I was asked a question today, in response to my reluctance to go to a particular church meeting for a healing miracle. "Don't you want to get healed?!"
Excuse me? Er... of course, I do! I'd love to be healed! That would be so wonderful. Who wouldn't want to be healed from over two decades of chronic illness and to be able to eat freely again? I just don't believe that I need to run from one healing meeting to another or "pursue healing" to get it. I believe that God need only say the word, and I'd be healed right here, right now.
The fact that it hasn't happened that way simply means, to me, that God has other plans for me. To me, walking and growing in the Christian faith must involve suffering to some extent, largely because we live in an imperfect world fraught with pain and sin, and also because as disciples of Christ, we are no less than Him. He suffered. His mission was one of suffering, culminating with His death on the cross.
We are all called to bear our crosses and follow Him. We can't bear a cross with grace and dignity if we are continuously seeking to offload it at the same time. I believe the offloading of our crosses is up to God's timing and will for our lives. The bearing of the cross is our job in life.
The crosses we bear help shape us. They are meant to draw us closer to God, and deepen our relationship with Him and transform us into His likeness, if we allow them to do so. If we constantly seek to get rid of our crosses how can we learn the lessons they are meant to teach us?
I fear the notion that we are all meant to be blessed and prosperous and happy all the time has robbed many of the opportunity to truly grow their faith through an acceptance of suffering. Suffering grows the soul, teaches it to wait on God, helps the soul focus on the eternal, and can enlarge the heart despite deep pain and hurt.
Do I want to be healed? Of course, I do. Do I enjoy suffering? Of course, I do not. And yet I find I am experiencing suffering in some measure. I have to find a way to make meaning of it all. The best way forward, I feel, is to accept it, embrace it, to make meaning of it, and to surrender it back to God.
It's almost blaming a patient for not being well when you ask them, "Don't you want to get healed?" through your preferred sources of miraculous healing. I've been to these meetings before, and I'm still living with chronic illness. I've known of faith filled people dying of cancer too. Where was their faith, and didn't they want to be healed too? Of course, they did. But God is sovereign and His plans and thoughts and ways are higher than ours. Illness exists, it even persists, and often it kills us. It's a reality we cannot escape in this world.
I find it best to say as Christ did in the Garden of Gethesemane, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it." In other words, "Let your will be done".
To get to this place of even remotely desiring suffering as God's will, and accepting it, is the actual work of faith in our lives, and is echoed by the saints themselves who count their trials and persecutions as blessings. The constant desperate desire to escape pain and suffering, which is loosely viewed as some faith filled fantasy, bypasses the deep and lasting work of God that builds character. So many are weak and their faith is shallow because they would not embrace suffering as God's will for their lives. They turn against suffering, and see it as a sign of a lack of faith. It's all topsy turvy, to me.
Do I want to be healed? Yes, please God, feel free to heal me right now. But I just want to say that even if you don't I'll love you no less. I'm working out my faith in the absence of big miracles, but grateful for all the little ones along the way. I'm counting all my blessings, and learning to view the bad stuff as part of your plan for my life. It's ultimately all good.
I am grateful that even suffering has a place in my life. A thorn in my flesh that may never leave, but that has its purpose. Help me bear my crosses with grace and dignity, Lord, until you lift them from me.
Thanks for reading,
Pav
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