I Am Healed

For I am the LORD, who heals you.

—Exodus 15:26

It was an emotionally charged moment, to be sure. For both the speaker and the audience. Everyone leaned forward, toward the face and the voice of the woman delivering her story, including me. Waiting—hoping—for a happy ending to the gripping narrative.

Moments before, she’d shared the story of a close friend who had been diagnosed with cancer, advanced and aggressive. From her place on the stage, she told an auditorium of women about her friend’s horrific journey through chemotherapy and radiation, her struggle to cling to life, to battle this disease as a wife and a mom of two young children. The physical suffering alone felt unbearable, not to mention the weight of carrying around a not-so-favorable prognosis.

Things didn’t look good. So they prayed. Their friends, their church, their small group.

God, heal! Make her whole! Deliver a miracle!

The women in the audience, including me, hung on every word. And many of us tracked the details of her story especially well. Because we knew.

We’d been there.

We’d heard the doctor’s words. Ingested the news like trying to swallow a camel. And then braced ourselves and dove deep into a treatment regimen that drastically altered the lives we once knew and loved. Forever.

For all of us sitting in our comfortable chairs in the auditorium, the speaker’s story carried the discomfort of reality. We knew it could happen to any one of us. Thus the reason we leaned in, waiting for the story’s end, hoping for a happily-ever-after.

To our relief, that happy ending came. After a grueling journey, the speaker’s friend recovered. It has been six years now, and against all odds, her friend remains alive and cancer free.

The audience erupted in applause.

God is good!

God hears our prayers!

God heals!

You could feel the relief in the room. A communal exhalation of fear, replaced by an inhalation of peace.

But for some of us, our relief lasted only for a moment. Because at the same time we were celebrating the woman’s healing, we were also realizing we’d not yet received our own. For some in the audience, prayers for a child’s wholeness had ended in a small casket. Others had watched a parent or a friend or a spouse walk away from a relationship. And still, for many others—women not all that different from me—the word healed remained elusive. Whether chronic or terminal, their sickness continued in spite of their prayers.

What are we then supposed to believe about the God who heals?

Like our speaker and many in the audience, I too have dropped to my knees in soul-pouring petition. God, heal! Make me whole! I’ve lost track of the number of my desperate prayers. When my marriage failed and divorce seemed inevitable. When being a mom nearly ripped me apart.

And yes, when a cancer diagnosis stole my innocence and forced me to face death.

God, heal!

And yet my first marriage dissolved, and I became a single mom at age twenty-seven.

Parenting proved complicated and didn’t end up at all like I imagined.

And yes, cancer showed up three times.

My prayers are just as fervent and faith filled as those who receive their happy ending. So where’s mine? Where’s my healing?

Still, who’s to say my prayers haven’t been answered? Perhaps not in the way I dreamed or wished. Perhaps not with perfect happily-ever-afters and cancer-free proclamations. But God has wrought a healing that has transformed me just the same.

For perhaps the first time in my life, despite my unhealed body, I can say I’m whole.

Bruised and beaten, yes. Exhausted and weary, absolutely. But the broken desperation that defined much of my people-pleasing life no longer dominates my existence.

Instead, wholeness. Completeness. Even in my unhealed imperfection. Because I’ve discovered a God who, somehow, heals more than a body; He heals a soul.

A day will come for all of us when healing—physical healing—will not arrive. For some, it will happen at a ripe old age. For others, at twenty-four or sixty-eight or forty-one. It’s not a matter of if but when.

But the God who heals remains just as sovereign and powerful and loving when the healing doesn’t come. Perhaps more so. Because it is only then that we are able to experience healing as it was meant to be from the beginning: complete. And forever.

I’ll be honest. I still struggle with this from time to time. I don’t understand why some people receive earthly healing and others do not. But we can trust that the God who heals loves us, even when we don’t understand Him. There, in the thick of our questions, we can ask Him to show us His heart and purposes, to help us to see beyond healing to wholeness, of ourselves and the world.

No more waiting for Hollywood happy endings and doctor’s calls. No more fear keeping us awake at night.

Instead, sweet wholeness. Forever.

They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

—C. S. LEWIS, THE GREAT DIVORCE