Heal me, Please
Jesus, what else should I ask from You more than healing? Please release me from the recent illness that is tormenting me.
Outside the sun is shining, my God.
Life is pulsing.
And I am lying down exhausted with a fever and aches waiting for the return of health. I am torturing my own family. They are sick and tired of caring for me in my infirmity. They have high expenses. They are distressed at seeing my illness persist.
Omnipotent Lord, throw off this illness from me for good.
Bend the resistance of the viruses.
Add to the therapeutic power of the medicines.
Enlighten my physician so his diagnosis and the medicinal regimen he follows may be correct and appropriate.
Pick me up, Christ, from my sickbed, which I’ve been fastened to for so long as if by nails. Shake away my fever. Give me health.
During Your earthly life You healed so many chronic and serious illnesses. You passed through performing good works and healing (Acts 10:38).”
So often, Jesus, You had to run, to exhaust Your human self, to reach the sick and give them healing. But as for me, I don’t need anything more than one divine word of Yours.
Even that is not necessary. Your wish is enough. When You will it, in the same second I’ll be made well.
Come to me then, Incomparable Physician. Put an end to my time of trials.
Heal me, please, I beg You.
Reveal my Real Self to me
Lord, I constantly recognize that I don’t know myself. I myself ended up by being the more unknown and hidden from myself.
I am, however dominated by the desire to know myself. But without You I can’t accomplish much. So I also call upon Your love.
Reveal my real, true self to me.
Let my sight penetrate everything that I might examine myself in its fathomless depths. I want to investigate my soul as far as its distant corners, and I want to uncover its hidden creases.
O You, who examine heart and spirit (Psalms 7:10), don’t let life’s noises overcome me. Don’t let different daily concerns choke me and leave out the saintly work that is getting to know myself.
Help me discover and determine my faults. To become conscious of my weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Make me see clearly too the advantages You have given me, to be conscious of my strengths, to handle the talents that You have entrusted to me. To learn up to what point my abilities reach and which are the sensitive and vulnerable parts of my heart.
I ask You all these things, Christ, not out of a hollow curiosity, not out of a simple desire to know things. I want to come to understand myself, so that I can fix it, and rejuvenate it. So that I can help in the attempt You Yourself have made to purify and better me.
O Indefatigable, You ceaselessly work within me. You fight in the dark places of my soul in the labyrinths of my spirit. You labor, knock down and build, form and transform my inner world.
And many times I resist! Out of weakness and out of ignorance.
Please, bring me into contact with my real self. Give me courage to look at myself face to face, to study it in a ruthless way. To understand myself however much it may cost.
Lord give me air, give me light in the great diving that I am attempting into the dark, bottomless depths of my existence. Amen.
~Taken from Speaking to God, by His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. Speaking to God was originally published in Greek in 1960 by the Christian Student Union, Athens, Greece, and is now available in English.
