Waiting...To Be Healed

There's pain, God.  Everywhere.

There's physical pain--daily sticks to see if the blood sugar is normal, pokes to make sure the blood is okay, pricks to give medicine.  There's the chronic ache of a back that started after a car wreck and still won't go away.  There's stomach pains that can't be appeased, migraines that won't surrender.  There's lupus and cancer and literal broken hearts.

Then there's the emotional pain--figuratively broken hearts, though they often feel literal.  There's losing pregnancies, losing grown children, losing parents.  There's watching someone you love fight a disease you'd gladly take on as your own.  There's watching your child go back and forth between two homes, with no understanding for why mom and dad are so angry with each other.  There's signing of divorce papers, signing over of rights.  There's addiction and guilt, regrets and remorse for every second of the day.

We hurt, God.  And we want to stop hurting.

I want you to be the Lord of Lazarus!  The one who calls us from the grave and gives us life again!  For oh, how wonderful it would be to never have to let go or say goodbye.  Be the one who tells the lame to walk, so we can run and tell the news of your glory!  Be the God of Job, who though capable of taking everything away, can give everything back twice over.  Be the Lord at the well and the Lord drawing the line in the sand, who meets us in our brokenness and carefully sews us back together.

We want to be healed.  To be cured and whole.  To consider heartbreak and misery merely nothing but a memory, and one we don't recall well.

C.S. Lewis called pain your "megaphone," one you use to "rouse a deaf world."  And while I understand your need to get our attention and the effectiveness of pain, couldn't you take it away once we turn to you?

Sometimes you do.  Sometimes you wipe it all away, like the ailments that fell away at the touch of your cloak.  But for others, it's slow and monotonous.  For some, it never happens until this life becomes another.

So I have to stop and remember--healing is a process that's different for everyone, for we all have different combinations of hurts and different makeups that respond differently to those hurts.  It's like the babies I take care of in the hospital.  What's the first thing the parents ask us?

When will my baby be well enough for me to take home?

We can't ever answer that, especially on the first day.  We can give ballpark numbers and typical paths, but the truth is that every baby is different, and every baby heals differently.  I can't tell them if their baby will sail through perfectly and never need a blood transfusion or a round of antibiotics or oxygen.  I can't tell them if their baby will hit every roadblock and setback imaginable, with everything from a high-frequency jet ventilator to steroids to a perforated bowel to eye surgery.  No two paths to healing are exactly alike.  But what I can assure the parents is that babies don't stay in our unit forever.  One way or another, healing comes.

And I watch those parents wait.  I watch them come every day and bring milk.  I watch them change those first diapers with their breath held tightly, deathly afraid of pulling too hard on a tube or wire.  I watch them hold their babies for the first time and feed the first bottles.  I watch their faces fall when they hear that they can't go home this week like they hoped, for the baby briefly stopped breathing.  I wait with them.  I cheer them on and remind them that one day, these days of leaving their babies to sleep in a hospital when they go home at night will soon be nothing more than a memory.

Sometimes healing comes when the baby doesn't have to fight anymore and can slip silently away to the heavens in the rocking arms of his aching mother.

But healing comes.  Always.

And God, I see that the process that gets us to healing is just as important as the healed state itself.  For it is the pain and the waiting and the two steps forward and three steps back that make us hardy and refined.  It makes us who we are.

And so Lord, I'll take what you give.

I'll take the casts and the pokes and the pain and the brokenness that it takes to get me well enough until I'm Home.

So I'm still here, waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting for you to heal.