Some thoughts on healing and God's plan.

“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”.

I don’t know what God’s perfect plan looks like. I don’t know why some prayers get answered and not others. I don’t know why people suffer and hurt.

But I do know this: God has a plan. And it is perfect.

I had a lengthy conversation with someone today. Our stories were similar, and yet oh so different. While he battled depression from a young age and did not have a deeply personal connection to God, I battled depression from a young age yet have always had a personal relationship. Yet he was healed from his depression, totally and completely.

And I take medication every day to keep mine at bay.

I have been asked questions over the years like “Do you not think that God can heal you?” “Have you prayed and surrendered?” “Do you BELIEVE that God can take this away?”

And the answer to all of those questions is “Yes. Yes, and yes again. But…”

But I believe that God has different plans for every person. I believe that God uses each of us, our talents, our gifts, and our cracks and flaws, to paint a beautiful picture of life and glory.

I believe that God heals me every morning that I take my medication, and every night when I fall asleep trusting that He will guard me for another night. I believe that God’s healing for me is ongoing. It is not that I do not believe that God will work a miracle; I believe that God is working a miracle through the health care that I have.

This led to a fundamental question today: Why does God let me walk with my disorders and take them away from other people?

Well, why does God do anything?

We can speculate, and we can wonder. We can think that we know the answers, yet at the end of the day find ourselves empty-handed.

I realized today that praying desperately for healing, for God to show up in the way that I want him to, is not the prayer that God asks me to pray.

God asks me to pray a prayer of relationship. To grow deeper and deeper into Him every day, and to find Him in the broken places. I do want to be healed fully, yet what I really want is to see God every day.

Here’s the image I came up with: my disorders are kind of my binoculars on God. Here’s why: when I pray the prayer every morning that my medication will work, that I will not have a panic attack, and that my day will go smoothly, I see God at work with a can of WD-40 in the cogs of my mind making everything go.

I see holiness in the way that flowers show themselves
through the thick weeds that threaten to strangle them.

I see Him in the mountain that lurks behind the clouds and then bursts out into the glorious sunshine. I see Him in the flowers that dot the campus. And I thank God that I can see Him in all of these seemingly inconsequential things, because there are days when even those things look depressing.

Do I want to never have to take an anti-depressant again? Yes. Do I want to never have a panic attack again? YES. Do I want to experience God on a deeper and deeper level each day? YES YES and YES.

Maybe learning to live with these things is God’s plan for my search to see His faithfulness.

Maybe, one day, he really will completely heal me. I am open to that, and I would embrace that.

But in the meantime, maybe God just wants me to seek Him every day. And maybe living a healthy life where I take my medication is the way that that will happen.

And one day, when I am finally free from it all, I do believe that I will never feel pain again.

Maybe my doorway out will come through searching through abandoned
wreckage, and seeing the mystery that lies behind the other door.