Disccovering the Church as a hospital for sinners.

In my journey towards the Catholic Church, I was looking for actual healing from the most deadly disease that all of us have and that is sin.  I was looking for treatments that actually worked.  I think a medical analogy is a good one.

But let's talk about the disease first, what is sin?  Most of us immediately think of a list of things that we ought not to do but that we in fact do.  If we think further we also think of sin as not doing things that we ought to have done.  So we have discovered that there are sins of commission (doing what we ought not to do) and sins of omission (not doing what we ought to do).  But we are still thinking about "sins", individual acts or instances which are only symptoms (although they can have disastrous consequences) of the disease, Sin, itself.

Sin is, at its root, an ingrained distrust of and in God and an ingrained trust of and in self.  The symptoms or individual sins flow from our distrust in God's goodness and our pursuit of what we think is "life" apart from Him.  It involves what the Apostle Paul calls exchanging the truth of God for the lie in Romans 1.

So my question has always been, how do I find healing from my disease?  So I will talk about what I found.

May God be with you today in whatever circumstances you find yourselves in.  May He be your refuge.