If you've come to read my blog looking for answers, you may have to find another one. I've got more questions than anything.
I write this only minutes after coming back from praying at a children's unit at the hospital in Dondo, Mozambique. We prayed at 6 six different beds-children with malaria, anemia, terrible coughs, and a mysterious paralysis. But when I walked in to the room, I was overcome by one question:
What if God doesn't want to heal them?
Now before I continue too far and offend most of you, let me make a couple thing clear: You should never be afraid to pray for the desires of your heart (although, I would encourage you to ask God to reveal them to you in ways you never knew). If you are sick or hurting physically, spiritually, or emotionally, I do believe that before sin entered the world these things were not meant to happen, and therefore God never desired the pain for you. And I believe that God can make all things, even seemingly bad, work for His and your good.
As we prayed for the children in the room, I saw Jesus looking down on them, crying. He knows their pain.
If God wanted them healed why wouldn't He just do it?
When I have questions I can't answer, I turn to Jesus. But this seemed to only complicate things further. I looked at John 5:1-9, where Jesus went to the pool of Bethesda, which was surrounded by hundreds of people with ailments. Jesus chose one man who had waited 38 years to be healed, and when Jesus asked if he wanted to be healed the man didn't even say yes! Why did He chose him? Why at that time? Why didn't He heal them all? There were hundreds of people waiting around to get healed, and Jesus chose one. Just one? Come on Jesus, you can do better than that!
And in Africa, things aren't quite that simple, there's an entire other dynamic at work here too. The people that we pray for aren't always Christian (we need to pray for Christians and non-Christians alike). Given the popularity of witch craft, it's likely many of them have already tuned to alternatives to heal their children, some while simultaneously calling upon Jesus' name. And so I ask:
What if my prayer isn't answered, and someone who was coming closer to Christ is pushed away because they think He is just as powerless as the last attempt?
What if my prayer does heal, but because they also went to see a witch doctor, God doesn't get the credit, and the credit for God's healing goes somewhere else?
I've been afraid to pray. Not for myself but for non-Christians. I'm afraid of leaving them with a poor impression of my Father. I'm afraid of offering healing, afraid of telling them the Lord will heal them, afraid to pray for healing in front of them, when in reality I don't know that it is His will on this side of Heaven.
So for now I will work on following the Spirit, to discern His will…and trust that God is a big enough boy to take care of Himself. He doesn't need me to defend him against witch craft, or to live in fear that my actions will convert others to a different faith. And I will believe that regardless of the outcome of my prayer, His ways are higher than mine, and He will make all things for His good.
