If you are sitting in a waiting room with a plastic bracelet on your wrist, one question may be louder than the test results. Does God still love me now? The short answer is yes. God loves you today, in this chair, before you have fixed a single thing, and nothing in your diagnosis changes that.
That sentence can sound like it belongs on a mug. Said to someone who has just heard the word “malignant”, it can sound like a lie. So I won’t just repeat it. This post is for the person in treatment and for the one who drives them there, and it looks at what two stories from the Gospels say when you read them slowly. If you want a single line to hold onto while you read, it is this: God loves you, and he did not wait for you to get well first.
Why “God Loves You” Is Hard to Believe in Treatment
Most of us grew up with some idea of God as a kind of examiner. Be good, say your prayers, go to Mass when you can, and things will go roughly right. Then a scan says otherwise, and the old arithmetic starts up on its own. What did I do? What didn’t I do? Who am I paying for?
I trained as a teacher of religion, and I think this is the question underneath most other religious questions. People ask it in a classroom, at a funeral, in a kitchen at midnight. It almost always comes with the tone of someone reading out a bill.
When you are sick you lose most of your ability to manage things. The folded-arms God, who waits to see if you’ll cope, becomes very hard to live with, because you can’t cope on demand any more. A God who loves you only while you are performing has no use for a person who is lying on a scanner table. So it matters which God you’ve been carrying around. The first month of my book is about swapping one for the other, and it starts with the sentence “God loves you.”
Say it slowly if you can. God loves you. Not the tidy version of you who kept every appointment and every resolution. You, this week.
Illness Is Not a Punishment
The disciples asked Jesus the same question we ask. They met a man who had been blind from birth, and they wanted the cause. In John 9 they say, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They assumed somebody must have done something.
Jesus doesn’t give them the answer they wanted. “This man didn’t sin, nor did his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him” (John 9:3, World English Bible). Read it twice. He takes the whole idea of a debt off the table, and then he gets to work.
This does not make illness good, and it does not explain it. Nobody in that chapter gets an explanation. What the verse takes away is the sentence I did this to myself, or I’m being made to pay. If you carry that sentence, you can put it down here. God loves you in the same way on the day of a bad scan as on the day of a good one.
That is one of the better bible verses God loves you can be set beside, even though the words never appear in it. Jesus doesn’t say “I love you” to the man born blind before he heals him. He just stops, sees him, and treats him as someone worth the trouble.
What the Catechism says about illness
The Church is honest about how hard this is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that in illness “man experiences his powerlessness, his limitations, and his finitude” (paragraph 1500). It admits that illness can lead to “anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God” (1501). It also says illness can lead a person to discern what is not essential and to turn toward what is. It doesn’t ask you to feel fine.
It also says that Christ made the sick his own. He said, “I was sick and you visited me,” and he identifies himself with them (1503). And the Catechism adds, in a line I find oddly comforting, that “he did not heal all the sick” (1505). If God loves you and you are not healed, nothing has gone wrong with his love. Being unhealed is not evidence that you’re unloved, and the Catechism never says it is.
The Father Who Runs
Now the second story. A younger son asks for his share of the property, goes off, and spends all of it. When the famine comes he ends up feeding pigs. He decides to go home and he prepares a speech on the road: “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. I am no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.”
Here is what happens next, in the words of Luke 15:20:
“He arose and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
The father is watching the road, and that is how God loves you too: by looking for you before you arrive. He sees the son while he is still a figure in the distance. Commentators point out that a man of his age and standing would normally not have run, because to run he would have had to gather up his robe in front of the neighbours. He does it anyway.
God loves you before you’ve finished your speech
Compare the speech the son rehearses with the one he actually gets to give. In verse 21 he says the first part: I have sinned against heaven and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. The last line, the offer to be a hired servant, never comes out. His father is already calling for the robe.
God loves you before the speech, and the speech doesn’t change it. Most people with a diagnosis write a version of it anyway. I smoked. I skipped the screening. I wasn’t kind to my daughter. This is the bill. You practise it in the car park, in the shower, at three in the morning. The story is built so that the speech never gets finished. The hug comes first, then the best robe, a ring for his hand, sandals for his feet, and a calf for the table. He earns none of it.
This is what I mean when I say God loves you before you have earned anything. I mean the order of events in the story. The father runs, and then the son speaks. If you are asking what the prodigal son means, I think that order is most of the answer.
Notice, too, who does the dressing. Servants bring the robe and put it on him. If you’ve worn a hospital gown, you know what it is to be handled by other people’s hands, and how it can feel like a loss. In the story it is the first sign of being welcomed home.
God Loves You, and So Does the One Beside You
If you are the caregiver, you may recognise the other son better. The elder brother did everything right. He stayed, he worked, and when the music started he stood in the yard and wouldn’t go in. His complaint is an accountant’s sentence: “these many years I have served you.”
The father in the story loves this son as much as the other one, so God loves you whichever son you are. Many caregivers keep a ledger without meaning to. The holidays, the sleep, the job, the evenings: a column fills up quietly, and sometimes it turns into anger at the illness, at the patient, at relatives who send messages and never come. If that’s you, read the end of the story again. The father does not scold the elder son. He goes outside and begs him to come in. “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
God loves you in the chair as well as in the bed, and he sees what you are carrying. If you want some practical words for this role, there is more on caring for someone with cancer on this site. For now, one small thing. Don’t argue with a patient who says I brought this on myself. Say, “I’m not keeping that list. I’m here.”
A Short Prayer for Today
You don’t need many words to pray when God loves you already. If you can’t find your own, borrow these.
Father, I have a speech ready, and I don’t want you to hear the end of it. You saw me while I was still far off. Let me be caught before I have finished explaining. And if I’m the one who stayed and kept count, come out to the yard for me too. Amen.
If even that is too much, say only: God loves you, and that includes me. Start there. God loves you on the days you can say it and on the days you can’t. Some days it is the only prayer you can manage, and it is enough.
Let Go into Love spends its entire first month on this one sentence. If you’d like to read the rest, you’ll find the book here, and a free novena to begin with if you want something short for this week.