When Jill McAuley spoke of her spiritual growth process on the Church News podcast last week, she didn’t hesitate to testify of Jesus Christ. But her faith has had multiple points of what she calls “being restored.”
“I may still be paralyzed physically,” said McAuley, “but I am in the process, as we all are, of being restored and healed emotionally, spiritually and mentally.”
When McAuley speaks of her physical condition, she is referencing the effect of an accident that occurred when she was 18, leaving her with the lifelong condition of quadriplegia.
“After my accident, I relied too heavily on my own abilities to trust,” said McAuley, who noted that she always had a “natural gift of faith.”
“That’s important, but I was trying to do too much on my own. I believed and just had faith that if I could just endure, if I could just make it to the end, that one day on the other side, that everything would be made right.”
But relying on her own strengths got her only so far.
“Eventually that got too heavy, and it became too much, and I realized that I couldn’t do it on my own just by enduring and pushing through. I realized that I had been denying the gifts that Jesus so freely offers.”
At times, McAuley said that she thinks: “I thought I had already learned this. I thought I had already been through this.”
She realized that “there are so many different aspects to those lessons” and sees opportunities to learn something new.
McAuley calls this the “spiraling-upward effect,” where more spiritual truths are learned.
McAuley’s spiritual journey has been life-altering, changing her outlook and view of her own abilities. She focused on her shifting view of service.
“At a time when I was wondering how I would serve people, my mom amazingly said to me that allowing other people to serve you is a way of serving them.”
Receiving help was not easy for her after the accident, especially as a budding adult. “At 18, we’re starting to become independent, we’re self-sufficient, we’re living on our own.”
She measured the amount of help she has received since then and “came up with a number like 58,000 hours, but I think that is a gross underestimation,” she said.
McAuley became “almost completely dependent on others for help.”
“It’s a real transition, because it takes a lot of humility in how to receive help from others with grace, without feeling resentful for the help that I need or for the help I’m being given, for those amazing people who are willing to do that.”
While receiving a lot of physical help, she wondered what help she could give without “baking a casserole or picking up someone’s kids.”
“The ways that I’d always envisioned and acted out service was through my hands, and I can’t use my hands.”
And yet, she received insights on how to be a “spiritual caregiver,” a role she associates with Jesus Christ. As she has deepened her knowledge of His sacrifice, McAuley has come to understand “because of Him and His graciousness to me, I’m able to pay it forward and be incredibly grateful for all of the service that I receive.”
She has recognized other ways to keep her baptismal covenant, which includes to “love others” and “exemplify that empathy and give that to others freely.”
When her physical hands were limited, she became “really obsessed with hands, because I didn’t really appreciate mine until I couldn’t use them.” So, McAuley did a study about the hands of Jesus.
In her study, she came across a scripture in the Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 11:14, which says, “Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world.”
McAuley described her experience reading the passage. “It was then, in that moment, that they started to even more recognize Him, because they were able to feel and see and have an experience with the scars of His wounds. And the wounds of His sacrifice really became their identity to Him.”
She felt the Spirit whisper, “Your identity is being shaped by your wounds and your scars and your sacrifices.”
Despite her physical limitations, McAuley said “the Spirit showed me that in many ways, the 18-year-old version of me was even more limited than I am now, because she was naive, she was nearsighted, she was inconsistent in her testimony.”
McAuley has changed her view on her physical limitations because of a divine perspective. “The freedom I found really has come because of my limitations, which seems it doesn’t quite make sense, but my paralysis has become the catalyst and the motivator for me to seek after freedom.”
“Spiritual freedom,” McAuley said, “from my physical bondage as I placed Jesus Christ at the center of my life.”
