Healing

HEALING

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self

And the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help

And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,

Long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself

From the endless repetition of the mistake

Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify

D.H. LAWRENCE

I met a man today who told me his hands were healing hands.

I have no reason to doubt him.

He was quite sane.

I chose to sit by him at a luncheon today, a stranger, a man among a sea of women, all of them decades older than I am. I introduced myself and he smiled and said, "I have a story to tell you."

He spoke of Paraguay then, a country foreign to me, and he told me of a girl named Adella. Migraines razored her brain regularly and she couldn't join the group he was speaking to one day, so he asked if he could pray for her. In Adella's tent, he saw rags covering her face to keep out the slivers of light that punctured her eyes. He placed his hand on her and demanded that the Holy Spirit of God heal her in the name of Jesus.

He told me, moments later Adella slid the rag from her brow and motioned to him excitedly ... Healed.

His greatest joy, he said with some stilled emotion, was seeing this same girl with her newborn baby the next year, after he had prayed for that life inside her, because Adella had miscarried the two babies before this.

His hands healed, he said, because he had faith they would and because the people whom he healed had faith that God would heal them.

Christians all know the Biblical examples of healing stories, not just the Divine cases where Christ placed his perfect hands on a broken limb and it straightened, but where the disciples, sinners just like us, had the power to heal.

Skeptics scoff... Of course. That's what they do.

I seek. I want to know of this healing. I want to know if it's a matter of faith or a matter of prayer or a matter of fate. I want to know if God's mind can be changed... Do we just need to stand on this? Remind Him of the suffering ones here? Believe it can be done ... and it will?

Healed. This girl and the others he spoke of were healed. I believed this man. He was not lying to me and he was not lying to himself. Did his hands heal? Did God use his hands?

I don't know the answers to my questions, yet. Even as I pray for healing for my friends, for my cherished loves, for my patients, for myself, I wait for the mystery to be revealed. I wait and I seek.