Lent starts February 14, and so does the RESCUED Blessed is She Lent devotional. This year, you’ll be receiving an excerpt from the Lent devotional every day in your inbox (in lieu of our regular daily devo). We want to pray with one heart and one mind as the BIS sisterhood. If you prefer to have the book, purchase the 2024 Blessed is She Lent devotional RESCUED right here. Right upon purchase, you’ll receive a link to come into the free Blessed is She app to walk through the Lenten season with us in daily live prayer, small groups, and more. Together let’s look to the Lamb of God who came to rescue each one of us.
Christ took away our infirmities and bore our diseases. // Alleluia Verse (see Matthew 8:17)
Late November 2022, I watched my mother do physical therapy exercises in my dining room. She scrunched up sheet after sheet of magazine pages with her left hand. The tears running down her cheeks, however, were not from physical pain, but a result of the worry she felt over what her increasing hand weakness might mean.
Several months later we learned that she has the incurable degenerative nerve disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). And since then my family has been accompanying my mother through her increasing loss of physical ability as the nerves throughout her body die. We do not know how many months or years she has left, only that she will become less and less independent, needing more and more care.
She came to visit us again this past October, a few days after she returned from a trip to Lourdes, France. While we had prayed for a physical healing, we knew that the grace of the miraculous spring in Lourdes is more often a healing of the soul than of the body. Yet the grace she received there was not unlike that of Saint Peter’s mother-in-law, who physically rose from her sick bed to serve Jesus and His disciples in today’s Gospel (see Mark 1:30-31). For in my mother’s faithful acceptance of this suffering, she is serving Him through her witness of the goodness of God in her life. Her love for Him shines forth in her gratitude for each small blessing, in the words of faith she speaks about her diagnosis, in her desire to live her last months as she spent all of her adult life: devoted to regular prayer and spiritual conversations with her loved ones.
Her soul is being healed each passing day as her body surrenders its ability to her disease. And she increases in her desire to serve God with her whole being, speaking of God’s goodness and offering her suffering. For when I see her suffer and decline, I see Christ bearing her disease with her. And He will take it away when He leads her by the hand into eternity.
Susanna Spencer holds a master's in Theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville and is the Devotions Editor for Blessed is She. She is a freelance writer and editor and a teacher-in-training living with her philosopher husband and four kids in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She loves reading theology, attending beautiful liturgies, cooking delicious food, and casually following baseball. She is the author of all of the Blessed is She Gospel Meditation Studies. She was narrator for Found: Advent With the Good Shepherd and Rescued: Lent With the Lamb of God and a contributing author and editor for our children’s devotional prayer book, Rise Up. She is the Theological Editor of the Blessed Conversations Studies. Find out more about her here.
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