When Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law, she got up and waited on the group. The spiritual dynamic here is that when we are healed, saved, brought from disease to wellness, our desire to serve is naturally activated.

Most people have a love/hate relationship with work, says Greg Pierce, author of Spirituality @ Work. Pierce always quotes the late columnist Mike Royko who said, “That’s why they pay us to do it.”

We see a lot of things advertised with that four-letter word these days: “Free!” And we’ve grown wisely skeptical of such claims. We’ve all learned by now, sometimes bitterly, that there’s no free lunch, no free subscriptions, and no free merchandise. (And nobody in Nigeria wants to wire a lot of money to your bank account, you internet users!)

Remember the little cardboard Valentines with their odd shaped envelopes? Some had a little clasp that allowed a part of the card to move. We used to be able to buy the cards by the bagful, sometimes paying as little as 50 cents for a hundred of them.

Every time I hear the story of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, I stand amazed: The woman is lying in bed, sick with fever when Jesus takes her hand, pulls her up, and instantly cures her. She then waits on him and his pals.

As a young girl, she always tried to avoid getting drafted to work in her mother’s garden. She disliked the planting, the pruning, the watering. She disliked the weeding the most. And so she would rush off to play with her friends.

As those changed because we have met the Lord, let us pray in confidence to our just and merciful God:

He drove out many demons, not permitting them to speak because they knew him. In the New Testament, demons, who were servants of Satan, entered in their victims and caused physical, emotional, and spiritual disorders

We know how to make beautiful speeches on suffering. I myself have spoken of it with enthusiasm. Tell the priests to say nothing about it; we don’t know what suffering is. I weep to think of it. —Cardinal Pierre Veuillot, when he was dying from cancer