Healing Is Not a Reward

There is a road that runs out from a small house toward the water, and a man walks it every morning because a doctor told him to walk. Half a mile out, half a mile back. The doctor said it kindly, the way you hand someone a rope. The man took it and built a courtroom out of it.

He walks and he prosecutes. Exhibit one, the years he went to bed at two in the morning because the work would not wait. Exhibit two, the cigarettes at twenty two, which he has quit for so long that nobody who knows him now has ever seen him hold one. Exhibit three, the appointment he moved twice and then let go of altogether, because that month was hard and there is always a month that is hard. He argues the case out loud sometimes, quietly, under his breath, and the gulls do not care, and the water does not care, and he reaches the mailbox having lost again.

He has never once, in four years of walking that road, asked God for healing without first apologizing for needing it. He asks for strength. He asks to be able to bear it well. Strength feels like something a man can be handed without being forgiven first, and he has decided, somewhere below language, that forgiveness is the part he is not getting.

You know that road. Yours might be a hallway between a bedroom and a kitchen, or the eleven minutes in the car before you go into work, or the stretch of ceiling you look at when the house has finally gone quiet. And you have your exhibits too. You could list them right now without pausing, in order, with dates. That is the tell. Nobody has a list that ready unless they have been reading it every day.

Two chairs in that courtroom, and you sit in both

Let me say the heaviest part out loud, because it is not the pain.

The pain is real and I am not going to be casual about it. But the pain is not what has been pressing you down at three in the afternoon. What presses you down is the verdict. You have decided that this condition is a bill, and that it is your bill, and that a healing would be a pardon you have not earned. So you have learned to pray in a smaller voice. You ask for endurance instead of healing. You say if it is His will and you mean I know what I did. You let other people pray for their bodies with a boldness you would never allow yourself, and when they are helped you are genuinely glad, and something in you says quietly, well, they did not do this to themselves.

I want you to hear how tender I am being when I say this: that is not humility. That is a sentence you handed down, in a court where God was never seated, and you have been serving it alone. Nowhere in Scripture is that sentence written down, and the Spirit who has been walking that road beside you every morning has never once agreed with it.

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.Acts 10:38

Read what is not in that verse. There is no intake form. There is no line where Luke sorts the crowd into the ones who deserved it and the ones who brought it on themselves. He went about doing good, and he healed all who were oppressed. All. That word is doing the whole job, and it was chosen on purpose by a physician who had spent his life around people who had reasons for what they were carrying. It was written down under the Spirit's hand and it has never once been amended to leave you out.

And when the question you have been asking every morning was actually put to Jesus, out loud, by his own friends, he refused it. They saw a man born blind and they wanted the cause. Whose fault, they asked, his or his parents. Jesus answered that it was neither, and that the works of God were going to be displayed in him. He did not debate the theology. He would not even let the question stand up. Then he made mud with his own hands and gave the man his sight.

That is what he does with the question you have been chewing for four years. He does not answer it. He heals the man.

I know the second thought, because it arrives in everyone. That was then. Somewhere along the way you were handed the idea that healing was a season that closed, that the power was a scaffolding taken down once the building was up. But Acts 10:38 is not a description of a decade. It is a description of a Person. God anointed him, he went about doing good, and God was with him. Nothing in that sentence expired. The One who walked those roads is not a memory, and the same Spirit who rested on him has not been recalled. What he did because of who he is, he still does, because he is still who he is.

And then the harder one, the one that is actually keeping you where you are. Not does God heal but would God heal me. Not the doctrine. The address on the envelope.

So look at who he actually reached for. A man covered in a disease that made him legally untouchable, and Jesus put a hand on him before he said a word. A woman who had spent everything she had on doctors for twelve years and only got worse, who came up behind him because she did not think she had the standing to come in front of him. A blind man begging by the roadside that the crowd told to be quiet, and Jesus stopped the whole procession for him. Not one of them was anybody's idea of deserving. Every one of them had a story that a reasonable person could have used against them, and the crowd did use it, and he crossed the room anyway.

He was never once slowed down by how someone got there.