In her book God Never Blinks, Regina Brett describes the first time she attended a Jesuit Retreat House Healing Service.
She writes, “At first I cringed. I pictured a TV evangelist beckoning … touching my head, screaming ‘Demons be gone!’ and people dropping to the floor and flailing around like guppies out of water.”
Instead, she faced something quite different. At the service, one song after the next was played and the message was always the same.
God loves you.
Brett writes that she went through a whole box of tissue during the first song alone and “that the tears cleansed [her] wound.”
Last Wednesday at church, we sat around in a small group and discussed whether or not God heals today. We talked about physical healing, emotional healing (like Regina Brett’s) and spiritual healing. At the end of our meeting, we said a group prayer, inviting healing into our lives.
And then the strangest thing happened. A man walked into the room. He looked like he was off the streets, unkempt, missing a few teeth. He apologized for interrupting and then he asked us to pray for him.
A few minutes later, I handed him twenty dollars, and then I walked into Pastor Debbie’s office and cried.
When I was six-years-old I broke my arm on the playground and I broke it bad, so bad they had to knock me out at the hospital in order to set it. It’s the only night I have ever spent at the hospital.
They put me in a cast up above my elbow and I would go through yet another cast before it was all said and done. When the doctor removed my cast for the last time, my arm looked so pitiful. It was small, shrunken and still misshapen.
My grandfather called me “crooked arm” for years.
Like bones, souls can be broken too. Instead of wearing casts, we put up walls to protect ourselves while our souls heal.
But at some point our souls do heal and those walls, just like my cast, have to come down or else the soul has no room to grow.
And, just like my arm, the healed soul can be tiny and sensitive, but free of its walls the soul can flex its muscles and grow strong again.
Since coming to Hope Episcopal, God has taken down many of my walls, some even without my knowledge.
When I saw that man the other night asking for prayer, I didn’t stop to consider his motivations. I looked at him and saw him for what he was.
Broken.
And I remembered how once I was broken too … broken in a different way … but broken nevertheless and I remembered how it is God’s grace that has made me whole.
The same words that healed Regina Brett at that healing service are the same words that healed me and they are the same words I said to that man that night.
God loves you.
