Of health and healing

I’ve been reading recently in the New Testament book of Acts. It’s exciting to see how the Holy Spirit led the early believers and how supernatural expressions of His presence, like healing or other miracles, were a common occurence. This week as I was reading in Acts chapters 6 and 7 about the life of Stephen and the price that he paid for his faith, I was challenged by his uncompromising boldness. After healing the sick and preaching to the religious leaders of the day, Stephen encountered much opposition and became the first New Testament Christian to die for his faith. 

It made me reflect for a moment on my own life and I was shocked to see that our enemy can be so subtle in the way he intimidates us and robs us of confidence. I’m rarely in situations where speaking about Jesus would cost me my life, and to be honest, I doubt that such a threat would hold me back. But this week I became aware of a different and more subtle hindrance. Twice over the past week, my neighbour has felt suddently and strangely unwell, such that she was unable to go out to the nursing home to visit her mother in the evening.  While my natural response would usually be to ask, “Can I pray for you?,” I felt myself pulling back from that, and on Monday this week I realised why. It’s because of my own health issues in recent months. I wasn’t instantly and amazingly healed of my pleurisy and, after fourteen weeks of battling with it, I realised that something within me was hesitating to pray for a sceptic - just in case she wasn’t healed and it gave her further reason to doubt the reality of God.

On Monday night as I was walking the dog, I felt the Lord challenge me about that. Who am I to think that I need to look after God’s reputation for Him? He’s more than able to do that for Himself. But He commanded us to pray for the sick, and that’s reason enough to pray for my neighbour when she’s not well. The outcome is God’s responsibility, not mine.

An hour later, when I got home from walking the dog on the hilside, I asked my neighbour, “Can I pray for you?” and I was surprised how readily she said yes. In my less than perfect Spanish, I simply prayed for God to touch her with His love and healing. Then she thanked me and gave me a hug.

The next day, amidst my own diagnoses of degenerating arthritis and chronic lung condition, not to mention the news of my cat’s failing kidneys, my neighbour came to me with great enthusiasm, telling me that she felt completely better now and had all her strength back again. Since then, she keeps mentioning how much better she feels now.  It’s obviously an answer to prayer, but I have no satisfactory explanation for why my neighbour would be so remarkably healed, while my cat and myself face rather daunting medical diagnoses.

All I know is that I can’t allow such unanswered questions of life to prevent me from stepping out in obedience to God. He told us to lay hands on the sick and to pray for them, and it’s important for me to obey that, without rationalising and wondering how the person will take it.

We may not be in situations where we’d be martyred for our faith like Stephen was... but we can run into a whole lot of other situations where the enemy will attempt to discourage us, silence us or steal our confidence. That’s when we need to remember that God is bigger and that we simply need to trust Him in every situation.