God’s healing touch

Lucille Partington walks pain-free since her parish’s healing service

A unique part of my job in travelling around the archdiocese, gathering stories, meeting with parish communities and documenting their services, is getting the chance to encounter unique individuals whose lives and witness of faith may never be known outside of their own immediate community and family.

With this series, ‘Parishioners in Profile’, we plan to shine a light on devoted persons in our archdiocese and the inspiring witness of faith they live out in their local communities. If you would like to recommend a person for this series, please contact us at comdirector.agm@outlook.com

For many people, putting complete and absolute trust in God can be easier said than done.

For Lucille Partington, total trust in God has been a defining trait of her life, and it’s a trust that has recently been reaffirmed in a most miraculous way.

Her battle with cancer – a metastasized cancer that ran through her spine, was diagnosed as untreatable and would only give her a matter of weeks to live – has now been turned into her testament to the power of God’s healing touch. After a healing service held at her home parish Immaculate Conception Church in Sexsmith last summer, Lucille now lives today long past the expiration date given to her by her doctors, and is walking pain free and without her cane.

Lucille’s awareness of this cancer only came to her attention after she had a bad fall this past May, which ended up giving her a consistent and unwavering pain whenever she walked and moved around. She went to the doctor, who diagnosed her with a back sprain and requested she go to physiotherapy. Lucille did so for several weeks and started walking everywhere with a cane. But as the days went on and on, her pain did not yield, and her sprain did not seem to heal despite the efforts of the physiotherapists.

“So I went back to the doctor and said, ‘It’s ridiculous that this is not healing, because I’ve had a sprained hip and it has healed faster than this’,” Lucille recalled. “And the doctor said, ‘Well, remember that you’re coming up on 80 years old, so it will take some time’.”

This answer did not satisfy Lucille, as she fills her days with much walking and was only getting increasingly annoyed as week after week her pain persisted and failed to go away. She finally convinced the doctors, after much pleading, to do some further tests. With this, it was discovered that her pain was not due to a sprain after all. As they looked over x-ray images and the many black spots found on them, the doctor explained to Lucille that the real source of her pain was stage four metastasized cancer all through her spine, arms and pelvis region.

“When I saw the specialist he told me that this cancer is very, very advanced,” said Lucille. “It’s beyond chemotherapy and it’s probably beyond any kind of treatments. He gave me a few weeks at most to live.”

However, for Lucille such words were not an excuse to resign herself to defeat. To her there was a medicine much more valuable than what the doctors could prescribe, and that was her trust in God and the power of prayer.

After her diagnosis, Lucille called Fr. Jeyapaul Packiasamy, her parish priest, and requested a healing service. Fr. Jeyapaul agreed, and the service was scheduled in July, Many parishioners, friends and family came to fill the pews of Immaculate Conception and pray over Lucille, and to pray for their own healing.

Lucille has been a part of the Sexsmith parish since 1977, when she, her husband and their four children moved to the area.

Lucille grew up attending the Protestant church where her mother played the organ every Sunday, so attending church and reading the Scriptures were a routine part of Lucille’s life from its very beginnings. But it was only in her university years that she was exposed to the Catholic Church that would become the eventual home of her Christian faith. It was through getting involved with the Charismatic Renewal movement at her university, a movement then at its height, that she ended up joining the Catholic Church.

More than the movements of the Spirit at Charismatic prayer meetings, what ultimately brought Lucille into the Church was the Eucharist. Specifically, it was the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation and the real presence – that Christ’s Body and Blood are fully and truly present in the consecrated bread and wine.

“When I discovered that the Body and Blood of Christ was real, there was no question,” she said. “As a Presbyterian, we celebrated a version of the Eucharist, but there was no teaching that it was actually the Body and Blood of Christ.”

This is only an excerpt. Read the full story in the October 2024 edition of Northern Light