My Life is a Miracle

32 My Life Is a Miracle In the evening, during the night, I went on weeping, giving thanks to God. Though astonished to be cured, deep down, I didn’t dare believe it. I wondered if it would last. It had been forty years that I’d been bat- tling this illness and now, in the space of a few minutes, it was all gone. How to take it in? It’s unbelievable: forty years of illness; then, forty seconds later, nothing, cured, just like that. Such a big change takes time to sink in. Your body is no longer a foreign body; it’s your own body again, the one you live in every moment of your life. You know every one of its nooks and crannies, like an old family house. You know what works and what, definitively, doesn’t work any more. It was deformed, painful, diseased, and now it is intact, comfortable, livable. It had stopped obeying my orders, and here it is at my beck and call. And all that in a few seconds! Yes, it’s unbelievable, but not incomprehen- sible. Once over the amazement, astonishment, confusion—I don’t know how to describe my surprise at this wonderful but so rapid, almost instantaneous, change—I immediately thought of Lourdes and my profound reaction to the Eucharistic Benediction near the grotto of the Virgin. I think it was then that it all began. What had happened to me was clearly linked to the