Having unexpectedly emerged alive from a four-week-long coma–in 2013–and with our church having held a 36-hour prayer vigil for us at the most critical point, and having had some kind of disability all my life, I’ve thought at lot about healing. This is another piece from my forthcoming book called (maybe) ‘The Sandwich.’ Like the others in the collection, it was commissioned by a Singaporean magazine and intended for newcomiers to the Christian faith.
(2015)
How do we know when to stop asking and simply accept? What’s the difference between surrender and giving up hope?‘
We are treading on a tender spot here. Because we all know people who have been struck down inside a good healthy life. Some dreadful disease snaffles them and everything inside of us cries out, ‘No! This is wrong.’ So we pray for healing.
Worse (in a sense), we know that God is a healing God. In the person of Christ he walked on the earth and did not view suffering with a Roman stoicism or a Jewish shrug. He wept over it, climbed into the problems, and healed. The lame walking, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised are signs of his Kingdom. These are the gifts he scatters as he walks among us. Jesus our King is full of compassion, fully engaged, and mighty to heal and save. Sin, evil, suffering, demons, death: he detests them all and went to the cross to purge all of them out of his lovely Universe.
We all know what is coming next: yet so many are not healed. I would be very surprised if in the circle of people you know and care about, there are not some for whom you are praying but who are not getting better. Others stay sick and in pain for a long time. What do we do? How do we pray?
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I joined a community choir recently. I am a musical illiterate, but I am learning that some songs include a key-change. You are singing along happily enough, you think you’re getting the hang of this, but then the composer introduces a key-change and often it takes the song to a whole new level. For example, the South African National Anthem includes five languages and a key change, because Nelson Mandela wanted to incorporate both the African National Congress anthem and the old white South Africa anthem, and five of South Africa’s eleven languages, into one song. It makes the total experience a powerful statement of unity in a divided land. Without the key-change, it only would be half a song.
As we pray on for the unhealed, we must listen for God’s key-change. Most of us who fall sick only want one thing: to get back to how we were. But with very many sicknesses and afflictions there is no going back. There is only going forward. Hence the need for the key-change. We just want to go home, but God is changing the landscape around us. In his terrible love, God is taking the evil and forging something good in us. This is why I suggest we let God lift our juvenile, confused, panicking prayers to another level. Of course it is not our prayers he is taking to another level: it is we ourselves. Then the song will be complete in us.
Here are some of the elements, so it seems to me, of God’s key-change.
- Mystery. In the gospels Jesus walked through a large collection of sick people at the pool of Bethesda and healed just one person (John 5:2-9). He stood in a cemetery full of dead people and called just Lazarus back to life (John 11:38-44). He must have seen a number of funeral processions but he interrupted only one, that of the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-15). Why should some be singled out for instant healing and others not? It does not seem fair, nor can we explain why. It is a mystery. Mystery is like a cloud passing between us and the certainty of the living, loving Christ. We know the Lord is still there, but for the moment all we can see is the cloud.
- Eternity. I guarantee you have nothing wrong with you that the resurrection will not put right. When a person passes from this land of the dying to the land of the living with peace on their face, bags packed, ready for eternity, surely that’s a healing, that’s the great healing, even if for us who are left it is a separation and loss. And even if the timing feels all wrong. So real, full healing is guaranteed for all who come to Christ, in eternity.
- The present moment. Sometimes in our panic and fear we forget the importance of the present moment. Yes, let us ask God that a person’s dreadful illness is totally healed. But let us not forget the now. ‘God’, we can pray, ‘turn their anxiety into peace today. Make their soul happy today. Set a table for them in the midst of their enemies today.’ In my limited experience of these things, a visit, a word, something, can make your heart almost burst with joy, even if you are lying paralysed in bed and connected up to quite a lot of tubes. People might argue that that’s not the same as a proper healing. I am not so sure. It certainly feels pretty good at the time.
- Seeing what the Father is doing. Someone once told me, prayer is not forcing God’s arm; it is taking what is offered in his hand. Somehow we need to walk with the Holy Spirit through the winding paths of prayer and let him guide our prayers so that as we pray, we feel full of peace and confidence. If we feel led to pray for a glorious sunset to a good life, so be it. If it means praying the person with ulcers will feel secure in God so that he doesn’t have to be a workaholic, that’s fine too. I’m not a fan at all of sharing these insights with the patient; they have enough to cope with. I would suggest asking for God’s leading, but then keeping the leading for your own domestic use.
- A meeting. Some scriptures teach that everyone who came to Christ for healing was healed. See Mark 6:36, for example: ‘wherever he went – into villages, towns or countryside – they placed those who were ill in the market-places. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.’ I believe these scriptures. Yet many today do not experience instant physical healing. How do we square this circle? Here’s how it works for me. I believe that everyone I might pray for can and should meet God. When the person meets God, in a sense, I can leave the two of them to it. The healing has begun. What goes on between them—instant healing; a long process of healing; abundant life amid continuing physical infirmity; healing fulfilled in eternity; or anything else—is between that person and God. Meeting God is the first and main thing. The core of healing is not getting physically better for a season until something else strikes us down. It’s meeting Jesus. I think I can pray for any sick person that they will meet Christ, they will touch the edge of his robe, and the healing will begin. I use that prayer a lot and I really like it.
- The glory. Hospitals, and let us be honest, sometimes a group of pray-ers, can make the patient feel like little more than a useless lump of meat. The sick person themself can start to believe that. But a sick person is not someone who has been suddenly shunted from a fruitful life to a non-fruitful one. He or she is not out of work, certainly not out of God’s work. They may not be on the path they would choose, but they are still on a path. They can glorify God. In the Old Testament Joseph named one of his children ‘Ephraim’ which apparently sounds like the Hebrew for ‘twice fruitful’ and he explained why. It was because ‘God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering’ (Genesis 41:52). That’s a mighty prayer to pray for a sick person. ‘God make her fruitful in the land of her suffering.’ This is not a get-out if physical healing doesn’t happen. It is about people meeting God–Almighty God, that one, the Almighty one–and not emerging unshaken.
Back to the question we were set: How do we know when to stop asking and simply accept? What’s the difference between surrender and giving up hope?
I think I’m arguing that there’s a third option between simply praying for physical healing and simply surrendering the person to God. I’ve called it God’s key-change, and it’s praying that respects mystery and eternity, treasures the present moment, tries to listen to God, believes that healing starts when people meet Christ, and asks for fruitfulness even in their place of suffering.
It’s worth a try.