Faith at the heart of healing…

Saturday started off well with a hot cup of coffee on a cold, rainy morning. Little did I know that there would be a small accident and I had hurt my knee. It was a rather deep cut through my artery and there was a lot of blood. I kept my calm not wanting to scare my son and dressed up the wound with my husband’s help and went to the doctor. Even as the doctor examined the cut and explained how deep it was and the number of stitches I needed, I did not panic. This attitude was very strange and un-Daphne like, as I used run a mile when I saw a needle as a child. Now, here I was lying in the emergency room, telling myself, this too shall pass.

While I was lying there, I was glad that this accident happened to me and not to my child. (Parents have this streak of freakish craziness about protecting their children from pain.) Then, I started thinking about all the people who go through pain caused and intensified by violence. Children that are so badly hurt…..How many people go through this experience, each day? Many. And, some of them don’t see the end of the day as they don’t have access to medical care.

Sometimes, it takes small accidents to feel the pain. It takes some moments at the emergency room to remember how many people suffer through this pain. It takes a little faith to not panic, and say this too shall pass but it takes a lot of strength to be mindful and pray for healing, both spiritual and physical. Not all wounds are bloody but they sure hurt. Scars are a constant reminder of struggle and strength and let us not become numb towards the pain around us.

Faith is at the heart of healing as it could be where the mystery of healing becomes real. “The expectations that we arouse in the process of healing have to take into account both, of God’s faithfulness to keep God’s promises and of the freedom in the way that God keeps them. To tell somebody that if they believe enough the healing that they seek is guaranteed, is to court disappointment if it does not happen, but even worse it is to misrepresent healing as a cause and effect process rather than a personal transaction. A prayer in which we let what concerns us pass from our hands into God’s and wait for an answer that we cannot control, but that we have good reason to believe will always be gracious even when it is not the one we were looking for.

We have to tread carefully on this delicate course between not encroaching on God’s freedom and at the same time firmly trusting in God’s promises. That is what we do in healing because that is what we do in all prayer.”