Geared for battle - pt. 2

God has quite the sense of humor. The longer I live, the more true I find this to be. To take our frail human nature and armor us up for battle makes me want to giggle. Yep! It sends me into peals of laughter. I see this divine sense of humor everywhere and obviously He shared this with us, too. Have you ever seen a baboon's rump?!! It has a target on it! There's a type of mole that makes meatballs for it's dinner. I won't say what they are made of...I'll let you guess. My daughter has a book called, "Gross Out! Amazing facts about animals!"  This is where I heard about the mole. And owls that barf.

Years ago the Lord gave me this word from Holy Scripture,"My strength is made perfect in weakness."    This was a word that I really liked! Every time I felt weak interiorly or exteriorly this word would come back to me. It consoled me so much because I knew how frail my human nature was. I got a good laugh the other day when I read what "Myasthenia Gravis" meant. It's Latin and Greek in origin and translates into "grave muscle weakness". Maybe I am the only one that sees the humor in this but I think the Lord does, too :) In some people the disease only affects the face. In others it affects the entire body. This was me. My entire body was weak. I had trouble swallowing and even breathing sometimes. Right before I got healed I was having tremendous trouble controlling my face muscles. My eyelid would have tics that lasted all day. I had double vision often and pounding headaches. Working became almost impossible. Where's the humor in this you may ask? It sounds horrendous. What makes me laugh is that:
The whole time that I suffered from this disease God was strengthening my spiritual muscles! I am totally serious. Under the cover of our aches and pains God is doing marvelous work if we trust Him. Even our faults and failures are worked into His plans. He gears us up for battle. Gives our frail human nature His own strength...cloaks us with His Own Spirit. I knew this was going on. Not so much at the beginning but much more as time was going on.
 Illness is humbling, too. My bladder was so weak that I had to pee in a bucket sometimes because my husband was hogging the bathroom. He reads in there :) Just don't tell him I told you this. Sometimes I would be speaking to people and my eyelids would wack out. Nobody ever said anything, though. One of my sisters is a nurse and told me (after I got healed) that she saw this, so I'm assuming others noticed, also. I learned something about humility through all this. Believing you are too weak for God to use is NOT humility. It is pride. Humility is believing that God's power can work through a ROCK if this is His inclination. And if this rock is ME - thanking Him for it. Humility isn't pretending that you don't have any gifts, it's accepting the gifts and thanking the GIVER. It is acknowledging His work in each and every one of us and knowing it's from Him.
The more we get to know Our Lord the more we realize how little we actually know. God gives us many weapons because He wants us in heaven with Him. Our frailty, once we see it and acknowledge that we need the Lord, becomes a well that God can fill with His own strength and power. Next week I hope to write about the actual armor that God puts on us - through both Scripture and Sacred Tradition we have absolute assurance that He does this.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell in me.    Cor. 12:9
"...for when I am weak, then I am strong."     Cor. 12:10