Notes From My Daughter - Surgery

Third in an occasional series from my 19 year old daughter. She apologizes for the delay as this semester has been a bit tough. Though she writes these great pieces she still can't keep track of her cell phone. Read on. 

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Throughout the adversity of life we all get wounded. Regardless of the size of the wound, we all need to be healed in order to move on. Often times we try to numb our own pain through various fillers, and procrastinate our own healing. Many times we have numbed ourselves so much that when God tries to bring it to our attention we get mad at him even though his awareness is what’s keeping us alive. 

If I had to imagine this type of healing as a metaphor it would go a little something like this: While wounded on the hospital bed of life, we self-ambitiously think to ourselves of alternatives and say “I can just take some medicine to heal the pain and move on.” So we choose to eject ourselves from the hospital and try to take some control of our own lives. Every now and then we feel a bit of pain, a bit of limitation in movement, but we’re happy for the most part. In our heads the little pain is better than whatever plans the people in the hospital had for us. At least we are able to get back to our own lives. But when the healing process is not completed we wind up being prone to injury every second of our lives, but most importantly -  in our next trial (which we cannot predict). When leaving the hospital bed it does not occur to us that the incident that caused this pain might happen again, or that we may have to face something even bigger than us next time. We were focused on the short sighted view (see last post) without recognizing that full healing was needed in order to live a full life. 

Well here’s the problem: while we tried to cover up our wound with band-aids and medicine, we only resolved the issue temporarily. This is the problem with short sighted vision, we assume we know and end up finding out that we only knew a fraction of the entire answer. And we put these fractions constantly before God, making idols out them when they cannot serve the purpose that God can. We end up taking the stab in the back that life gives us, rather than allowing God to take the knife to our problems which need to be cut out of our lives. We don’t recognize that we NEED surgery; not a band-aid, not painkillers, or any other “fix”. We need His touch, we need to sign the consent forms, submit even though we won’t be able to control God, and trust him as he does what he’s always done: healed us. 

The great thing about God, is that he just doesn't throw you out of the hospital once he’s done healing you, but lets you rest in him so that the healing can be COMPLETE. Then he pushes us to work on our weak areas knowing that “in our weakness He is made strong” and implements the physical therapy we need in order to gain confidence in Him and lose our unrighteous fears. He’s the surgeon, the Comforter, the Healer, and the Medicine. You can’t take pieces of Him or His gifts, or else YOU will never be complete and whole and able to “fight the good fight of faith.”  “We fight not against flesh and blood but against power and principalities;” we need God’s strength in order to make it through. Let him heal every part of you, so you can be able to do everything he has planned for you. The medicine covers the pain for a while, but God takes the pain away and covers you in his love eternally. He wants to heal you because he loves you too much to let you be defeated by life when he already defeated death. Let him in, give God a chance.

Have you given God a chance?