Imago Dei Blog

At the recent women’s forum “What is it to Heal?” we discussed expectations we have surrounding healing.  Imago Dei community member and doctor Heather Crummet shared her thoughts with us:

Healing:  From the verb “to heal” – To make sound or whole, to restore to health, to overcome adverse circumstances, to be restored to original integrity.

The desire for healing is universal; it’s a defining feature of our humanity, to desire wholeness. Without brokenness, this concept, “Healing”, would never have existed. It would have been unnecessary, in fact, unfathomable. Similarly, without suffering, I would suggest, we would not really understand compassion.

When I started medical school, my idea was that by becoming a doctor I would experience satisfaction through making the world a better place. I also had this underlying concern that somehow God didn’t quite have the situation under control, or things would clearly be going differently than they were. Something happened along the way that I didn’t expect. I was stretched beyond my limits, to the point where I would fall asleep talking to my parents on the phone, but it wasn’t enough – there was always more, so my human energy was inadequate. I discovered that sometimes people would continue doing things that were harmful to themselves even when they received good advice. I found I couldn’t always make it better, even with a lot of knowledge and skill, and concluded that there was a gap between what will ever be humanly possible and our ideal of wholeness. I found myself as a doctor completely inadequate when everything medical had been done to no avail, to mend the wounds of grief and loss. So the magic required to “make it all better” had not passed into my possession. Through all of this, I came to suspect the possibility that Christ might have a different agenda than “making it all better” in the simple way I’d like to see.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was talking to a patient years after a car accident that dealt severe damage to the left side of her face. She has multiple scars, and her ear is permanently misshapen. Yet she is fully functional. She doesn’t look “normal’, she doesn’t look the way she did before the accident…Is she healed? What is our expectation of what it means to be healed? Is it possible that things won’t be the same after as before?

I also looked on Google Images under the word Healing. I got 22,300,000 pictures, and I looked through them all, and a lot of them showed hands – hands receiving light, lifted up, or the laying on of hands. Now, I think that’s a powerful symbol that says something about healing. Why does this symbol speak so universally? Is healing a relational event? What is communicated in the laying on of hands for healing?

I met a man on a medical mission in Indonesia. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say I met him actually, because he was unconcious. He had fallen out of a tree days before. His body showed the marks of “cupping”, a traditional healing practice where heated cups are laid on the body to suck the illness out. Eventually, his family had brought him to the hospital, his internal injuries already advanced. I think this illustrates some interesting questions about things that get in the way between us and healing- Do we have preconceptions about healing that perhaps get in the way? In expecting one thing, do we miss another opportunity? What else comes between us and being healed? In our search for healing, do we run up against our own sin, another’s sin, or perhaps the greater darkness of the world?

Is healing a painful road, sometimes a road we would prefer not to take? My high school friend was hit by a car, and day by day, had her thigh bone lengthened a millimeter at a time – that was excruciatingly painful. What is the cost of being healed, and does it sometimes require more courage than we seem to have?

Is it possible to experience healing after our hopes are disappointed? Another friend is grieving today, a year after his beautiful wife passed away from breast cancer shortly before her 40th birthday. He still can’t sleep, he experiences tremendous back pain, and his children are having nightmares. Is it safe to conclude that he and his family have been forgotten? How long do we wait – how long does healing take?

Who is more whole – the woman in my office who is about to have a healthy baby, and is so angry, she hates everyone she meets, or my friend who is confined to a wheelchair since her 20’s with Friedrich’s ataxia, already on medication for a failing heart, and is able to share her sorrows with her Creator, able to have friends and to love people, and has hopes for the future here and for a new life in heaven? If we were truly well and at peace in our souls, would our physical infirmities matter a little bit less?

When I think about Christ’s healing, I love the story of the woman who needed a good gynecologist. Let’s look at the story of the woman with the hemorrhage…Mark 5:25-34.

“And a woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years, and had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was not helped at all, but rather had grown worse, after hearing about Jesus, came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she thought, “If I just touch his garments, I shall get well.” And immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. And immediately Jesus, perceiving in Himself that the power proceeding from Him had gone forth, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My garments?” And His disciples said to Him, “You see the multitude pressing in on You , and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” And He looked around to see the woman who had done this. But the woman fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him, and told Him the whole truth. And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.”

This woman had plenty of pain and shame. I think she probably had fibroid tumors, enlarging her uterus, causing pressure, pain, and endless bleeding. She was probably so anemic, she was always exhausted. She couldn’t stop bleeding, so she was always unclean. She stank, she couldn’t go far from home, she tried everything and spent all her money and only got worse. She made contact with Christ, that physical healing contact, but that wasn’t enough for Him. He went back and found her. She came to him trembling – what had she done? Touching the Master when she was in fact unclean? But He spoke to her with kindess, he called her Daughter, and he offered a benediction over the healing she had experienced.

My home community has been studying Mark, and we looked at this and other miracles of healing that Christ performed. Each one is unique; he has different words for some, he touches others, sometimes he spits or makes mud – but he always approaches each person individually, no assembly line, impersonal, healing for the sake of quickly making it better. What does Christ’s ministry to this woman and to individuals tell us about what healing means to Him? What does Christ want us to experience of Himself, to know about Him in the process of being healing? Or does our experience of suffering and compassion actually bring us into relationship in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise?

These are some old and new thoughts from my journey as one who would be part of Christ’s healing work.

Some questions to consider:

*What pictures come to mind when you think of healing or being
healed?

*Thinking as the woman with the hemorrhage, how do you imagine
yourself feeling as Christ turned to ask who touched him?  How
might those feelings change or shift as you spoke with him?

*Do you know someone for whom healing came at an unexpected
time or in an unexpected way?

*What are some common barriers/derailments/roadblocks to healing?
What gets in the way of healing?