Episode #264 - Spiritual Healing

What does it take to be spiritual healed?  And what do our trials have to do with it.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #264 – Spiritual Healing.  I am your host Damon Socha.  Spiritual healing, what is it? We talk about it.  We appear to understand it.  But do we really.  If I asked you to explain spiritual healing, how would you describe it so that I fully understood what you meant.  I’ll give you moment to think about.  Most likely we look at it vaguely with mystical eyes.  Well it’s when your soul is hurting and the Savior comes and comforts you.  Yes that could be a definition but again it’s vague, mystical and limited.  We certainly do not understand how the Lord works and so we regularly just place it into the mysteries box and go about our lives.  However, that does not help our souls at least to understand what is occurring when we say that we need spiritual healing.  To charge it to the mysteries may places us in a problematic situation when the healing does not come.  We wonder why the mystic nature did not come or work.  As Elder Bednar has stated, and yes I am paraphrasing, “We treat God like a vending machine.”  We put in our effort and pours out the blessings.  Except when we put in significant effort, we expect the same from the Savior.  In addition, we have of determined and even dictated how we would like to be healed spiritually.  Essentially because of our vending machine attitude we become frustrated when the blessing appears stuck.  We try everything to obtain the blessing that we desire and regularly the healing we seek does not come in the way or the timing we expect.

But what does it mean to be injured or hurt spiritually?  To know this you must understand a little about the premortal world first.  Before we came here, we were made in the image of God spiritually.  This means he took intelligence, what he calls light and truth, a consciousness and placed it in a spiritual body where it could become far more intelligent and have far greater abilities to act for itself.  After birth the spiritual body grew to its full capacity.  This growing efforted including significant teaching, training and agency to allow for us to prepare for mortality.  Our spirits became so fully developed that we were ready for the trials of mortality, which was the final step to Godhood.  However, as we look back into the process of our spiritual birth and development we continue to see three parts to our spiritual bodies.  The light of the spiritual body, the truth of the spiritual body and the spiritual body that houses this light and truth.  While we don’t fully understand the nature of light and truth, I think that the words to describe them give us some understanding.  We need truth to be able to act and have agency.  Truth is knowledge of things as they were, are and are to come.  Truth allows choice and the light is our motivational source.  Light is similar to what we might call our emotions.  It is our core beliefs brought into action.  We can have all the truth of the universe but it does no good without a motivational source.  Light provides the energy and motivation to be obedient to the truth we know.

Now one thing about mortality is interesting.  We always believe that we are right.  Even when we know we might be wrong, we rationalize it to be right so that we can act upon it.  Arguments are built upon this premise that we all think our motivations, desires and knowledge are correct.  We tend stick to what we know to be right because our body has a method of negative punishment we call guilt.  Guilt is simply when we act out of character to what we know to be right.  Now what we know to be correct can vary widely per individual.  I think this world demonstrates this principle openly.  We even argue about things in a doctrine centralized church whether they be right or wrong.  Needless to say truth can be relative in this world.  But it is not in our Father’s Kingdom.  Because we lived there and learned truth from the source of truth, we deep down in our hearts have a good sense of what is true and what is not.  What we don’t all have is similar spiritual motivations to accomplish what is true.  And motivations and desires is where it really counts.  We can have all the truth in the world but if we have no desire to act upon it, we will not.

What we see then with spiritual healing is that we are working to heal two portions or our spirit.  The first is recognition of truth.  The second is the realignment of our motivations and desires.  We are essentially healing our light and truth or what we call our core intelligence.  When we act out of accordance with perfect truth and light, we cause damage to occur to our spiritual nature.  When we act in corrupt ways two things occur, the heaven lose confidence in our ability to be light God, and we ever so slightly change our spiritual nature towards the sin we have committed.  Over time, if we continue to commit the same error, it will become a part of our spiritual nature and be difficult to root out later.  So every day is a fight to learn and maintain the truth and the light of our spiritual nature.

Now let’s talk about our mortal bodies in this process.  First let’s remember that our mortal bodies are a shell and they do not work without a spirit.  Our mortal bodies are a covering for our spirit that provides additional powers of procreation and our ability to live as god.  But it comes with some interesting motivations we call the natural man.  These motivations are provided for our survival in a troubled world but they can cause us serious problems when it comes to the truth and light we have cultivated in our spirits.  Our body has three main motivations that are meant for our survival and these desires are very strong.  They are procreation, food and shelter, and fight or flight mode.  Our bodies also have some secondary genetic desires that fall into the same category of as the first.  We can be naturally drawn to these types of desires and motivations depending upon our spiritual nature.  All these desires primary or secondary are self-centered in their nature.  They are focused on the individual and not the overall benefit of everyone.  The secondary motivations of power, fame and fortune all rely upon selfish motivations.  And so a spirit with light and truth is placed into a natural body that in many ways fights against the light and true we know.  And this isn’t a small fight.  It is a heavy wight fight where the spirit can struggle to overcome the powerful emotions brought about by our bodies.

