NOTHING is better and healthier for a human being than a holy life and a whole heart given to God!

The True and overwhelmingly beautiful Presence of God is so thrilling and satisfying; He in Himself tarnishes and destroys the glamor, lure and power of sin. He restores souls, identities, sets people free from the captivity of addictions and cravenness. Malachi 4 - Healing is in His wings.

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This was posted by a reader at Kendall Harmon's TitusOneNine blog.

Jay Geary, a member of the Doulos Chapter of Order of St. Luke, attends First United Methodist Church in Lakeland. He shares this testimony:

We prayed for a gentleman who was a client of mine who also had the same type of cancer I did but much more serious in that he had to have surgery, in addition to chemo and radiation.  He also had a stomach feeding tube like I did and dropped almost 60 lbs.  The last time I saw him at my office in late March 2006, he looked like death warmed over and was telling me he wasn't sure he was going to make it.   I told him he needed to hang on, and I and others would continue to pray for him. 

I will confess that I was not as diligent as I should have been in praying for him, and I hadn't seen or heard from him in the interim.  Frankly, I wasn't sure whether or not he was alive; however, I received a phone call from him yesterday.  

 He said he was "cancer free" according to his doctors and was regaining his health, weight and ability to eat.  He was looking forward to getting back to work shortly.  He said he wanted to thank me. I told him that was GREAT news and I was thankful to God for healing him. 

Please lift up my friend in your prayers for his continued health and, more importantly, a closer relationship with Jesus.  Finally,  please lift me up in your prayers for forgiveness for not being as steadfast as I should have been in "staying" with this man's situation in my own prayers for others.   I thank Jesus that He intervened in my friend's life, because his situation was - at least to all appearances - very serious indeed.

God's love is a healing love, and healing isn't always comfortable. It heals in a surgical sense, and the scalpel can hurt. It's more comfortable to avoid those times of authentic confrontation with God, which can rattle us so deeply.

Yet God is unwilling to leave us as we are, confused and mired in sin. To receive God's healing we must examine and admit our failings, the things we'd rather ignore or dismiss with "I just can't help it," or "God accepts me anyway." We must not just resolve to do better, we must actually do better. We must expect that there will always be new layers of unexpected sin under the old ones, and that we will never outgrow the identity "sinner." Yet there is peace, joy even, in admitting this truth. After all, Jesus came only to save sinners; the righteous, he said, can take care of themselves.

from Frederica Mathewes-Greene, "The Illumined Heart" (Paraclete Press 2001)