After 17 years of painful illness, she was healed by receiving the Eucharist. Located 2,500 meters above sea level, the municipality of Tocancipá (Colombia) -until the arrival of industries in the 1990s- was a pre-mountain range territory whose economy barely allowed its inhabitants to subsist.
Rosalba Zamora Malcera lived there with her parents and eight other siblings. As millions of other families in the continent had experienced for decades, poverty was not an obstacle to births. Everyone contributed to the family economy from a very young age. My mother,” recalls Rosalba, “taught me… it was our turn to cook, help with the laundry. And the older ones took care of the younger ones while they went to work.
In her dialogue with Portaluz, Rosalba does not mention reproaches to God or to her parents for those conditions of austerity, even spiritually, that marked her childhood and adolescence. The family, she says, “was not of prayer”. Her parents took them to mass “only” on Sundays. but “during the holy weeks, there was absolute respect, when we could not even fight, argue or anything else,” she says.
The physical and spiritual impact of an illness
She grew up with some certainties of faith,” she says, “but without much religious formation, or any affection for prioritizing her intimate relationship with God in her life. A spiritual reality that would be put to the test from her youth when Rosalba faced a painful and limiting alteration of the organism that turned her life upside down.
The ailment deformed her face and this -being a young woman- provoked not only concern or fear for her physical health, but also great moral and spiritual pain in Rosalba. Especially since no doctor could find the cause or the remedy for her illness. In such a way that in spite of being rigorous in the hygienic cares and in the feeding, repeatedly Rosalba’s mouth explicitly exploded in aphthae, inflaming even the external soft zones of her cheeks and jaw. Overwhelmed by the pain, she would spend days without being able to eat. Some days the symptoms would subside and then reappear with a vengeance.
“God, why are you punishing me!”
The disease, understood by Christian ethics as a manifestation of the fragility and mortality of human life, was something tangible and everyday for 17 years for this Colombian woman (pictured here today). General practitioners referred her to internists, dermatologists, oncologists and other specialties. Without improvement…
“The truth told the Lord: “God, why are you punishing me, I have not been bad, I do not deserve to carry all this disease”. I was in denial, I often quarreled with God and I no longer wanted to live. The doctors said they did not know what was the cause of it and even dared to say that I had AIDS; while the results came back, which were negative. it was very painful because they kept me isolated, almost nobody came to visit me or anything else.
God’s love in the Eucharist
At her mother’s request, she began to go to Mass on the 14th of every month to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Miracles (Bogota) and she clung to it with faith, begging for “a blessing” to obtain from God the grace of her healing. She made novenas, prayed to the Virgin and never tired, she says, of crying out and claiming to heaven with devotion.
“I began to see the changes through the Eucharist… and thanks to God I did not suffer from that disease again; the doctor told me not to go back because I was fine. Today I make an effort to go to mass every day. because I know that there is nothing greater than receiving the body and blood of Christ. If it had not been for that illness I would be the same Eucharistic woman only on Sundays, but without knowing the true meaning of the Eucharist. Blessed God, I am now a different person,” she concludes.
After 17 years of painful illness, she was healed by receiving the Eucharist. Read the original post in Spanish here.
