In the realm of the Catholic faith, the charism of healing holds a significant place. It empowers believers to express God’s love through the restoration of health and the curing of illnesses. While this particular gift may elicit mixed emotions, healing can be manifested through any willing soul.
Discovering Healing Charism
Firstly, whether it is through physical, inner, or relational healing, our charisms bear supernatural fruit. However, it is important to understand that possessing a specific gift does not guarantee perfection or supernatural abilities. Imperfect outcomes should not deter us, as they can serve as opportunities to draw closer to the Lord.
Testing the Charism of Healing
We must discern our charisms intentionally. The assessment may not accurately reflect our potential due to a lack of knowledge or exposure to certain gifts. However, if even a low-ranking result ignites joy and excitement within us, we should give this charism a chance. It is the Holy Spirit who provides clarity during the testing phase.
Perseverance in Prayer
However, the journey of healing is not without challenges. While we may pray for it and sometimes witness miraculous occurrences, at other times, our prayers seem unanswered. Do not lose heart, for discouragement does not come from God. Instead, go deeper in our relationship with the Lord and access a new depth of healing and Holy Spirit anointing. Healing takes various forms – physical, inner, and relational – and God’s ways are beyond our comprehension.
A Spectrum of Faith Experiences
The spectrum of faith experiences affects the manifestation of this charism. While baptized individuals may have seen healing, those in the middle of the spectrum may not have recognized its potential. It is those who have invested more spiritually, with a deeper awareness and effort in seeking healing through prayer and inner work, who may have encountered a greater frequency of supernatural experiences.
Finally, the charism of healing is a powerful gift that God invites us to explore. In the midst of uncertainty and imperfect outcomes, our willingness to pray for healing can lead to remarkable encounters with the Holy Spirit. As we continue to discern and develop our charisms, let us remember that supernatural healing is not about our abilities but rather the work of God through us. Let us trust in His divine plan and persevere, for the journey of refining our charisms is an ongoing process of faithfulness and perseverance.
Learn more at Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to Charisms for Catholics. My name is Jill Simons and I’m the executive director at Many Parts Ministries where we equip the Body of Christ by helping people learn about and discern their charisms, which is really another word for spiritual gifts. When you discern your charisms, you’re able to see how the Holy Spirit is already active in your life and where he is inviting you to further build the Church. Let’s dive in. Let’s dive into healing. This is one of those maybe a little bit scary ones for some people. I think this charism and one other that we’ll get to later in going through the individual ones are the ones where people are most likely to be kind of stratified based on where their frame of reference is. So I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But to start with the definition, healing is about empowering an individual to be an expression of God’s love through curing illness and restoring health.
Jill Simons [00:01:09]:
So this could be physical healing, this could be inner healing, and this could be relational healing and this can be applied in a variety of ways. But what we’re looking for in testing the charism is, is there supernatural healing happening that could only come from God? And is this person a very specific conduit of that healing, whether through whatever means? So I’ve talked before, and if you go back to the last episode before we started doing all of the individual charisms, I talk about really like the three levels of the spectrum of people coming into the charism assessment. You have people who are unbaptized that this is really just going to show you where their nature is geared towards. You have people that are moderately involved in their faith. They have received the grace of the sacraments. They do have charisms, but they’ve never really like taken them out into open water to see what they could do before. And so there’s likely less historical evidence of supernatural fruit. And you have people who have been walking very intimately with the Lord and are what we’re going to call more spiritually advanced.
Jill Simons [00:02:23]:
I don’t love that term, but you get what I’m saying, where this has been something that they’ve been going after intentionally, very intentionally. And so obviously this is a spectrum, these three things are a huge spectrum of where people are at in their faith. Obviously, there’s a clear delineation between people that are unbaptized and people that have been baptized. But once you cross over into the baptized area, there is a very wide range of life and faith experiences that people are bringing to the table. So people who are going to fall in more of that middle sector of the spectrum are highly unlikely to have supernatural historical evidence of healing. It’s not impossible, but it’s highly unlikely because there is a high likelihood that they did not know that that was a thing. There is a high likelihood that they did not ever pursue that because that wasn’t in their world of possibilities. As opposed to people who maybe have invested a lot more spiritually and intentionally, there may have been a greater awareness that that’s a possibility and a greater effort to kind of press into that by actually asking for supernatural healing, praying for somebody else to receive supernatural healing, going through inner healing, et cetera.
Jill Simons [00:03:48]:
So whether people rank highly on the assessment for both healing, and then also prophecy that we’re going to talk about later, is frequently colored by what they thought was possible to the point of taking the assessment. The rest of the charisms are a lot more built on sort of natural inclinations. Now, healing and prophecy are also very built on natural inclinations, but like I said, when you don’t know something is a thing, you’re not very likely to try and do it. And so a great example of this is myself with prophecy. I’ll probably retell this story when we get to the prophecy episode, but that is something that I have always been very oriented towards and that has always really been an exciting possibility for me. But it wasn’t until somebody was like, no, that’s okay, you can pray for that, you can go after that, that I was like, really? Okay. And I kind of was full steam ahead into it. So I ranked incredibly lowly or low not lowly.
