“Christ-centered healing is some of the hardest work that you will ever do.”
There are a number of misconceptions about Christ-Centered healing. Perhaps the most pervasive one is the idea that faith-based healing is a kind of “passive process,” that it just happens if we’re in the right location, or if we just say the right number of prayers—but that’s couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Christ-centered healing is some of the hardest work that you will ever do.” So says, Carrie Wrigley, a licensed therapist who frequently integrates faith-based principles into her counseling practice. She says that people frequently misunderstand the idea behind Christ-Centered Healing. Primarily, many people assume that Christ-Centered healing is an “instantaneous” process—that it happens suddenly.
“It would be nice if that were the case,” says Carrie Wrigley. “But emotional challenges are built layer by layer, over the process of time, with lots of different factors, and they tend to be healed in exactly the same way, little by little, over the process of time.” She then adds that “Christ-Centered healing isn’t typically so much a matter of instant results, like turning on a light-switch, for example. It tends, far more often, to be like the sun coming up over the mountain—gradually, a little bit at a time…it is very much a gradual, step-by-step process.”
During an interview (see video below) Carrie elaborated on the misconception that Christ-Centered Healing is a passive process: “I think a lot of that misconception also is derived from the way we read a lot of the Bible stories about the healing that the Savior extended during His mortal lifetime. The verses that we read [are] usually two to seven verses, they outline this beautiful, miraculous healing process that makes it sound like it’s this instant transformation of the person’s experience.
“But if you think carefully about even those stories there were steps to that person’s healing process: They first had to hear about the Savior, they had to develop faith that perhaps He could help them, they had to somehow get themselves to His sphere—wherever it was He was teaching or healing that day. Even once they were in his presence they had to—very directly—exercise faith that what He could do for them was worthwhile to them. He would ask them sometimes, ‘Do you have the faith to be healed?'”
Watch the video below to learn more!