Healing: Mud and Spit

This week will be rather short. It's really an expansion on my last theme, which is appropriate, because when I originally planned on writing about this topic, this was already one of the sections I had considered, and that is this: Healing rarely happens all at once. It happens most often in increments.

We all want that break-through story. The one where we walk in broken and walk away fully healed. The one where a withered hand grows muscle and tendons. The one where he says "Your sins are forgiven, get up and walk," and we do.

Those are beautiful stories of God's love, but so are the ones where he presses mud and spit into our eyes only for us to see men walking as trees. And I'd guess that even those people he healed outright still had wounds from years of being ostracized that took further healing. I do believe we should pray for and expect break through. But I also believe we should celebrate the equal miracle of incremental healing.

If the Lord healed every ailment outright, how would we know what suffering has to teach us? How would we know the kindness of a savior who holds our hand in our sorrows if we never have to walk with Him in the valley? How would we know how to offer that hand to others?

I don't mean to make light of our suffering. It's awful. And too often, there is not a pretty bow to put on it. But I do want to offer the promise that healing is available, and that it may take longer than you want, or may not happen fully in this life, but that the Lord is near in it all. I listened to a sermon* by Tyler Staton recently on suffering, and the he remarked on the beauty of a God who would not only rescue us from suffering, but step down from heaven to take suffering upon himself first.

This week through the gift of grace that is EMDR, another layer of a very old wound was exposed and healed. I would have preferred that to happen a long time ago, but I can't tell you the joy I had watching Jesus come into that place of suffering, expose that part of the wound, and then heal it with the gift of not only His love, but his Presence in that suffering moment.

I can trace different layers of healing from that same wound all the way back to the time of its affliction. And each layer brought a new level of trust in the Lord. Each breach of healing brought a new burst of joy. And I have to tell you, I don't think I would know the depth of the goodness of God if that wound had been healed when I first asked Him to.

I don't have an answer to all our suffering. I don't. There are so many times I have railed against the Lord or asked him through a breaking voice why He isn't intervening, and I'm sure there will be again. I don't always get answers. But I do always get Him. 

In that same sermon, Staton closed with this thought. He said that he believed most of us would trade all the goodness the Lord has wrought, all the growth, blessings, healing we have experienced because of our suffering for the chance to not live through the suffering in the first place. And then he drew our attention back to Revelation 21, and the promise that suffering will end. That all wounds will be healed. That the plan of God is not just to enter into our suffering, but to one day end suffering for good. In the mean time, let us hold fast that hope that we professed, for I promise, He who promised is faithful.

* The sermon was The Birth and Death of Suffering from Bridgetown Church.