I never really thought that this question would have such an overwhelming influence in my personal life as it does now.
Yet now, all of a sudden it is the question of the hour, so blazingly loud, that I can't go one moment without hearing it's overwhelming thunder.
Poetic words aside, and several personal experiences of where this idea of healing comes into play, I see that I am struggling to come up with some answers on my own.
I meant to post something about healing about 4 months ago, when the year was fresh and I heard a plethora of, "Give me a double portion, give me healing, give me renewal" statements being made by the church(and by that I mean the church community as a whole, nobody specifically).
First off? Who are we to ask for that? What have we done to deserve blessings from God?
Just because we've made vain promises on the inspiration of a new year, we expect God to follow through, when we secretly know that we won't keep up our half of the bargain?
I digress. As much vanity is in that thinking, I know it's not the only thinking.
Ever since my dad got sick 10 years ago, I have always struggled with the concept of healing, and for the longest time illness was just something that I dealt with and never truly understood as a "bad" thing. It was really just a part of life.
(And it is so much a part of my life, I have told my parents—multiple times—that I think God made me experience my father's illnesses so that I will be prepared for it in later life because I am bound to marry into illness...something I now regret saying in retrospect).
Perhaps that's why I grimace when people ask for healing over remedial things like diabetes, hypertension, and headaches.
But who am I to talk anymore, right?
I mean, I think a lot of it is stemmed from watching people struggle for years with Type 2 diabetes and then constantly eat garbage. Why ask for healing when you're obviously doing a tremendous job of correcting the problem on your own?
Like I said though, that was the way I used to think.
When I handle healing I always think of John 9:1-5, "As [Jesus] went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents,that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
I think, in order to properly demonstrate my argument here, I need to get my theological viewpoints out in the open, then, maybe I can make sense of what I hope to be a discussion.
Firstly. I agree that illness and death are a natural consequence of sin. But, as a student of science, I also believe in the concept of entropy, which(basically) states that all things are slowly decaying into a larger and larger sense of disorder. Now, while I won't go into how science strengthens my faith, I do think it's a fair assumption to have two forms of evidence to back up my assumption.
To explain, if we as humans are bound towards entropy(which, spiritually, I understand as a consequence of the initial sin), our bodies are bound to be imperfect. It is almost guaranteed that we are flawed from birth by virtue of the fact that our bodies are all mutated in some way, shape, or form.
And these mutations only increase exponentially as we age. So, naturally, the longer sin has a chance to pursue us, the longer it destroys us physically(I realize this is a HUGE theological assumption I'm asking you to make here, and again it's my belief, so feel free to disagree).
It's not the best way to pursue a discussion of the consequence of sin. It's less emotional and more matter of fact. But it makes sense. We were made perfect creations, and the second we allowed sin to take hold of us, was the second we allowed it to slowly kill us.
However, I also hold a second belief. Yes, as humans we are bound to illness and death, but that certainly does not mean that God cannot work through our tribulations. If we stop looking at our pain as, "Oh woe is me God did this to me" and more of a "I was born into sin by virtue of the fact that I am human" it becomes easier to cope with the struggle and less about hating God.
I agree, it is a self-depreciating thing to do, but as much as I find it hard to say the statement that these things are not the fault of God, we were given true free will when we sinned, and by that virtue, we chose to bring illness into the world.
But, like I said, if God can work through our unique circumstances to find beauty, is it necessarily right for us to ask him to remove the circumstance in the first place? What if God chose for us to experience growth, and the only way to achieve that growth was by experiencing pain? What if our testimony of struggling with cancer while still having faith in God is the only way someone experiencing our same struggles can ever experience the overwhelming love that is God?
God never promised us an easy life, He only promised to hold our hands and to intervene when it was clear that we wouldn't be able to handle any more.
I don't know why I struggle with the idea of asking for healing, but maybe that's because I understand it as a part of life and a method of growth. And it saddens me that I cannot deal with death in the way that most deal with it.
Unfortunately I see death as "right of passage" so to speak, that, while it is painful, is inevitable and therefore pointless to obsess over.
I've experienced death a lot, I've had multiple family members die of cancer, so maybe I'm immune to feeling pain over it anymore. And while I do believe that the grieving experience is important for everyone to handle with the utmost care—and memory of someone should never be forgotten—reflecting on the past will do nothing for a person that seeks to move forward.
But empathy is a trait I am slowly working towards achieving.
Here's where my perspective in this whole healing game comes into play: I might be getting sick myself.
It's nothing serious. And I don't even know what it is actually. I'm convinced that I have reactive hypoglycemia, which occurs after I eat and either means that my body doesn't know how to react to the sugar I'm putting in my body or it produces too much insulin. It pretty much means that I have low blood sugar all the time, and I have to be extremely careful not to let it get too low.
To be frank, I'm tired all the time. I'm slightly faint about 40% of the time that I'm conscious. When I exercise if I even feel minutely faint I have to stop, and I have to always be sure that I have a snack around me. What I hate most about whatever is wrong with me is that no matter what I eat I get tired, but if I don't eat I know that I will feel even worse.
And for me—the person who worked out moderate-intensely(oxymoron, I know) 3 times a week and made sure that everything she put in her body was fairly balanced between protein and carbohydrates—it was a shock to me that I even developed the symptoms in the first place. I mean I'm not obese, I exercise frequently, and I eat a lot healthier than most of my peers. And even after doing what "diabetes" experts said to do, I only felt slightly better after eating things packed with protein.
So, I did what any self-righteous first-world Christian would do: I cried to God about how I didn't deserve this struggle considering how good I was taking care of his vessel(myself). And, after a day of self-pity, I realized what I spoiled brat I was being. Am I dead? No. Am I dying? Not in the near future(God-willing).
There's a family history of diabetes in my family, I should have expected it, to be honest.
But it was like a smack in the face for me. And here's me being honest. Everything that I've done since my freshman year of high school was to avoid all of the illnesses that threatened my family, and my obsession with health was, I now realize, a way of paying my dues to a way of avoiding fate. So that's why I was "woe is me". It was my way of being, "I did all these good things God, so why did you punish me?" And I admit, I do obsess over it.
But I feel like I'm trapped in my own body, and every time I think I've somehow escaped it it pulls me in, telling me that my body is weaker than my own will. I wish I wouldn't obsess over it, but it's hard when it affects something that is so essentially a part of my humanity: comfort, food, alertness, and most importantly—control.
And as much as I understand that my pain may very well be a part of a bigger plan that involves me ministering in some way, it's hard to stay strong when you're being attacked physically. Mentally, you can always control on some level; but physically, it's like you've lost to yourself, and the only one who can win is either God or your body, but never yourself.
This all brings me back to my question of asking for healing. I think that my illness, whatever it is, is part of a bigger picture that might very well might only be achieved by my current struggle. And if that's the case, I am not comfortable asking for the removal of it, but I'm not against asking for strength to endure it. And I think, perhaps, that there's a fine line between the two.
But, like all things, the execution is much harder than the intended plan itself. As much as I may convince myself that I am going to stay strong, and that others should do the same when they endure death or illness, I also admit that human nature will incline us to give up daily, to run to everyone but God for support and when we do turn to God it's inevitably to blame him.
And I—like I think everyone must deal with on a personal level—must learn what exactly that balance is, and what exactly it means for them, not to blame God and not to blame their circumstances either.
Does that mean acceptance? Or changing fate? Or does that mean ignorance of the problem completely?
