I have spent my entire adult life surrounded by the most broken people. I have walked with sexual abuse and rape victims. I served as a 9/11 relief worker to the families of those murdered at the Pentagon. I walked with combat Veterans who were sole survivors of IED blasts. Listened to Marines and soldiers haunted by nightmares and metaphorical ghosts. I’ve counseled young people from broken, abusive, and addicted families. I’ve ministered to the sick and the spiritually oppressed. I told a priest once after visiting the sick at the hospital: “The suffering are my people.”
The suffering are my people because they are Christ’s people. They are my people, too, because I am one of them. Even as I have walked with people suffering the deepest of agonies, I have been broken by my own. In a moment of immense vulnerability, that still has a tinge of shame, I confided to a young person I was spiritually counseling recently that 9/11 left me a complete wreck. I shared that, at 23, I spend 5 weeks in a private posh mental health hospital in London as a result. It was this experience of seemingly complete brokenness, at the bottom of a deep abyss, where the Lord began His healing work in my life.
I can remember a very clear moment when I first arrived at the hospital, sitting on the floor in the back corner of my bedroom. It was a beautiful but simple European bedroom with high ceilings in a former castle. How the military got a contract with this hospital I will never know, but I am thankful to God for it. Two doctors came into my room to check on me after I had slept for 3 days straight. I was unsure and completely undone, hugging my knees to my chest.
The psychiatrist was a kindly Australian man, and the other was a young British doctor who was completing his 6-month mental health rotation. I remember that moment vividly because it was the moment when the Lord reached out to me in the darkness. It was the moment when the Lord began to teach me that it was in my poverty, weakness, and brokenness that He would be able to heal me and use me for His work later on.
I had bought the lie that I had to do it all on my own. I lived the lie that as a woman I needed to be tough like a man. I believed that weakness was the enemy. All those lies collapsed under the heaping rubble of the terrorist attack I had endured and responded to. No 20-year-old is equipped for what I witnessed and lived through. I tried with all my might to do it on my own. I tried to keep moving forward and get past it. I couldn’t do it, so three years after 9/11, I collapsed under the weight of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
It’s not easy for me to share this period of my life, even in the Church. The Church today is very much influenced by the American lie that we can “do it ourselves” and that we must never show weakness—all of which is the deadly sin of pride. This is one of the reasons we struggle to build deeper communion, because no one can know we don’t have it all figured out. This is not Christian in the least. The people who claim these lies are the ones who would have been telling the blind beggar or the leper looking for healing from Christ to be quiet and stop pestering the Master.
We are not called to have it all together. We are not called to do it ourselves. In fact, the Lord often has to allow immense suffering in our lives to teach us that we must surrender radically and depend on Him. Any strength in us is His alone. I was reminded of this truth in a powerful way as I shared this story with the young person sitting across from me.
There is no reason I should still be standing, let alone serving in the capacities I serve in by God’s grace. It is all God’s doing. After enduring 9/11 and PTSD during my 20s, my 30s were not any easier. I lost 4 babies, suffered from hormone-induced post-partum for nearly 4 years, my husband was deathly ill for 3 years, and I endured many personal hardships and rejections. I started my 40s with the loss of my 5th baby and started serving in larger ministries, which always comes with a mix of joys and sorrows.
Now in my mid-forties, I look back at that young woman sitting in the corner in astonishment. I am amazed and grateful for how much healing Christ has done in my life. This past weekend, I stood on a stage with the chaplain I work with in front of 1,700 college and high school students—with total peace and joy. It was bittersweet, since the Lord is calling me out of that ministry at the end of this semester, but I never could have seen myself in a place of such profound spiritual strength, peace, healing, and joy. It is a testament to the healing love and mercy of Christ.
The Christian path is not the same as the world’s. It is the most broken, the most lost, the most impoverished, the most addicted, and the most afraid whom the Lord wants to work wonders through. He can’t work great healing through those who think they can do it themselves or those who wrongly believe that they must put on a front of having it all together. I used to be that person, and that mentality leads to hardness of heart, blindness, and pride.
What a profound privilege it is that the Lord sends me the most broken people. People who think they are unlovable. The ones who have been discarded by others, including other Catholics. I’ve been in their shoes. I know when they come to me it is because the Lord wants to heal them. He wants to take the wounds from their scourging and crucifixion and glorify those wounds before others. It is precisely in our woundedness where the Lord brings about resurrection. I have told every person I’ve ministered to that their specific wounds will become glorified by Christ so they can go out to help save souls. Those specific wounds are where Christ will use them to help save and heal others.
It is within the lens of all the suffering souls the Lord has sent my way that I began to understand and embrace my own suffering. I can thank the Lord for using that suffering to draw me closer to Him. I can praise Him for using that suffering to reach others in the darkest places imaginable. It is in that suffering that I can see the redemption of the Cross and how the long years of suffering paved the way to Resurrection and Pentecost.
My suffering is how the Lord uses me in His plan for the salvation of souls, and the same is true for you. I can pour the living water of Christ into hearts and minds who are suffering because I have suffered. I can walk with Christ into dark places and shed His light in their lives, not because I have it all figured out, but because I too have been in the darkness. I know the abyss, and I know what it is like for Christ to show up.
I also know what it is like for my Mother to come in the darkest moment. When the night terrors, nightmares, and sleep paralysis from the PTSD raged the fiercest in the darkest part of the night, She would come. She has been Star of the Sea, Our Lady of Sorrows, and Virgin Most Powerful for many years in my life. After Our Lord, She is the one I point the most broken towards, along with her holy spouse, St. Joseph.
The Lord has to turn our worldly view of things on its head. I thought I had to be strong and have it all together. I thought weakness was my greatest enemy and that my tears were a failure. The Merciful Lord taught me that He can only heal me when I am most broken and surrender everything to Him. As long as I tried to do it myself, He couldn’t bring His healing love into the dark places within me.
This is why in the spiritual realm it is the suffering ones who the Lord often uses to save the most souls. The person who hasn’t suffered or avoids suffering cannot relate to those who are suffering. In a culture as lost and broken as ours, we are turning a blind eye if we cannot see the tremendous suffering in people’s lives caused by divorce, addiction, abuse, pornography, loneliness, and many other evils of our day. Young people are not alright. The scientific data is revealing this reality to us.
I am surrounded by such beautiful brokenness. I get a front row seat to witnessing His healing power in people’s lives. When we run from the brokenness of others and our own brokenness, we miss the Resurrection. We cannot have the Resurrection without Crucifixion.
The suffering people in our lives are a gift. Our own suffering is a gift. Not because suffering in itself is good, but because it is the means by which the Lord heals and sanctifies us and others.
