Considering God’s mysteries feels heavy. Why didn’t Jesus come and make everything right; why didn’t he eradicate all disease? The bleeding woman, Jairus—they had the advantage of asking Jesus for healing face to face. Yet if they had to pray to thin air, to make their petitions to an invisible God, would the outcome have been different? Would the Gospel writers even have recorded any unmet requests?
Why does God heal some and not others? More important, why didn’t God heal me? Why is he so slow in healing Titus? These questions are constant embers.
If only I could systematize God, if I could explain with logical certitude why he does or does not, then I could explain away the hurt, the inequities of the past, the ones of the future. I could create theological constructs whereby God chooses some and not others, whereby he ordains some healings and some deaths, and whereby a lack of faith leads to a lack of healing. I could remove the mystery of spirituality, the complexity of both the God feast and the God famine.
But systems are not God; I know this to be true even though I’ve spent too much of my life attempting to prove otherwise.
When I was five and playing in the mesquite trees, I heard the clear voice of God, and even then, I had no way of explaining his whisper in the wind moving across the grass, or the way my heart turned grateful at the sight of the scissortail flycatcher daring to dart so close to the ground before returning to the wire. I had no system for explaining the God I saw in all things, or for the love I felt among them. I had no new charismatic language then.
I remember an old Texan woman, a tiny wisp of a twig with switch branches for arms and legs. Her eyes were large and gray. She sat in the country pew in front of us on Sundays, and if we were good during the service, she’d turn and offer us a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum. She had a genuine smile, and she never spoke a word—at least not as far as I remember. I have no system for explaining how godward her simple charity felt.
When I was a child, I had faith like a child. This charismatic healer—a misguided ninny, really—stripped the tender reed of faith bare. Now I hear only the Spirit-whisper of a mysterious faith, and it’s calling me back to mystery.
But how?
I know it’s time to begin turning in to the pain, headlong, rather than numbing it away. It’s time to go back. How? Simple practice. Begin with the last hurt and ask myself, What emotions do I feel? Are the emotions chaotic, disorganized? Are they like a tempestuous sea or a burning atmospheric reentry? Can I sit in those emotions and write them down? I’ll consider the emotions, confess them, find the truth in the moment. And then maybe I’ll move into the practice of forgiveness. Maybe.
In the forgiveness, I wonder, will I find myself being made more like the Jesus I claim to follow? Is such a thing possible?