When you hear stories from former World Racers you hear stories of paralyzed people walking, blind eyes given sight and limbs growing back. As skeptical as I was when I heard those stories, I still expected this month to be salvations and healings and miracles, one after another. Even though I grew up in church, very little was taught on the subject of God’s healing power and the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit. I grew up predisposed against this kind of thinking, but despite my skepticism, I opened myself up to it coming into the Race and I was “on board” with it.
It was our second week of ministry in India. I was in the middle of giving my testimony in front of 50+ men, women, and children, when I saw a paralyzed man carried in and propped up in a chair. In my head, I got really excited and thought, this is it. Tonight is the night. God is going to heal this man. I finished preaching, and we wrapped up the service with prayer like we always do. When we had made our way through most of the crowd, this particular man was brought near the front and our team surrounded him. Through our translator, we learned that for most of this 70-year old man’s life, the entire left side of his body has been paralyzed. For 30 minutes we prayed, crying out to our God to heal him. I believed with all of my faith this man would be healed. But for some reason outside of my understanding, there was no answer.
I left that night feeling discouraged in my faith and frustrated with God. What did these Hindu people now think about God? And how much more defeated must this man feel? The stage was perfectly set for God to show off and for His name to be glorified, and for some reason it just didn’t happen. I could not understand why the man wasn’t healed. It really bothered me, honestly. After this night, our entire team started to get discouraged and began wondering if we were doing any good at all in India.
God has been teaching me a lot these past 2 weeks and I’ve struggled through much of it. God has slowly revealed to me how weak my faith is when it gets tested. Who am I to doubt God’s goodness? Who am I to doubt God’s sovereignty over all things? Just because God doesn’t always act the way I think He should act, doesn’t mean I should doubt his ability to act. Nothing in this world can surprise God. The Bible says that there is not even a sparrow that falls to the ground without the Lord willing it. The book of Daniel says that “He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: ‘What have you done?’” (4:35)
His infinite wisdom and sovereignty and for reasons known only to Himself, God didn’t heal that man. His ways are so incredibly far out of our ability to understand. And this why faith so important. Faith fills the space in between understanding and God’s all-knowing. This is the essence of faith.
I think we’ll almost always struggle with doubts about God’s love during our times of adversity and times when we don’t understand. If we never had to struggle, our faith would not grow. But we have to engage in the struggle with our doubts and not let them overwhelm us. David is a man who had his doubts and struggled with them. In Psalm 13:2 He even felt God had forgotten him! But David, by the enabling power of God, won his struggle and overcame his doubts. He then could say,
“But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me. (Psalm 13:5-6)
God has been begging me so long to just trust Him, to believe in His promises. He’s begging that of all of us. We need to trust Him when it doesn’t make sense. We need to trust that He will accomplish his purposes even when we can’t see Him at work. Yes, you and I, like David, must wrestle with our doubts. But with God’s help we can come to the place, even in the place of adversity and not understanding, where we will be able to say, “I trust in your unfailing love.”
