Healed By the Healing

“Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me.”

Psalm 30:2

“‘But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds,’ declares the Lord…”

Jeremiah 30:17

It has always been easy for me to say these words, but it’s been very difficult for me to believe them.

How can I believe God is Healer when He let my mom walk through a years-long battle of cancer and chemo?

How can I believe God is Healer when my mom’s strength was fading and her weight decreasing?

How can I believe God is Healer when the heart monitor goes flat and my mom’s breath is no more?

If you have lost someone to a health battle, you may have thought these same thoughts. And if you prayed long and hard for a miracle that did not happen, you probably felt abandoned too.

In the past few years, I’ve come to realize that I struggle to believe that God truly heals. More specifically, I’ve struggled to believe that He heals me. I’ve taken my mom’s passing so personally, that I’ve subconsciously believed God picks and chooses who He heals. I haven’t walked through anything nearly as painful as to what my mom did. But anytime I’m hurt physically, be it a cold or virus, an infection or a broken bone, I struggle to believe that God will bring healing. In the midst of a cold, I catch myself saying things like “just gotta ride the wave and wait for it to pass” or “every time Lily (my toddler) catches something, I get it too”, etc.

There was a time when I said something like that out loud to my husband, and he responded with “Okay, then that’s what I’ll believe with you.” I quickly glanced at him, offended at what he had just said to me. But I knew it was the slap-in-the-face that I needed. He was reminding me that what I say out loud is what I am. We wear the words that we speak, and the more we say them, the more they become who we are.

The whole reason I started this blog was to share how God has healed my heart and my mind through the grief of my mom’s passing. If I have seen how God has healed me emotionally, shouldn’t I believe that He’ll also heal me physically? That when I/we pray for healing over someone, that He has and will provide? My emotional healing didn’t come with time. It came with speaking Truth over myself and believing I would see restoration.

Satan wants to distort our minds based off of an occurrence. God wants to fill our minds with His Truth, and anything outside of that is not worth any energy. When we define Who God is based off of circumstances, we have a foundation that isn’t secure. Take the following passage for example:

“And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Matthew 7:26-27

When our foundation is anything outside of the Word of God, eventually, our worlds will fall apart. That’s right where Satan wants you. He wants you to believe there’s no hope in the pain and that God works in everyone else’s lives but yours. It’s all a lie.

So if you’re walking through something right now that just doesn’t make sense, know that I can empathize with you. I still don’t really understand why my mom wasn’t healed physically here. But I can either spend the rest of my days in anger while trying to answer that question, or I can spend my days pursuing God and His Truth. The latter is what has healed my heart in so many ways, and given me reason to share this story with others.

Through this journey of grief, I’ve been reminded that just because my idea of physical healing didn’t occur, doesn’t mean that healing didn’t happen. Truth is, my mom has been healed eternally. The healing that took place was actually the best healing that could ever happen for her. And one day, we’ll get to experience that eternal healing too.

Don’t wait for the pain to be gone and the questions to be answered to pursue Him. Go TO Him with the pain. Write down your questions, get them out of your head and on paper. When they stay in your head, Satan uses them to convince you that God has forgotten you. Write them down and let Him speak to you. You may or may not get an answer to your question, but you will experience healing. And you’ll be able to look back at those questions and see how God has restored you through it. Your pain will serve a God-given purpose that will be life-giving to you and to others. That’s a life way better spent than questioning the situation and living in deep despair. Let Him fill you with the joy and peace that He has already promised you.