A Believing Touch . . .

 Macrina Wiederkehr has penned a beautiful poem in her book Seasons of Your Heart.  It reads:

Once there was a wound
It was no ordinary wound
It was my wound
We had lived together long.

I yearned to be free of this wound
I wanted the bleeding to stop
Yet if the truth be known
I felt a strange kind of gratitude
    for this wound
It made me
    tremendously open to grace
    vulnerable to God's mercy.
A beautiful believing in me
    that I have named Faith
    kept growing, daring me
    to reach for what I could not see.
This wound had made me open.
I was ready for grace
And so one day, I reached.

There I was thick in the crowd
    bleeding and believing
    and I reached.
At first I reached
    for what I could see
    the fringe of a garment,
But my reaching didn't stop there
    for Someone reached back into
    me.
A grace I couldn't see
    flowed through me.
A power I didn't understand
    began to fill the depths of me.

Trembling I was called forth
    to claim my wholeness.
The bleeding had left me.
The believing remained
And strange as this may sound
I have never lost my gratitude
    for the wound
    that made me so open
    to grace.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/063024.cfm