August 27, 2020
When I was just a child, about 9 years old, astronauts went to the moon and walked on it. They even brought back moon rock. I was very excited about it and my parents even let me stay up to watch it on television.
But the next day, I was very sad. The moon, you see, was NOT made of green cheese. It was made of rock. Dull, boring rock. There wasn’t even air there which is why of course astronauts wear space suits.
I was glum because things were not as wonderful and marvelous as human fiction had made it out to be. I lost my daydreams about the moon.
As I grew up and moved into adulthood, I lost a lot of those whimsical daydreams. Generally speaking we call this “growing up”.
But there was one thing that never went away for me.
Wonder.
As a young divorcee with a child to care for, when trouble piled up too high, I used to drive me and my son out to the seashore. We would usually just sit in the car – as it was after work and everyone was eating, somewhere. We’d grab McDonald’s and go park at the beach. I would stare out at the ocean and just try to get my mind around how huge it was. The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world, so it’s a lot to try to wrap your mind around.
After doing that for a while, it was like I got perspective back and with it, my balance. My life wasn’t very big. My problems, even smaller than my life. That kind of wonder had become my chapel, though I did not know it at the time.
Now, as a Bible believing Christian who relies utterly my Savior, I no longer NEED that kind of chapel. I do miss seeing the ocean. But not as badly as before, because now my wonder comes from another source that is so much bigger than the Pacific Ocean even all the minds in the world cannot truly fathom it.
There are many so-called Christians, some very sincere, who are hooked (out of excitement addiction or desperation) on going to churches who purport to do “faith healing”. I haven’t seen a church or leader who is anything but a charlatan with this. It’s total fakery, and the best a person can get from attending those kinds of services is an emotional buzz and a psychosomatic relief of some symptoms. No one with any kind of serious injury or illness is ever healed at these gatherings.
Yet miracles happen every single day right in front of all our eyes. For instance: I cut myself on a jagged piece of furniture, say, and my arm bleeds a little. If I clean it out, it doesn’t get infected. As long as it doesn’t get infected, it heals.
We say “the body heals itself”. I never questioned that phrase until now. IF the body truly heals itself, then why do we ever die? Why do we ever get killed by attack or catastrophe or illness? IF the body itself truly healed itself, then why can’t people – after letting the body be dead from sudden death – heal itself and bring itself back to life?
Why is it, for that matter, that hemophiliacs could die from a cut if it bleeds much? Why would some people die from infection from a cut, as people did in the Middle Ages? ‘Well,’ we answer, ‘because we have modern medicine!’
But, I can battle infection in a cut with nothing more than soap and water. Yes, we are told that is something our doctors have learned, finally, and taught us. But we knew it before, at least Christians with a Bible knew it before, if they read their Bible. (Side note: Leviticus is packed with medical advice.)
And, just to cut to the chase, the book of Job explains that the earth is a sphere hung on “nothing”. Just like what we see from satellites in space.
I do have a point to make here. I don’t believe the “body heals itself”. If it did, one could theoretically, and actually, cut off one of my fingers, slice it, and watch it heal itself. Oh, we say, but it’s cut off from the HEAD and obviously all commands come from the brain, including healing. True. Partly. Some comes from DNA which is present in all our tissue. But who made DNA? Did we all figure THAT out in our heads when we were babies? No. Obviously. Now we get into “automatic” signals from our brains to our bodies: those we don’t have any say so over. I know this because sometimes I get a cut and totally forget I have it, only to find the scab and be surprised a while later, then reminded. So I had forgotten it, yet it healed. Really, we do not have any say over it ourselves in our own thinking. Anyone who has been at least 5 years old knows we can think until we’re blue in the face and it doesn’t bring complete healing.
But leave a cut long enough, it heals.
So if our body doesn’t heal itself and our mind doesn’t heal it (consciously) what does? Some random signals so efficient and perfect that – like it or not – we heal?
That does not sound like the kind of science I was raised on. The kind of science I was raised on, and kids now even more so, said we’re all an accident. That randomly, over millions of years, we “accidentally” evolved (or survival of the fittest … which does NOT explain me) into these biological “machines” that though we live in them all our lives on this planet, we still cannot fully understand them? Yet they somehow were “accidentally” and “randomly” put together in marvelous ways? Personally, I’m no longer interested in that kind of irrationality.
No, our bodies do not “heal themselves”. A gracious, merciful and beneficent God who created all there is, He it is who heals our bodies.
In the New Testament, Jesus healed a lot of people, right? Well, listen to this:
John 5:19-23 New International Version (NIV)
19 Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. 21 For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. 22 Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.”
Look closer at “he can only do what he sees his Father DOING” …. note the present tense “because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
God heals us, present tense. It’s not our “bodies” healing themselves, it’s GOD who heals our bodies. Or doesn’t. Gives life or takes it.
My wonder has returned in greater degree than ever before.
Nobodyz' Space 