Healing

Last night we went to a party to celebrate the adoption of Cayden Thomas Brown.  It was a great moment for our friends Clint and Beth Ann, after waiting over a year and jumping through the complicated hoops of the foster system, they were finally able to officially call Cayden their son.  I just couldn’t be more proud of Clint and Beth Ann, they’re great parents and an incredible blessing to our church.

This Sunday at Park Lake we’re going to talk about Healing.  I felt it was appropriate to discuss healing after taking on the issue of Mental Illness and the effects of depression and anxiety the last two weeks.  If we can truly look at these issues as a sickness, then there must be a cure, a healing of the mind.  We’ve discussed the role of medication, professional counseling, and the role of proper thinking, but this week we’ll discuss in more detail the role God plays in our mental healing and how important it is to have the correct perspective on His interaction with us.

Cayden’s adoption seems to me such a perfect example of how God goes outside the box to heal an individual.  Cayden will grow up in a home that he wasn’t born into.  He’ll have parents who love him, will nurture him and provide a stable environment for him, and discipline him so he can be successful into adulthood.  Clint and Beth Ann won’t be able to keep Cayden from making mistakes along the way, they won’t be able to protect him from tragedy or struggles, we all know he’ll have his unique challenges to life.  But, in the end Cayden will have a better life than the one he should have had.

Cayden was healed by God before he was even sick!  God interceded in his young life and has changed the course of generations to come.  Cayden will grow up in a pastor’s home, he’ll learn about faith in Jesus and see it played out in his life on a regular basis, he’ll be challenged to live a moral lifestyle that’s characterized by integrity.  This will be in direct contrast to the life he should have, but it will be the life God ordained for him to have, God directly changed his course.  Cayden was healed, and he’ll never know, we’ll never know the full extent of how sick he could have been.

This comes back to the point of healing and perspective.  I think we often look at God and trip out on conflicts in our lives that we put the sole blame on His shoulders.  Rather than looking at “what life could have been”, we think in terms of  ”what life should be.”  We experience difficulties along our journey and cry out to God “Why!” but fail to recognize that either the blessings or protection He provided without our even knowing.

When my father died, in my grief I had difficulty thinking through the fact that God would allow my dad to die when we had such a good relationship, while God allowed so many other dads to live who didn’t even know or care about their sons.  It was during the process of healing that I began to reflect how grateful I was to even know my father the way I did, to have the relationship I had in spite of his poor health and constant travel.  I realized that despite the pain I experienced in losing my dad, it paled in comparison to the pain I should have felt never knowing my father, or even worse, knowing a father in only negative ways.  God had healed me before I was even sick.

God heals in all kinds of ways.  Sometimes he heals instantly, His word or touch is all that is needed.  Other times He heals over long periods of time, allowing us to grind though a process of getting up every day and realizing He has allowed us to live.  We should never forget though, that His greatest act of healing came through suffering the pain of the cross, taking on our shame and punishment for sin, and giving us eternal grace and mercy as a result.  God’s ways are not our ways, but there is no one I trust more than the Great Healer.