I used to be (and in reality, still can be) a cynic when it comes to healing. I always knew and believed that God could heal, but believing it could happen in my context, among my friends and family, was another matter.
To cut a long story short, I have now been healed four times of various things, some big, some small. God is slowing getting through to me, and, amazingly, all of the healings are different; they don’t fit into a neat little box. Praying for healing, I have learned, is not black and white but grey - a bizarre mixture of freedom and pain, wholeness and brokenness.
I was ill for all of last year with ME (chronic fatigue). I had a lot of prayer for healing at different points, and stood up for prayer at festivals feeling nothing happen except anger rising. God didn’t choose to heal me before it got worse. The illness took me to breaking point, and the physical exhaustion soon led to depression and anxiety at being so house-bound.
One night as I went to bed, I realised that I hadn’t prayed for healing in a while. This was a fleeting thought, and I just said a quick one-line prayer to God in my head. Honestly, I wasn’t full of expectancy. I mean, healing normally happens when you’re surrounded by faith-filled prayer warriors, right? Or at least when you’re in some kind of festival setting? But I felt my whole body go extremely hot and tingly all over for about ten seconds and then felt nothing. I was left slightly freaked out and with no idea whether I’d actually been healed. I went to sleep.
But when I woke up I had the energy of a normal person, and did more that day than I could have done in a week when I was ill. I had been completely healed. It was amazing, and it’s completely changed my view of healing. I was healed in the stillness and the silence. There was no hype, but God still answered my prayer. He didn’t need someone with more faith praying for me, but he answered my pathetically short and lack-lustre prayer. It was enough.
More than this, though, there was a mystery to God’s timing with it all. God could have healed me before I missed graduating from university, before my wedding day, or before I got so bad I was having daily panic attacks. I don’t understand why, but God took me to rock bottom before he healed me. I think you change as a person when you get to that level of emptiness. Praying for healing, even when it didn’t happen, made me stand in my humanity and showed me how much we need God. It was my six month wedding anniversary when I was healed, and it was almost as if God was saying ‘this much, but no further’.
I always used to think praying for healing should always be a good experience, and felt freaked out when it wasn’t. Now I don’t think it’s always supposed to be. Sometimes, when we see someone healed, we get a taste of life on the new earth, of what is coming, and it’s amazing. But when we pray for healing and nothing happens, we are confronted with the pain and reality of life now, and I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. I think Christians should be able to engage with both the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, the freedom and the pain, as hard as that is.
I don’t know why some people get healed and some don’t. I don’t know why I have been healed so many times yet have never seen a healing when I have prayed for someone else. But I do know that when I was healed, the pain that I had been through before (which seemed to stretch on forever), suddenly became a memory. I think I got a taste of what it will be like for all of us, one day, when Jesus comes back and all of us will be healed.
