Healing: A Series

I’d like to talk about healing. Not that I am any authority on it or have any more wisdom than anyone else who has been in a place of hurting. In fact, I want to make it expressly clear that I am no expert on it at all. I’m simply working out some things that have felt pressed on me lately, and I thought, maybe you’d like to come along. Perhaps you have felt the same pressing but not known what to do with it or what words to clothe it with. There are more words untangling themselves in my spirit than I can fit here all at once, so this will be a bit of a journey, and even then, they may not all come untangled, nor do they all need to. This is just an invitation to come into the woods with me and see if we can’t begin to learn how deep they go.

I have thought often about the old adage that “Time heals all wounds.” I’m not so sure it’s an accurate portrayal of the truth. Certainly, time distances us from our wounds, perhaps even curbs the urgency of them, but I have not experienced time as a great healer in itself. If anything time, along with space, can be a great component of healing. It can give us the distance we need to look at things rightly and work through them healthily. So yes, time and distance are certainly helpful, and I want to stop right here and encourage you to take all that you need. Healing cannot be rushed, no matter how much we’d like to, and I will share more about that soon.

Still, I have not found time itself to be an adequate healer. If anything, time is a calcifier.

When we leave a wound untended, it might feel better over time, the pain may become less prominent. But if no work was done to properly heal that wound, then we will operate out of it, often subconsciously, for long after it has effectively “healed.” We see this when someone gets a little too close to an old injury and we lash out from a place we thought time had freed us from. We have to clean out the infection, reset the break, put in the sutures. Without those necessary and often painful tasks, things may smooth over, but they will not work properly. When a broken bone is allowed to heal without resetting the break, it often “heals” out of place, causing life-long residual pain in other areas of our bodies. The same is true of our souls. Time without proper care only hardens a wound, it does not heal it.

So what then? What heals all wounds?

In Exodus 15 the Lord reveals one of his names to us. Jehovah-Rapha - the Lord who Heals. I don’t mean to offer a trite platitude in the face of real pain. Trust me, I have been frustrated myself by the cold simplicity of being told to just “trust the Lord” or that “this too will work together for your good.” I’m not here to offer a bandaid where surgery is required. Healing is work. But I do want to invite you with me to seek the face of the only hope we have of real healing. It is not easy, and it is anything but simple, but it is the only way, and although the particulars can play themselves out in a myriad of ways, the end is the same. The Lord is the one who heals.

He doesn’t do this remotely, pressing a button from his castle in the sky, as we might expect Him in His majesty to do. The truth is far less believable and far more beautiful. He draws near, He pulls us close. He sits with us in the pain. He takes our wounds upon himself to bring us healing. He is pierced so we can be whole. It’s often slower and more subtle than we would like. We are often so unaware of the work He is doing in us, but one day we look around to find that the mornings of drawing close to him and feeling only pain or despair, have given way to drawing close to him to find rest, peace, or, if we’re brave enough to admit it, joy.

One of my favorite verses in my teenage years was Ecclesiastes 3:11. “He makes everything beautiful in it’s time.” As a young girl who struggled with confidence and self-loathing, this is what I clung to because I needed to believe it was true about me. I hoped for that physically as much as I hoped for it spiritually and emotionally. That He was making me beautiful in His time.

At some point I grew out of that childish view of Ecclesiastes 3. I matured and retired my young and naive interpretation to the box with my friendship bracelets and my diaries. That verse was not about me. It was about all things. About how the Lord was working all things for the good of all of those who loved him. That verse was about the big “C” church and about creation, and most importantly, that verse was about God, Himself, and who He is.

While all of that is true, I was too hasty in abandoning my child-like understanding. In thinking about healing, and specifically, God as my healer, I realized that Ecclesiastes is also very much talking about me. That it applies to the Kingdom at large, and it applies to my local church, and lastly but equally, it applies to me. And it applies to you. That He is making you beautiful in your time. That He is healing all of the broken parts of you and your story and me and my story to weave together something more beautiful than we could imagine: a tapestry that looks like Him. He does this because He cares about our Holiness. He does this because He cares about our Wholeness. And He does this because He cares about our Happiness.

But there was one more thing He wanted to show me. That He does all of it in its time. As much as God wanted to teach me to understand the universal as well as the personal implications of this verse, He also wanted to show me that the object of action in this verse is not time, but Himself. He is making all things beautiful, and He in all his omniscient wisdom is deciding when the right time is.

This is the thing I keep coming back to because it takes away the guilt of not being able to just get over my own brokenness. If time heals all wounds, then how much time is too much? There’s an internal deadline of acceptability if time alone is the thing that heals me. Maybe you have also felt that pressure, like the clock is ticking on the appropriate amount of time you can take to heal. The pressure that makes you feel like you have to manufacture your own healing, certain that if you only do the right things in the right order, you can move on and be whole again. I’ve just not found that to be the case. What I have found is a God who makes it His task to heal us deeply and authentically, and although it often feels too slow for us, it is always right on time.

I have so much more to say, and I will, but for the sake of today, I want to leave you with this. One of my favorite Mary Oliver quotes is 'Things take the time they take.’ She was sacredly right. Healing takes the time it takes, and I want to give you the freedom to let God do that work in you and to tell you there’s no need to rush. It will take work. It will take faithful vulnerability. It will take exposing the wound to the scalpel or the stitches over and over again. But one day, in the Lord’s time, healing will come.