Divine Healing

Dear Gentle Reader,
Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I’m blessed to be able to attend a neighborhood church that is flowing with life and spirit. The music is joyful and the people enthusiastically praise God in song. The Bible says, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." So we feel free to dance and shout, and in fact, the pastor encourages us to do so. Sometimes he gets so excited when he preaches that he jumps up and down. It’s fun.

The church takes a bus to the central city and picks up people living in shelters, who are offered breakfast and a good lunch. San Diego seems to have a high number of homeless people and many of them like living in Pacific Beach where the church is located. This morning a man from Nigeria testified that he had attended our church two weeks ago and had recommitted his life to the Lord. The next day he felt prompted to apply for a job at a 7-11 store and was immediately accepted. We felt happy for him.

Preceding the church service, I usually go to Sunday School, where there is more discussion and opportunities to hear people ask questions or expand upon what the teacher has said.

Today I’d made plans to meet some friends for lunch in another part of town. Jill and Don are a "happy-ever-after" couple who met each other at church after they had both "suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." He is a retired minister whose wife died suddenly. She is a teacher who had gone through some hard times. Now they’ve been married three years and are still in honeymoon mode. There are challenges with re-marriage and acceptance by adult children, but what is life without a challenge or two? They keep us on our knees and dependent on God.

We had a good discussion during lunch about Jesus’ promise in John 14:13-14, and corresponding passages in James 5:15-16, particularly about how the New Testament seems to offer the miracle of healing as a reasonable expectation for believers, and yet how powerless many churches seem to be in that regard today. Don is a member of the International Order of Luke the Physician, an organization whose website says, "OSL is a body of Christians who believe that the healing of the body, mind and spirit is a vital part of the total ministry of Jesus Christ." And yet his first wife died soon after returning from a wonderful trip to Israel. Likewise, I prayed and truly believed that my older sister would recover from a stroke, but it didn’t happen.

Why not? What is missing from our faith? We don’t know.

But we’re asking, seeking, knocking. Jesus promised we would receive, find, and have doors opened to us.

Are you familiar with The Message version of the Bible? Psa 27:14 says, "Stay with GOD! Take heart. Don't quit. I'll say it again: Stay with GOD."