Risale-i Nur Collection  

However cliched it may sound, illness always has the potential to be a blessing. For like all forms of communication from our Creator, illness is telling us certain things in certain ways. It may be telling us to slow down and to live life less hectically. It may be telling us that we are not eating healthily, or sleeping enough, or getting the amount of exercise that we is needed to remain healthy. Depending on its seriousness, it may be telling us that a complete 'life overhaul' is necessary. But whatever it is telling us on the level of specifics, there is a general message that comes with all illness, and that message is, quite simply, that we are, at base, impotent beings who are at every instant dependent on God's grace and loving attention for the continuation of our existence. For the weakness that we experience during illness is only a reflection of our existential weakness. Illness comes with the reminder that everything we are, and everything we have, depends on His love and generosity: who we are, and what we appear to possess, depends solely on His will. Illness helps us understand this by reducing us to a childhood state of utter neediness and dependence on others, for it is this state only that can help us reconsider whether we are living our lives with the recognition of our impotence or not. For we are impotent whether we are well or whether we are ill; it is just that it's harder to realise this when everything in the garden is rosy, so to speak. Illness, therefore, can be a blessed wake-up call, halting us in our tracks in order to give us the time and situation necessary for stock-taking and worshipful reflection of our life situation and its attendant duties. Illness, seen as a blessing, inevitably turns out to be such. This treatise shows us a number of reasons why this is so.
Colin Turner Durham, August 2020