I’m going to be open. I’m going to trust you and I’m going to be willing to receive it is hard. I’m acknowledging that because I think to hear me sound like, oh, just be open to receiving. The whole point of that woman’s minute talk was to tell me, be open to receiving. Okay, I wrote that down. Be open to receiving.
Do It For Jesus
What does, what does that mean? How, how, how do I do that? Well, I think maybe, you know what I’m going to say, You and I can’t necessarily step, step, step toward suddenly being the perfectly receptive person. But what we can do is say, Lord, I want to be able to receive your love. I want that, I don’t know how, please teach me, please do it for me. Think of that priest’s mom that Jesus wanted to put away those Christmas boxes. Jesus Wants to heal my heart and yours. So Jesus, teach me how to be receptive. Show me, help me, guide me. Lead me. Do it for me, Lord. I can’t, I can’t do it myself. We need God to, to teach us and to equip us with His grace. We recognize our need for Him. There is so much freedom in that we don’t have to do it ourselves. We we can’t actually do it ourselves. We need Him, we want Him. And we need to allow Him to do that Gentle, gentle surgery sutures work on us as the divine physician by saying, I’m turning this over to you. God, just turn it over to you. I had to pretend with Him.
You say, it’s really hard for me to trust you Lord, but I want to open my heart up to be able to receive you. And I’m scared And slowly allow Him to work inside your heart. Right? When we’re reading sacred scripture, we’re reading the lives of the saints, we’re reading the Catechism and we’re reading this huge bevy of, of beautiful words that have been given to us. Sometimes that can help soften our hearts. Sometimes that can kind of be the words like I’m, I’m going to say these words of the gospel because I don’t have my own words of prayer. Lord, use what’s been given to us to continue to turn ourselves over, over and over and over again to Him to deepen our trust in the healing He wants for us. And when we say Jesus, you do it.
The delight, the delight that I imagine takes place in His sacred heart when we don’t just say, I want help doing it, but I’m going to do it myself. because I’ve got to do it myself. because I’ve got to perform well and I’ve got to get that A, When he hears and sees this movement in our heart towards like utter helplessness, this very childlike helplessness who needs to be carried and fed and bathed and all the things little babies and little children need, that’s us. That’s still our posture. Like, please do it for me. Please take care of everything. Maybe in your life, and certainly in mine, I have tons of responsibilities. Things that at the end of the day I’m like, who’s going to do all this? Me? I’m going to, I’m the mom, I have to do all of these things. I take my list and I turn it over to our Lord. I say, Jesus, I’m so overwhelmed by the uniforms for school. I need to source and the endless pit of trying to get to the bottom of our comcast problem and the emails that keep coming you, you do it, Lord, take care of everything.
And then feel relinquished in that freedom that he’s going to give me the energy he’s going to give me, the time. He’s going to give me the clarity of mind. If I stay close to Him, right by his side, hidden in the wound and His precious side, He will take care of it for us, not magically, but more importantly Miraculously through a deep healing of our union with Him, my friends, I’m praying so much with and for you, and I’m so delighted that you’re open to even being open. So be gentle on yourself today and when you don’t know what else to say, just continue to turn toward Lord and say, “Jesus, I trust you. You take care of everything.” And you’ll find that He actually really, truly. God bless you.
About Nell O’Leary
Nell O’Leary loves reminding people of their gifts and marvelousness. Her current work includes growing community for the Word on Fire Institute, contributing video content for Ascension Presents, assisting with Friends of the Bridegroom with Fr. John Burns, and writing content for the National Eucharistic Revival Newsletter. She served for 8.5 years as the Managing Editor for Blessed is She. She is an attorney-turned-writer, speaker, editor, and community maker. Her heart is for healing through encounter with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. She and her husband live with their five children in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Learn more about Nell at: www.nell-oleary.com and follow her on Instagram here.