SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS

We are all wounded. It goes with being human, being alive. We will always be wounded. Heal one wound and another opens up. Several wounds may be festering at the same time. The bleeding never stops until we die. Until then we are a mess of wounds, often a bloody mess.

The wounds are usually more spiritual, psychological, than they are physical. Would that all our wounds be only physical. We could deal with those even if they could not all be healed. It's the other wounds that are the real stinkers. They make the physical wounds even worse. Many physical wounds are simply that: physical. If there is a psychological scar attached, it is usually the result of our own foolishness and nothing more deep-seated than that. Break a leg: we know why. Injure our back: we know why.

But there are some wounds whose reason is beyond our comprehension. For those, we find a reason, a spiritual one: sin. The fundamentalists are good in this area. Their standard reason for anyone being sick is that the person has sinned. Cancer, MS, diabetes, etc., are all the result of personal sin. Repent of that sin and one will be healed. And in a way the fundamentalists are correct. Sometimes our own sinfulness causes injury to our physical being. A smoker who gets lung cancer knows the reason for the cancer. But for the most part, no one deliberately sets out to do something sinful so that the action will cause a debilitating and life-threatening disease.

Yet, even though personal sin is not the cause of breast cancer, for instance, if one wants to be healed of that cancer, one must want to be healed and must believe that healing is possible. If we believe breast cancer is an automatic death sentence for us, it is; and there is nothing that the medical profession can do about it.

On the other hand, the medical profession can determine that there is no cure for our disease and we can still be healed -- physically and spiritually. But the spiritual always comes first. We must want to get better before we can get better. And it does not matter what the cause of our illness was -- sin, foolishness, or the luck of the draw. It is only after we are wounded that the healing process begins.  We are wounded: now what? Now let the healing begin. And once we want to be healed, once we begin to pray for healing, something always happens.

What happens is not always what we pray for, the outcome we may desire. But something, some good, always happens. Prayer brings God directly into our lives because we have personally asked God to be directly involved in the healing process. God never says "no" to that prayer.

How God answers our prayer is up to God. Without God we will surely bleed to death, physically and spiritually. Even with God, we will never be free of wounds, given our humanity; but we will always be healing, getting better spiritually, if not always physically. Something always happens when we let God into our lives, something good, no matter how wounded we are.