Two New Books Help Readers Heal With Jesus, Through Scripture
“He was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that makes us whole, by his wounds we were healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
We are healed (sometimes!) by our doctor. We are healed (again, sometimes!) by our therapist. And we are healed (always!) by Jesus. It might not be right away, and it may not look the way we’d like it to, but Jesus always heals.
If you want to know what it looks like to find healing with Christ, two new books can help.
God’s Love Is Healing
Love Heals: A Biblical Plan to Restore Our Emotions, Memories, Souls, and Bodies is Sonia Corbitt’s new “flagship book” from Ave Maria Press (disclaimer: Ave Maria Press is also my publisher). Corbitt, known as the “Catholic Evangelista,” is a speaker, author, and the developer of the LOVE the Word Bible study method. She’s also a wife and a mother. Love Heals is a distillation of her work and an exploration of her belief that the first and greatest commandment (Mark 12:30) is the key to healing:
God commands that we love him, not for his benefit, but for ours: the first and greatest commandment is a template for whole-person healing. … We are commanded to love God, first, because love heals. We are healed by Love, for love.
Corbitt believes that “life is a constant litany of difficulties—and therefore a university of love.” We are profoundly changed by the events and people who hurt our hearts. But it is in those wounds, Corbitt says, that the Holy Spirit meets us, to heal us.
Each chapter in Love Heals delves into one aspect of healing, centered around one element of the greatest commandment and sharing examples of healing from the Bible:
With All Your Heart (Jesus heals the blind and teaches us how to see the truth.)
With All Your Soul (Jesus spiritually heals the Woman at the Well and heals us through the sacraments.)
With All Your Mind (Jesus heals the deaf and heals our toxic thinking.)
With All Your Strength (Jesus heals the paralytic and heals our bodies.)
Love Heals is a powerful book that enables the reader to use Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments to identify wounds and find healing in Jesus. It’s not just inspirational; it’s practical, too, filled with exercises and tools. And it’s meant not to be an end but to be a doorway to the ultimate book, the best book:
In the Bible, you will discover a heavenly Father who pursues you all your life with holy feet, grips you with the gentlest hands, searches you with sacred eyes, and flies you to heaven in cloudy visions of his face.
Journaling Toward Hope and Wholeness
The latest book in Allison Gingras’ series Stay Connected Journals for Catholic Women, published by Our Sunday Visitor, is Jesus Heals: Finding Hope, Wholeness, and Peace. Gingras is the director of digital evangelization for Family Rosary USA and CatholicMom.com (disclosure: I write for CatholicMom.com). She’s also a mother and the wife of a deacon. Jesus Heals includes stories of healing from her own life and from the Bible. Like Gingras’ other journals, Jesus Heals includes short chapters with reflections, Scripture study, and prayer and journaling prompts (as well as lined space to respond to those prompts).
“We can learn from the hemorrhaging woman’s faith,” Gingras writes. “Just as He did for her, Jesus allows us to reach out to Him—to touch His heart.” As she points out, we don’t need to know exactly how to pray; the Spirit will give us what we need (Romans 8:26). Still, having a guide like this journal is helpful in improving our self-awareness, our understanding of who Jesus is, and our relationship with Him.
We see in the Bible that the people “who were healed by Jesus didn’t keep the blessing of the moment to themselves but put it into some form of action,” Gingras writes. “We are called to do the same.”
As I work through my own healing (a lifelong process, to be sure!), in relationship with Jesus, I am grateful for writers like Gingras and Corbitt for sharing the blessing of their healing, putting it into action in books like these!
Taryn DeLong, co-president of Catholic Women in Business, co-wrote Holy Ambition: Thriving as a Catholic Woman at Work and at Home (Ave Maria Press) to help women hear and follow God’s unique calling for their life. Following her own calling, she currently spends much of her time caring for her two daughters, including homeschooling her preschooler. Since Taryn was a child, she’s called the Raleigh area home, and she and her husband are now raising their family in a small Raleigh suburb. In addition to supporting Catholic women, she's passionate about inclusion of people with disabilities in life, work, and (most importantly) the Church. She also enjoys reading and playing the piano. Connect with Taryn on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, her blog, or Substack.
