I’ve been praying for the Lord to heal me from significant chronic health problems for a long while now. I will continue to.
In the meantime, I marvel at what He IS healing me from through this course of pain…
God is healing me of a false need to carry my own burdens.
I’ve always been the doer friend. I’m the one who takes the initiative, goes out of my way, and tries to make sure being friends with me is easy, convenient, and encouraging for you. Burdening others has long felt falsely like sin to me.
Being largely housebound and regularly fatigued has forced changes to all of my friendships. I can’t even pretend to carry my own burdens. It’s humbling.
One friend, whom I met in the midst of my health challenges, has never seen me at my best. She has seen me exhausted from leaving the house briefly, and she has seen me in the evenings when I’m worn down. She has visited me when I’m near my worst. And yet, she keeps coming around!
God is healing me of a long-time struggle with receiving grace.
If you’re familiar with my Abigail series, you might recognize this theme. I long to be made complete and perfectly holy. I don’t ever want to need grace and have trouble receiving it when I do.
The mere stress of being so perfectionistic isn’t viable anymore. I don’t have the energy to maintain my tendency to shrink from grace as undeserved and therefore unacceptable in my case. My weakness and limits are too apparent and too constant, and tempt me to sin too easily.
My expectations of myself have changed, and this has made me far more expectant when turning to God for help. His grace isn’t just sufficient, it’s sustaining, strengthening, and sweet.
God is healing my misguided notion that He needs something from me to work through me.
While my head knows God is not dependent on me, my heart sometimes believes He needs my help to work through me.
It is wild to see God continue to carry out the good works He planned in advance for me to do, even on days when I scramble words, can’t get out of bed, and struggle to have a hopeful attitude.
I’ve clung to 2 Peter 1:8. We aren’t unproductive while we are growing in Christ. He works in us and through us just by helping us to persevere.
God is healing me of mistaking worry and control-seeking for planning.
I’m a planner, and that can be a gift. But, it can also be a way of dressing up worry and control-seeking. This has been exposed in me by having heaps of entangled unknowns, making it hard for me to guess what tomorrow holds and what the future might look like.
I can’t plan much right now, and that is proving to be a gift too. It makes me more aware that every day is a day the Lord has made and ordained. I am driven to ask the Lord more about what he has in store and what he wants me to do, moment by moment. Needing to be more prayerful and surrendered has eased some of the temptation to worry and control—I see more clearly that God works everything out and sustains me no matter the twists and turns.
God is healing me of idolizing knowledge and those “who have it.”
A long-standing label on my computer says “Google doesn’t know. God does. Proverbs 3:5.” I keep it there because I know I am prone to idolizing knowledge.
The complexity of my health challenges has helped put knowledge in its proper place so often that I think it strays from its spot less. I haven’t needed to run my finger over that label nearly as much.
I am grateful to be able to see doctors and to learn more myself as I seek physical healing. At the same time, I have experienced what it’s like to be at the mercy of medical professionals’ limited knowledge and fallible judgment calls. I have experienced what it is like to glean a lot of information through careful study and still not know what to do with it or how to translate it from “problem identified” to “solution successful.”
All this makes me more aware that I am not ultimately at the mercy of medical professionals or my body or my circumstances, but at the mercy of God. He alone knows everything. Including what healing is going to and ought to look like in my life. Knowledge is useful, but it isn’t all-powerful, doesn’t care for or comfort my soul, can’t sustain me, and isn’t sovereignly working all things together for good. God is. Knowing Him and knowing He knows is enough.
While God *might* heal me physically in this lifetime, He WILL heal my soul, inwardly renewing me day by day as He makes me more like Jesus.
—How have you experienced soul-healing by the Lord in an unexpected context?—
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