You know how you know something, but you don’t REALLY know something? You see it through small eyes. Limited. You know facts, but not power. Here’s what He’s been teaching me…
He is the Healer. (You might be thinking, “duh”) But I mean of everything. Big and small. Every illness. Cold. Flu. Cancer. Diabetes. Blindness. Deafness (although that one’s close to my heart and don’t necessarily believe that healing someone from deafness is any more glorifying to God than being deaf). A broken heart. And others. You name it. He’s the healer.
A friend of mine went to the doctor with headaches and dizziness recently. Surprise… he had a tumor and was transported to San Francisco for surgery. He’s one of those friends that I’ve known for years but don’t keep in touch with beyond the grapevine of mutual friends because our lives have changed over the years. You know those people in your life? The ones you don’t talk to much, but when praying for them, you feel connected and passionate for them? This is him for me. It didn’t dawn on me until two days later as I was out running, praying and thinking about it, “He has cancer.”
Unrelated, a few days later, my dad was sick with the flu. In the quiet of my room instead of over him like I really wanted, I prayed that God would touch and heal his body. Then I thought, it’s the flu. It’s not worrisome. Is prayer really necessary? Of course it’s good. But it is necessary? Of course he’ll get better. Everyone does. Then I remembered… No, they don’t. Though I have taken simple healings for granted. Cancer. The flu. And they can equally take your life away from you.
PSALM 103:3
“He forgives of all your iniquities and heals all your diseases.”
This is where God spoke to me. For Him, cancer and the flu are the same. Same severity. And the same simplicity of only needing the touch of God to be healed. People die from cancer. People are dying from the flu. H1N1. We think it’s no big deal because we’ve “gotten better” from it many times before. What does it mean to “get better?” For a believer who knows the power of the hand of God and how miniscule we are, it means that God in His Sovereignty and blessing chose to touch our physical bodies with His metaphorical hand and healed us of His own accord. Every time I’ve been sick with a cold, He touched me. Every time I’ve had a runny nose and my sinuses were out of whack, He touched me. Every fever, chill, sprain, and pain… He healed me. I’ve been healed so many times and science calls it the nature of our bodies and attributes it to white blood cells and such.
But who made our white blood cells? Who revealed to us the knowledge of our bodies? Who healed us for scientists and doctors to even notice change? Why can they even study how the body heals? Who has given us knowledge to comprehend these things of our bodies? Who truly heals us? We call it science and medicine and knowledge. We call it “normal” when we feel better. Natural. It’s not. We expect it. We shouldn’t. Every time our bodies heal from whatever the ailment, it’s a miracle. God does not have to heal us, but He chooses to. Supernatural. What we can’t, in our own limited knowledge, explain.
So I prayed for my dad, that God would choose to touch His body just as much as I prayed that He would touch my friend’s. Someone posted on Facebook to my friend “I still believe that this is the kind of stuff God eats for breakfast.” I believe that, too. Shows off His power. And heals. I’ve seen a man in India with labored walking get up to walk with ease after a prayer for healing. A friend just told me how he prayed for a blind man who hasn’t been able to open his eyes in 5 years… and he opened his eyes. We classify healing as big and small. To God, it’s all the same.
How often do we take His power for granted? His mighty hand that we can’t “feel”? Every morning that we open our eyes is a miracle. Every breath that we don’t focus on is a miracle. Every time our heart pumps blood to the extremities of our body is a miracle. That my brain can communicate to my fingers what to type is a miracle. And at any point in my day, He could also choose to take it all away from me. The power of life and death are in His hands. The power of motion or stillness. Health or disease. They’re all His. He does not have to give us breath or movement or health. That we have it at all is a miracle. We categorize illness by severity. A cold. The flu. Cancer. All the same to God. And His ability to heal is all the same.
In the last few years, I’ve been learning to pray big prayers. He may answer them with a “no”. But oh, what if He answers with a resounding “Yes”?
