I just received an email from a friend of mine who shared that the doctor caring for his wife has just told him that she has about 4-6 weeks to live. She has cancer. Six months ago she was told she had about a year to live. Six weeks ago, they told her she had six months and now six weeks. I believe that God heals. I have written about it, prayed for it, seen it happen on occasion, but every now and then wonder why we don’t see physical healing occurring more. We are told to pray for the thin place of the Rule of God to enter into this present evil age. We have lots of theories about who is responsible for folks not being healed.
Years ago, a mentor of mine told a story of his days as a missionary in Africa with the Lutheran church. He was visiting other missionaries deep in bush. At one of the missionary outpost, he arrived to find the missionary building a wood coffin. Inquiring what had occurred, the missionary told him that just that morning his son had become ill with a high fever and by noon he was dead. Worse yet, he had lost his daughter the day before in the same time frame. My friend, whose belief system followed the path of thinking that we are at war with Satan, that we are in a conflict between the kingdom of Satan and the Kingdom of God and that this was a direct attack of the enemy on this missionary. The missionary, however, saw it as God’s will to mold him into a better follower of God.
What he learned and passed along is that in those moments, it’s not the right time to debate theology, but to hold the broken family in one’s arms while suffering their grief and tears with them. So, my encouragement to any of you that may be reading this post, is to lay aside all the theologizing about why a friend or loved one may be suffering a certain disease and may be close to death and hold them tightly in your arms, praying for the peace of God to saturate their present situation.
