When healing is just the beginning......

It makes a great deal of sense that when  you are burdened with a physical/mental/spiritual/social problem......that absolutely no one seems to be able to solve.......that should healing come, should you experience wholeness once again........you will be filled with gratitude.  I expect for days you will find it hard to actually believe that the long wait and all the worry are over.  Before the healing, you could only look down the road one day at a time.  Now a whole future stretches out before you.  There are all kinds of possibilities.  I think this is rightly called HOPE.

Yet let us consider that the gift of healing is only the beginning.  It offers to each of us the opportunity to start again.  Now that the great burden of our broken bodies or spirits is no longer our reality, we have a chance to begin again with a new reality, and to live out that reality in new and different ways.  That is, the gift of healing is also the gift of a new tomorrow......and that tomorrow could and just maybe should be different from today.

Because after today, you will be a person who once was oppressed or imprisoned by a problem that was beyond this world's ability to solve. Now you will be a walking example of the unpredictability of grace, poured out on you and your life.  You might even call this salvation.

And you just might want to tell someone else about this miraculous, life changing, life giving experience.  You just might want to tell someone else about how it all came about.  In the case of the three people healed by Jesus in the 8th chapter of Matthew, each one just might end up telling their story of new life.....and pointing to the Jesus who made it all happen.  Those who were healed would now also be witnesses......to the salvific power of Jesus, to the joy of restoration, to the gift of unexpected healing.

Healing takes many forms:  a broken relationship restored, a disease which disappears, an invitation to an outcast, a meal for the hungry, a mind which is whole again.  Any and all of these can turn our lives in a new direction, one of gratitude but also a life of witness as well.  The verb  sodzo is Greek and is translated as 'to heal' 'to make whole' or 'to save'.  In this one word is wrapped all these notions of release from disease, wholeness of body, mind, spirit and the new life that is discovered in the end.

Healing is the beginning of a journey of salvation: new life that springs up like living water in those who have been made whole through powers unknown by mere humans.  Sure, some of that healing comes to us through modern science and practice.  That doesn't make it any less amazing, or, to think about it, leave us any less thankful.

From healing to witness.  New life springing up.  Salvation lived today.  Forgiveness that takes the broken and makes it whole.   I bet you have a story about how your life has been changed.  If we share that story with others, they just might reach out to the one who wants to heal them as well.