Day 1 – Healing In The Waiting

“We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.” (Romans 5:3-5, NLT)

“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.” (James 5:16, NLT)

“But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” (1 John 1:9, NLT)

“And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” (Philippians 1:6, NLT)

Imagine you’re on a hike when you notice there’s a pebble in your shoe. It starts to irritate your heel, so you wiggle your foot around a bit, hoping that will solve the problem. You don’t want to have to stop, but finally, you’re forced to sit down, take off your shoe, and remove the pebble. But when you do, you see that, completely unrelated to the pebble, your foot is suffering from some sort of injury or infection. Suddenly, you’re grateful for that annoying little pebble. You see that it alerted you to something much more urgent that needed to be addressed.

I think this is a fitting picture of how God often works in our lives. We might wonder why He allows us to walk through the heartbreak or the job loss or the season of struggle. We view the waiting as a nuisance, and we wish we could wiggle it away so we could continue on our way and get on to the good stuff. But what we’re waiting for isn’t the only “good stuff.” God cares about our desires, but He also cares about the deeper things that need to be healed in the here and now, and He sometimes uses the waiting to address them.

Sometimes what needs healing is a hard thing that happened to us in our past. Other times what’s in need of healing is hurt or shame from our own sin or past mistakes. Regardless of the cause, God longs for our healing. It’s easy to see our deep need for healing and feel a frantic pressure to be fully healed. But freedom doesn’t rest on us. God asks for our participation, but He is our ultimate healer. The work He does in our lives takes time, but He won’t stop until it’s complete.

Inevitably, the process of healing involves God inviting us to step into the light. It can be scary to bring the parts of ourselves in need of healing before Him and others, but healing doesn’t come from hiding. Being exposed is scary, but in the appropriate context, confession doesn’t lead to shame—it actually frees us from shame. When we bring the hard things into the light, we can live in freedom, knowing we aren’t defined by those things—we’re defined by the blood of Christ, which washes us clean.

God has already begun to free us from fears, heal us of hurts, strip us of sin, and make us look more like Him. But we haven’t yet experienced the completion of those things. We still wrestle with fear, wait for God to heal hurts, and need to be cleansed of our sin. Yet in Jesus, we have the assurance that we will one day experience the completion of His plan of restoration.