Today's guest post comes from a good friend of mine, Sherry Fahmi. Sherry is a proud member of St. Timothy & St. Athanasius Church in Arlington, VA and she has guest posted on my blog before. You can follow her on twitter, @SherryFahmi. And if you too are interested in guest posting on my blog, please visit my Guest Post guidelines for more info.
Do you ever get tired of waking up tired? Sounds like a silly question right? Well, about two months ago I decided that I was tired of waking up feeling like life was somehow too hard. I know in my head that, as a follower of Jesus, my life SHOULD look different, feel different, and make a difference, right?
But instead, I felt tired, distracted, and very broken. Where was the joy? The strength? The healing? I felt like I was missing something important, and that even though I might have had it once… I lost it, whatever IT was.
I struggled to pray, to read my Bible, or to serve othes in any capacity. In the brief moments I actually tried to pray, I had nothing to say. All I could muster up was someting along the lines of: “Lord, I need healing – I don’t know why I feel so defeated, like life is too hard and I’m too broken to do anything about it…I need to be healed.”
That single prayer carried me for what seemed like forever.
The question I was struggling with was this: if I need healing and God has promised me healing through His Word, and He is more than capable of healing me, why is it that I’m still tired? Still distracted? And still broken? Why hadn’t God healed me yet?
God had the answer (of course) but to get there, He took me on a little journey.
Now, if you are reading this and expecting some life-changing miracle in the paragraphs that follow, let me go ahead and tell you that’s NOT how this story ends. When I asked God for healing, I felt Him responding to my question with a question of His own:
What kind of healing are you looking for? What is it that you need healing from?
I didn’t have the answer to that – not the slightest clue.
There have no doubt been situations in my life – as in most people’s lives – that have caused wounds and no matter how small they are, those wounds eventually add up. So at first, I thought those were the problem. But they weren’t.
In my pursuit of Gods healing, I learned a couple of very valuable lessons.
First of all, I learned that when God heals, he makes WHOLE.
With Christ, there’s no such thing as partial healing. I haven’t read a single story in the Bible about someone who came to Christ to receive healing and was half-way healed. Ever. That might seem elementary for most people, but for me, that was earth-shattering.
Why? Because the very next thing that hit me was that ONLY CHRIST Himself still carries His wounds, and He does so for a clear purpose:
“But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins; He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.”Isaiah 53:5 (NLT)
Alright Jesus, that’s what I want... I want THAT kind of healing. I want to be made WHOLE. And that became my new prayer. But of course, it didn’t end there.
I was so proud of myself for coming up with what I thought was a pretty good answer to God’s original question, but there was more.
I was talking to a good friend once about this idea of healing and he said something to me that really resonated. He told me that I need to seek God’s healing DAILY; it’s not a one-time thing.
Naturally, I hated that idea and desperately wanted him to be wrong (don’t judge me). But I let it marinate in my head for a while (and by a while, I mean weeks), until I realized that he was absolutely, positively 100% right!
I needed to accept the reality that I am broken, and I live in a fallen world. Every moment I am alive, my heart and my mind are filled with poison. Therefore I am in constant need of healing. I constantly need to be made whole. Talk about a reality check!
The beautiful thing about God is that He already knows what this world does to my heart and my mind. He knows my desperate need for healing, and my adamant refusal to admit it. He knows it so well that He renews His mercies each morning – JUST FOR ME – so I can find healing. His compassions never fail, because if they did, I’d never be healed.
It finally dawned on me that God in His infinite love orchestrated each of His attributes in a way that ensures I would find healing.
There is something so profoundly powerful in knowing that every time I seek God’s healing in my life, I am made whole. All it really takes is recognizing that I am always broken, and that He is Jehovah Rapha - my God who heals.
“…for I am the LORD, who heals you." (Exodus 15:26)