Praying God's Wisdom: Already, but Not Yet

 

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. Psalm 27:14

 Have you ever found yourself in the Waiting Place? I wrote about this last April with regard to waiting for Jesus to return and take us home to be with Him. This week it’s taken on a different connotation for me. Two weeks ago, I heard a speaker share about when Jesus asked the man at the well, “Do you want to be healed?” (post coming soon, once the song it discusses is released 😉). This last Sunday, God followed it up by a teaching, at a completely different church, on healing, specifically discussing the story of the man born blind and his healing we read about in John 9. All this stirred up in me the old questions I have about healing. Things I thought I had resolved and found peace with are churning once more in my heart and mind. I *think* this is God’s doing, that He wants me to revisit these things and explore them with Him in light of a new season of my life. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like the feelings and questions that get brought up when I explore this topic. So, since misery loves company, I’m going to drag you along with me while I look into it!

 Do I believe that God can and does heal people physically in this life? Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen God do incredible things, bringing circumstances together perfectly, and healing people miraculously. Do I believe that God will heal everyone physically in this life on earth? No, I don’t. I’ve seen way too many examples of people who loved Him deeply and served Him faithfully who died young, far earlier than the average lifespan. So what decides which side of this paradigm you’ll fall on? Is there something you can do to assure your physical, earthly healing?

 You might notice that I keep emphasizing “physical” and “earthly.” Why is that? I believe we live in a reality of “Already, but not yet.” I believe that at the moment of our salvation we are completely, 100%, healed and cleansed of all of our sin and unrighteousness. No where is this more clearly stated than in Ephesians 2:6:

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,

 Notice the phrasing here. Paul isn’t saying that God will do this. He isn’t saying God is doing this. He says God has already raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms. This has already taken place. It’s done. I don’t know about you, though, but I don’t have the current, conscious experience of this. I don’t see the heavenlies all around me. Does that make it less true or real? No. Does it make it tricky to understand? Definitely! We are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies, but we do not yet get to experience that reality. Already, but not yet.

 That’s the reality I live in with my physical healing as well. I fully believe that my true self, my soul, that is seated with Christ in the heavenlies as we speak, is fully and completely healed. There is no more pain, no more brain tumor, no more struggle, no more heartbreak. Everything is as it should be. But that is not yet my experience. So, this begs the question, which side of that paradigm I discussed earlier will I fall on? Will I get to be the beneficiary of earthly healing, or will my experience of healing not come until I also experience the reality of being seated with Christ in the heavenlies? I asked before if there was something we could do to assure our physical, earthly healing and I think the answer to that is, “No.” If there were, our healing would be in our power, not God’s. If there were magic words we could speak, a special, specific prayer, to make God give us what we want, that would be witchcraft. That would say that we are stronger than God, in charge, the captains of our own souls. That’s just not true. Does God give us a free will to choose our own path? Yes, kind of. Do we get to pick everything that happens to us or how every situation will come out? Definitely not. It is God who is supreme, in charge of everything, who orders the heavens and the earth, whose plan and will and kingdom is everlasting and sure. Only He knows whether I will experience healing in my physical body, or have to wait until I join Him in eternity.

 Ok, so that leaves me in a tough place. I believe in a God who can heal me, but I don’t know if He will heal me. I do, absolutely, believe that if He does not, He has a very good reason and I don’t want to miss out on His perfect plan. I would not choose physical healing over the joy of participating with Him in His mission to share love and truth. I am in a unique position to be able to connect and communicate with people who, like me, experience pain and uncertainty every day. If you’re not like us, you just don’t get us. No offense, but until you’ve heard, “But you don’t look sick,” or, “Have you tried (insert exercise plan, food, supplement, or essential oil here)” dozens and dozens of times you can’t understand the horrible, demeaning, soul-squashing feeling. In order to engage with and write to this audience in a way that is taken seriously, I have to be one of them. Maybe that’s why God has me where He does right now. But then there’s that little voice in the back of my head that says, “Do you want to be healed?”

 What would healing mean for me? It would change who I am. Not completely because, at my core, I am a child of God, a wife and a mom. None of that would change, but pretty much everything else would. Nearly my whole life revolves around my illnesses. My choices, how I spend my time, what I can and can’t do, all of it. Am I ready for that? Only God knows. Did you ever think healing could be scary? It certainly can! Do I enjoy the sleepless nights and unrelenting pain? No, I most certainly do not. So here I am caught between what is and what could be – but that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? I am not sitting here facing the choice of whether or not to be healed, I am facing the choice of wanting to be healed. With that choice comes the potential disappointment of it not being fulfilled day after day after day. What if my desire doesn’t match up with God’s plan – on either side of the choice? Ugh! And this is why I try to live in a place of comfortable discomfort, where I’ve “made peace” with my situation and trust God to take care of me in it. Yes, when I originally was diagnosed with Lyme disease almost ten years ago, I had a clear impression from God that He did not want to heal me from it at that time, that I had been brought there for a purpose. But was that a forever thing? Did that impression mean that God never had physical, earthly healing in mind for me? I just don’t know. I feel like I have a lack of faith, like I’m failing in some way because I’m not actively pursuing God’s healing. I’m not praying for it every day, seeking out others to pray with me, constantly analyzing my life to see if there is some sin that is causing me to be stuck here. Have I done all those things? Yes, but I don’t do them every day, every hour. Do I not do it enough? And what about all the places it talks in the Bible about peace and resting in God? How do I exist in these two ideas simultaneously? How do I live in the Already, but not yet?

Here's the Thing: I have some bad news. If you read to this point expecting some miraculous answer, it’s not coming, at least not in this post. I haven’t figured it all out yet. I’m working on it. By God's grace, I’m working through it. I have faith that God’s got me and he’s holding me in the tension. He’s not given up on me, and He won’t. God and I, we’ll get through this together.