Healing - Fact or fiction 2

Up in the Rift Valley, Kenya, we'd been engaged in some rural evangelism and after the preaching it was announced that we'd be praying for those who were sick. I was grabbed (literally) and taken to a woman who wanted prayer for healing. "what is wrong with her?" I asked. The response was that she was blind!

I have to be honest and say that I wanted to get out of there. I believed God 'could' heal but that hadn't generally been my experience. I would have been O.K. with a headache or something a bit abstract and lightweight, but blind was a bit over the top!

It was obvious that I wasn't going to get out of it (I remember thinking I'd try and see if I could slip off to get my Bible!) and so I stuck out a hand and prayed two of my favourite prayers, 'oh God' and 'help'. I could feel something was happening as I prayed for those blind eyes to see (heat, tingling electric sort of stuff and the like).

When the feeling sort of stopped I asked the woman (through a translator) how she felt. After a brief conversation the people clapped and cheered and the translator said, "She can see."

To be honest here, my first thoughts were that she could see all along (always the cynic me!) and that what we really had was an error in initial translation which meant that 'she can see' was the starting state as well!

Someone came into the crush and after a quick chat it transpired that there was a lot of blindness in the region (something about volcanic ash was Mentioned) and that she had been blind for some time and now wasn't!

Relieved, shell-shocked and I don't know what I felt, it was all a bit heady, confusing and disorientating, I believed in healing but this was up close and personal in a really big way! I turned, only to find another candidate for prayer and of course she was also blind! Repeat prayers (blind eye see had been added after my favourite two prayers, so I continued with that) and end up with the same response and result (except I was more expectant/believing/less surprised perhaps).

Again the people were buzzing and up came a third person, obviously blind (White eyes are a give away aren't they?) but still I asked and prayed and opened my eyes to look into two brown eyes without a hint of white to be seen anywhere! I didn't bother to ask, but someone else did and the praised God (of course).

After that I managed to get back to the matatu (the bus I was driving) and once inside, my wheels fell off. If God could do what He'd just done using me then I'd got Him very wrong indeed! I understood the 'get away from me God, I'm a sinful man' bit and realised something if His immensity in one experience.

The sad bit was that later, back in the UK, I struggled to understand how we could see what we did (for there was much more) in Africa and yet fail to see the same thing on our shores. We were the same people and God was the same God so what was it? Faith, expectation, mindset (we know so much and see so little whilst they knew God but were less 'sophisticated').

what was it in us that meant we didn't see what we had seen elsewhere and even though my expectations were high, for healing was now a reality not just something I believed yet didn't expect to see in some sort of dispensationalist or rational way, it wasn't the same!

I still don't understand and to be honest, over the intervening years I have stopped asking (but now I'm going to have to start again :( ), but my experience tells me that God does heal even though my 'now' sort of denies it. Chronos and kairos? Just a lucky night? Can't have been for there were so many people and so many nights in so many different places.

Bottom line - healing sure isn't fiction and surely there must be some of the robustness in the evidence out there?

Pax

ps. my scientific and engineering background always calls for empirical proof. That night I got what I hadn't sought and realised that what I'd never thought about in any real way was something that I should expect and was real. Care on the streets - nope, should be healing on the streets, now I have to understand how and why. Also healing is not the gift in the box but it is a gift.

God is not an equation: Sickness + prayer + God = whatsoever God fancies it being.

We cannot manipulate Him by transposition nor apply Him as a constant, and yet he is not hypothesis either. He is a variably constant constant - hallelujah!

The 'does God heal?' conundrum

Following on from this morning's post, the issue of healing appeared on the radar in to form of a conversation with an extremely experienced nursing type (been a midwife tutor and worked in a mil' setting for much of their career) regarding God and healing. Their view was (and always had been) that God healed through the skills and expertise of the medical types and not by any divine act.

This raised a whole raft of issues for me, namely (in a nutshell):

i. If God can heal but doesn't, does this make God wicked, uncaring or just plain mean?

ii. If God can't heal, then surely this means He isn't God, for everything should be possible for the Absolute God.

(Note the parallels here with the issue of evil - does it work if we substitute evil and suffering for healing?))

But what about times when God does heal, physically, when, how, who and where and why did it happen?

I struggle because I have prayed for (me, not a story from another person) physically blind people (yes, more than one) and they saw. Before I prayed for them, they didn't. Simple in an extremely complex and unsettling way. (I'll give an account of this later)

I struggle because having prayed for a man regarded as a 'demoniac' and seeing him stripped naked, shaved, hosed down and returned to his family who had long back assumed he was dead, I know the power of God's healing (again, I'll tell the story some time soon).

So why did God heal them (and many others) from discernable medical conditions and yet not heal others? I prayed for a child with cerebral malaria and buried her the next day and less than three days later prayed with, and for, another and never realised that I'd passed her playing outside the house when I returned the next day. Both had the same illness and yet one lived and the other died. "All the days numbered," had been reached for one and yet still ran for the other.

So here we are. The ASA want 'robust proof' and many will offer up headaches and inner peace as examples of this (which indeed are evidence of healing). But what of the robustness of dead raised, deaf hearing and the lame dancing? Is seeking evidence 'putting God to the test' or is it merely satisfying the need for empirical evidence and right (after all, we are told to 'test' aren't we?). Are we too content to praise God for what isn't there or are we too lightweight to shout about what is and take on the skeptics?

One of the most important roles I have as a dog-collar is that of helping people to die well. I start working with people on this as soon as they become Christians, for we only get one go at dying and there are no resits - but what of healing before death comes a knocking?

Pax