Jill Simons [00:04:51]:
I ranked incredibly low for prophecy when I was a young person because that was sort of out of the realm of possibility for me in my mind. And who knows, maybe I actually had not been given the charism yet at this point. There’s not really any way to go back and know that. But as soon as that was opened up for me as a real possibility, that was when I started going after that. And then immediately it was like a switch flipped and there was just a huge amount of supernatural fruit of going after prophecy in my life. And it’s very similar with healing where as soon as someone knows that it’s okay to lay hands on someone and pray for them, if that’s something that excites them, a lot of times that is because their nature is oriented towards that and they are like, oh, let’s go. And they get excited about doing this in a big way and maybe even daily way in their lives. So that’s the grain of salt I want you to look at your assessment results with and a question you can ask yourself to kind of double check is, does the possibility of the Lord supernaturally healing someone through me, fill me with joy? That’s a great checkpoint question.
Jill Simons [00:06:10]:
If you’re like, not really and you did not rank highly for it on the assessment, then there is a higher likelihood that that’s not one of your gifts. But even if you ranked low for healing, but saying, does the possibility of the Lord healing someone physically, emotionally, relationally through me bring me joy, excite me if you’re like, Heck yes, this is something I want you to take a second look at and spend some real time testing even if you ranked low on the assessment for it. Because your results might have been artificially colored by the fact that you didn’t know that this was possible. And that’s not on you. If you don’t know, you don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Jill Simons [00:06:56]:
I say that all the time and that’s a huge thing with charisms. A lot of people don’t know what their charisms are so they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. And that’s really where the importance of education comes in. Things like this podcast and the other resources that we create because we want you to have the tools to know so that you can test this out. So circling back to more healing specific conversation, this can come in a variety of ways. This is not simply I lay hands on someone and their cancer is gone. Is it that? Yes. It is also that if you did not know that, that still happens and that is possible. It does and it is.
Jill Simons [00:07:38]:
I have seen it myself. And this is something that really flows again out of the identity of God as Divine Physician, as healer. He wants to heal his people but he wants to invite us to help. And so if the healing is one of your charisms, again, this is one of your chores in the family of God. This is where you have been invited to really serve the larger family of God. And so this could look like a totally untrained person laying hands on someone and praying for any of those three types of healing and the person receiving it. This could be someone who’s been trained in prayer ministry and is especially supernaturally gifted to walk with people through a process of physical, inner, or relational healing. This could also be an RN, a nurse, a chiropractor, a doctor, fill in the blank medical practitioner who has a special call on their life to be a healer and they see supernatural healing when they answer that call and when they minister to their patients.
Jill Simons [00:08:45]:
Now this is a good place to mention that again, across the charisms, just because you have a charism for something does not mean you’re going to bat 1000. You will have times that you go to use and show up in your charism and it’s not perfect and it’s not beautiful and it’s not supernatural. That does not invalidate your charism. That is not something that makes it less than or not actually there. It is something that usually is an invitation to draw even closer to the Lord. So what I find a lot of times is during the testing phase when people are really being intentional about testing what their charisms are, the Holy spirit will be really clear.
Jill Simons [00:09:30]:
Like things that are your charism will have supernatural fruit, things that are not, will not. And it’s very clear as you’re discerning your charism. After you move out of discernment and into commitment, there might be periods of time where the Lord is really inviting you to faithfulness into perseverance and there might not be perfect every single time your charism is working exactly how you expect. So this is another important thing to mention with healing is that there might be times that you go to pray for someone for healing. You lay hands on someone, minister to someone and they are not healed. Does that mean you don’t have a healing charism? No, it does not. It means that you are really on a refining journey, just like all of us. And so we’re looking for the frequency and kind of the average outcome to be higher than normal for us to really show this charism. But we’re not expecting it to be perfect every single time.
Jill Simons [00:10:33]:
And so that’s an important thing to keep in mind. A lot of people will go to pray for someone for healing after having discerned this charism and be all gung ho and then have the person not be healed. And immediately just like I was wrong, that was stupid to think that I had that charism. What was I thinking? That is not helpful, that is not responding to the Holy Spirit in that moment, because that’s feeding into discouragement, which that does not come from God, as we know, because we’ve covered the charism of encouragement. God’s character is so much more towards encouraging us to persevere. And so instead of looking at it as invalidating, that’s what we want to look at it as is that this is actually our call to persevere. The Lord is inviting us to go deeper with Him to really, a lot of times, access a new depth of healing, a new depth of the Holy Spirit anointing in your life. And I have examples of people that I know extremely gifted with charisms of healing, where this has happened, where they have really been going after healing. Maybe they saw some, but not to the extent that they were hoping for.
Jill Simons [00:11:44]:
And in their perseverance, that’s really where they saw the fullness of the fruit of the healing coming from the Holy Spirit, because God was wanting to draw them deeper into Himself to open up that gift even more. Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics. If you would like to learn more about your charisms or begin your own discernment journey, head to our website at manypartsministries.com where you can download our free PDF guide to all 24 charisms and also begin your own journey by taking our charism assessment.