We should stop to mention one thing here.  We did not all come to the earth with the same devotion to light and truth.  If fact, many individuals didn’t learn their spiritual lessons very well at all.  And we see them take hold of the emotions and motivations of the body wholeheartedly.  Why talk about this because we all in some sense did not come to earth perfect.  We all had parts of our spiritual nature that needed tuning and change.  We needed to come to earth to drive out these problematic motivations that we had developed before this life.  The Lord knew that we needed to be able to have a pathway to do so.  He also knew that our mortal bodies if not weaken in some way that would drive us back to the Lord would carry us far away from him.  If we were consistently protected and given health, energy, motivation and agency to its fullest, I dare say that our spiritual weaknesses would be weakened even further by our selfish mortal nature.  Meaning you can’t place someone who is spiritually weak in a selfish mortal body and simply expect that they will learn the lessons necessary to become exalted.  One the contrary you would expect them to become more selfish.  So the Lord knew that he would need to provide specific weaknesses in our lives so that we would come to him seeking healing and he would heal more than our mortal bodies but our spiritual nature.

The problem is that spiritual nature takes time to change.  Yes the Lord could do it in an instant but would it stick.  Would the change be permanent.  Unlikely.  We need consistent pressure on our mortal body so that our spiritual nature will make the necessary changes.  Now even with a solid spiritual nature and a weakness to help us, we would still not make any change without the Lord.  It is the Lord who changes our nature not ourselves.  We do our part and the Lord does his.  Yes we can change our behaviors but our nature is the Lord’s universe.  He knows best how to heal the wounded soul and to bring it back to spiritual life.  What we see in this life is that it takes monumental amounts of effort and time to make even small changes in our nature.  That is why our mental and physical illness can last for so very long in our lives.  They change our nature ever so softly over time in a manner that the change is permanent.

So when we look at mental and emotional illness, chronic illness and those trials that last for long periods of time, we should recognize the hand of the Lord in changing our nature.  Now many of you know that I have been fairly sick over the last four years.  My chronic autoimmune illness has consistently cause me to be confined to bed and rest.  I have struggled deeply to understand why the Lord would do this.  I have lost jobs, homes, friendships, family and a host of other things in my life including my ability to work.  I have felt at times that the Lord has taken everything from me and I struggle to see value in it.  Throughout almost 20 years the Lord has seen fit to afflict me with serious pains and sufferings that do not appear to have any real value in my life.  I have struggled just to work and to keep up with this podcast.  My relationships have suffered.  My family has suffered and in addition to the pains, I have suffered deep and abiding mental health challenges associated with depression and anxiety.  I have seen the end of my rope and the pit of despair too many times to count.  I can’t even enumerate the number of times I have thought about suicide.  Although I am currently doing just fine in that sense.  How could such an illness have any value.

However, I have noticed a significant change of heart and love for my fellow man.  No it doesn’t make sense that an autoimmune illness coupled with depression and anxiety would provide a spiritual feast but in some ways it has.  It feel far closer to the Savior that I have ever felt in my life, including my mission.  I feel peace far more often and I hear revelation on a scale I have never experienced it.  Our sufferings do not need to be in vain.  Even when we cannot understand exactly how the change occurs given our trials, we can understand that the trial is critical to the changing of our spiritual nature.

If you have the trial of mental and emotional illness, or an accident, or a long term illness that has brought it forward in your life, you have been chosen to experience the mighty change of heart talked about by Alma.  However, trials can be experienced in many different ways.  For instance, Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel all experienced the exact same trials over and eight year journey to a place they called Bountiful.  Nephi found great spiritual awakenings and strengths.  Laman and Lemuel could only see the pain and misery and had little to no change of nature.  We must come to the Savior and allow for him to make the change.  We can certainly resist it and I would expect that if we do resist the Savior the trial will last much longer than is needed.

Now you might ask could the Lord do it another way.  Could he not heal my soul in another method that doesn’t include such pain and suffering.  Do you not think that if he could he would?  The Lord does not rejoice in the pain and suffering of his people.  He understands the spiritual purification is causes so he allows for it but he does not desire that we have mental illness, chronic illness, PTSD from abuse and so many other concerns in our lives.  He desire us to be happy but he knows that a beach vacation and a military boot camp do not teach the same type of discipline.  And so we spend our time training and learning rather than watching waves.  Don’t get me wrong, I grew up near the ocean and love it.  The Lord does desire that we get a vacation once in a while.  But the reality of eternity and exaltation is that he cannot allow for our vacation status to remain for long.  We must essentially pass from one trial to another with perhaps small breaks between.  The Lord has stated clearly that if he does not chastise his people they do not remember him or their purpose here on the earth.  Chastisement in this case does not mean punishment but more of a pruning so that we can become more fruitful spiritually and so that the Lord can heal our hearts and spiritual nature.  So is your current trial necessary.  Yes and it is more than necessary it is critical to your salvation.  May the Lord bless you to see him in your trials.  Until next week do your part so that he can do his.