Healing

I am irreversibly middle-aged, and I can feel it in my body. There seems to be a steady encroachment of new aches and pains. Even more unsettling is that old pains are getting worse. I've been seen by physicians who've prescribed medications and given lifestyle advice. It helps but I'm not completely healed.

Something the guest preacher at my church said this past Sunday, however, gave me a very helpful new perspective on my understanding of health. Apparently, it has only been since the advent of Enlightenment thinking that the health sciences were expected to diagnose and treat, and so cure someone who is sick. The scientific cure focuses on the disease - the objective side of sickness. Historically however, doctors focused on illness - the subjective side of sickness. They used to care, doing whatever was needed to alleviate suffering, and sometimes cure if science and care happened to converge.

I guess I've been expecting the pain and inconvenience of my condition to be cured, or at least brought under perfect control. There are days when it is well controlled. The reality has been that, as time goes by, increasingly more has to be done to keep it under control. Suddenly, it has dawned on me that my condition may never be perfectly controlled. The aches and pains associated with it will always break through. What the care of doctors has done, however, is enough for me to live fully and function normally.

It helps me to think of Biblical perspectives of healing. There are perhaps three NT words for healing: one has to do with physical healing, a second has to do with restoration effected through the special relationship between healer and the healed (we get the English word therapy from this), and a third often used when Jesus healed others actually has to do with salvation. Apparently, when Jesus heals, it is always in a holistic context - the healing of the whole person, both physical and spiritual. In this light, although my physical health lags a little behind my complete spiritual healing by Jesus, the reality of my spiritual restoration points me forward to an eventual physical wholeness as well.

One more thought. I do not make the mistake of asking myself if I have enough faith for healing to take place. This would be to base my healing on my faith and not on God. My faith is not in a healing taking place but in God's faithfulness, goodness, power and mercy. I don't think that Jesus heals where there is faith, but that his healing provides a chance for my faith to be expressed as an indication of my desire to be healed. Jesus' healing power does not need the cooperation of my faith nor can it be manipulated through either my faith or the lack of it. Bottom line is, I put myself in his care and trust in his loving goodness. It doesn't matter what he will specifically do.