… “Maybe those two years when I was sick make a difference … I was grateful to God for all the good things He’d given me – my family, growing up in this country with so much opportunity, my good health, my education, my faith – and I was determined to be worthy of them, to pay God back. At the end of the day, I wasn’t willing to just receive them. I had to pay God back, somehow balance the accounts …
The sickness I had affected my sight, and I couldn’t read anymore … God wanted to show me that He hadn’t given me all those things so that I would do something. He hadn’t given me all that treasure so that I would then accomplish some other thing. He gave them to me because He loves me! And I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t live in that love. I lived in my own capacity to respond to it and be worthy of it.
He was telling me, ‘I love you and that’s enough! Anything else I want to bring forth in your life is just the fruit of this: that you accept My love. That is everything for you. Your capacity to respond or make it fruitful or be worthy of it is beyond irrelevant. Anything more I need to do, I will do. I will make fruit come, but only through the fact that you accept being my beloved.’ I knew that my sickness was given to me so that I would begin to accept that, and as I began to accept help from others, it was the happiest time in my life. It was the first time I allowed myself to be loved and to simply live my life as one who is loved. That is my bottom line: not me, not what I can do; just the reality that I am loved. I would have never learned that fact – my salvation – without my sickness. It left me weak and vulnerable, but I’m very grateful for those years.”
Vincent Nagle Life Promises Life