A Word from Margaret Feinberg:
I want to write about something that’s raw and tender in my heart.
I’m sure I’m going to stumble, fumble and I’m already teary-eyed as I write you this morning.
Over the years, I’ve stood in wonder and awe of people’s healing stories. I’ve watched and witnessed those who have suffered months, years, sometimes a lifetime in agony and pain. And in one unsuspecting hour everything changes.
I remember joining a friend to pray for a woman who had a hard tumor in her neck. She said, “I’m healed.” In our goofy lack of faith, neither of us believed her. She urged us to press our fingers into her neck, and like Thomas, we felt the difference. It was indeed gone. And we believed.
I’ve invited people forward at events to be prayed with by members of the prayer team, and they return to their seats miraculously healed–pain gone, a once shortened leg now the proper length, bodies transformed. Some of those people don’t pray with anyone at all. They simply come forward and call to the only One who can heal them, and become more physically whole than they’ve ever known.
I can’t explain it.
I can construct a mile-high pile of scriptures for you about our God who heals (Jehovah-Rapha, Exodus 15:26). I’ve seen it. I believe it. But I don’t think we’ll ever understand on this side of heaven, the whys and whats and whens of healing for one person and not another.
(If you suggest it’s about quantity of faith, as in this beggar has a pint and this one a gallon, I’ll kindly ask you to check your pride and cruelty at the door!)
The truth is my body hurts. I’ve lived in chronic pain since cancer treatment more than a dozen years ago, and after a recent spate of surgeries, the pain has shifted, intensified, eased, and then intensified again.
Pain has a way of eating through our emotional resolve. It nibbles on the edges of our ability to respond thoughtfully, kindly, with any hint of grace, often leaving us only reactive.
Pain fogs our ability to think and process information. It drains our energy until we’re left beyond exhausted in the deepest fibers of our beings. And the recovery lingers longer each time.
To survive, we learn to compartmentalize pain on the days we can. Most of us never speak of it because if we emit a few syllables, if we dare acknowledge it, it grows exponentially.
So we rise up. We push through. And we disappear when it gets really bad and try to self-soothe amid icy blocks of isolation.
Most people don’t know how much we hurt, because they only see us on “good days.” They want everything and everything to be “fine” and retreat from anyone who might disrupt their understanding of life. I envy that reality – I wish it was true for me, but it isn’t and it hasn’t been for a long while.
People in pain hide their pain, because we’ve learned most people can’t handle it. Conversations stay on the surface. The phone stops ringing. The texts stop arriving. You know.
Despite all this, I still cling to a silver thread of hope regarding healing, even if it feels like it’s held in the furthest strand of the universe floating among black holes and the birth of new stars.
That’s why, while recently wandering through a city, I came upon an ugly purple sign with “Healing Service, Wednesdays, 7pm,” and thought, why not?
Now really, why not?
A million reasons. It could be weird or manipulative or shame-filled for lack of faith. It could be a money grab or power grab or some such nonsense. And if that purple sign was a sign, this could not go well.
Yes, I think like many of you. 🙂
Wednesday circled around a few days later. At 6:33pm, I glanced at my watch, realizing that if I scooted quickly, I might make it on-time-ish.
I entered the wrong door at the large Anglican church and slipped into a back pew.
The elements of the service followed the cadence of a Sunday morning with worship, scripture readings, message, and more worship. Then, if anyone wanted prayer, we raised our hand, and were escorted to two members of the congregation in little groups of 3 or 4 chairs to receive prayer. I shared my pain, and they prayed.
The words were plain. Without emotional charge or verve, two fellow believers asked the God of the universe to heal me. That was it. Then I returned to my back pew.
Once everyone was prayed for, we sang another worship song and received a closing blessing. Anyone who wanted an elder of the church to anoint them with oil could stay, then join everyone for the other great “Cs” of the any church . . . cookies and coffee.
If you’ve read The God You Need to Know or you’re leading a group through the study, then you know I’ve visited spiritual outpourings. And one of the good things they taught me is that whenever someone offers prayer, the answer is “Yes!” So, an elderly man touched my forehead with oil then I skipped the sugar and caffeine and slipped out the backdoor.
In the days since, I’m not sure my body changed at all. But my heart did.
Sitting in that back pew, I had surveyed those gathered. A woman on an oxygen machine. A person whose spine curved sharply to the left. A man who struggled with cognitive issues, and another who displayed challenges with mental health. One well put-together woman looked perfectly fine, but her willingness to go forward for prayer, like mine, revealed she, too, needed healing.
We were a crooked bunch. Not crooked as in thieving, but crooked as in our lives didn’t align in ways both seen and unseen. Missing digits and appendages and abilities and coherence. And yet somehow in the mystery of the universe, Christ among us. A community of saints paused to carry the pain with us.
I share all this because I know many of you today are hurting–in your minds and hearts and bodies and daily resolve.
And I want to encourage you. You are not alone. Jesus is among us. The One who knows pain all to well scooches extra close to those who live with it.
That back pew taught me something: our brokenness doesn’t disqualify us from God’s presence—it positions us right in the center of it.
We don’t have to wait until we’re whole to belong. We don’t have to hide our crooked parts to be worthy of love. We come as we are, oxygen tanks, curved spines, and scattered thoughts, visible wounds and invisible aches. And there, in that unlikely gathering of the hurting, we find we’re held.
The God who chose a cross understands.
The God who rose with scars still visible knows that healing doesn’t always mean erasing what was broken—sometimes it means being carried through it, together. And you are being carried, even now, by a love that won’t let go.
with all my love,
Margaret
https://margaretfeinberg.com/
