Here are the other two:
HOPE
CELEBRATION
As a
pastor, I am privileged to walk alongside lots of different people through lots
of different life events – some of the very best moments, and some of the most
difficult.
I had a
difficult one a few months back, when a woman came into my office searching for
some spiritual guidance in the midst of a particularly challenging bout with
cancer. She desperately wanted to believe that God could heal her, and she prayed
for it daily. She described a few experiences she had had with healing prayer,
yet here she still stood, riddled with cancer. She looked me in the eye, and
with some degree of desperation, asked, “Do you believe God can heal me?”
How do you answer that in a way
that doesn’t sound trite or hollow to someone in her position? I quickly prayed
silently for the right words, and the ones that came out were, “First of all,
yes, I believe God can do anything, and second, I guess that depends upon what
you mean by ‘heal.’” She gave me a puzzled look (one which I probably would
have been giving myself as well!), so I went on. “Do you want God to take away
your cancer, heal your body, and bring you back physically to where you were
five years ago? Or, do you want God to make you more accepting of your new
normal, even if it isn’t what you would have chosen? Or, do you want God to
take away some of your guilt, and to help you to forgive yourself? Or do you
want God to help you forgive someone else, or accept their forgiveness? All of
those are important sorts of healing, and I believe Got can do all of them. But if you’re willing to listen and respond, my
guess is that God will heal you in the way that you most need healing… and that
might not be the way that you had in mind. Whatever the case, you need to know
that healing might not feel good right away. It might hurt a little along the
way. It might hurt a lot.”
I’m not
sure where all those words came from exactly, but as they came out, scenes from
my own life flashed through my mind, in which each of those sorts of healing
needed to happen for me. I recalled the pain involved in physical healing –
muscles adapting to being in new places, nerves coming back together, regaining
strength I had lost, the sheer exhaustion of it all. And I also remembered the
spiritual and emotional healing – coming to terms with a new normal I didn’t
much like; discovering what emotions were going on in me, admitting them, and
learning how to talk about them to trusted people; learning how to believe
again that God loved me, that I wasn’t being somehow punished; and trusting
that I and this experience were being used ultimately for something good. As I
talked, I watched this woman’s face reflect what had been in my heart through
all that – what still crops up in my own heart from time to time, whether about
cancer or about some other area where I need healing.
Healing, my
friends, is hard work. I know I don’t have to tell you that – but it is does
bear repeating because maybe we forget sometimes. Healing is painful work, for
the body and for the heart. We normally hear “healing” and think of that lovely
end result when we are already healed, and forget about the painful road to
that desired point on the path, that scenic overlook where we can finally look
back and say, “Wow, look at all that I have overcome.” Healing is the road to
that point, and it is rocky and uneven, at points steep and sometimes
treacherous… and also at times, stunningly beautiful, and strengthening, and
deep, and transformative.
Healing
is hard work, and it doesn’t always result in the kind of healing we hoped for.
But it still happens. Healing can always happen in some form, if not of the
body then perhaps of the heart or the spirit. If we focus only on the healing
we had in mind, we might miss the other incredible ways healing is happening in
our lives. My hope and prayer is that we might all keep our heads up and our eyes
open, ready to see the many and various ways we are continually being
transformed.
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