Christian healing is a process that involves the totality of our being -- body, mind, emotion, spirit, and our social context -- and that directs us toward becoming the person God is calling us to be at every stage of our living and dying. Whenever we are truly open to God, some kind of healing takes place, because God yearns to bring us to wholeness. Through prayer and the laying on of hands, through confession, anointing, the sacraments, and other means of grace, Jesus meets us in our brokenness and pain and there loves, transforms, forgives, redeems, resurrects, and heals. Jesus does this in God's way, in God's time, and according to God's loving purpose for each person.
Because the Holy Spirit is continually at work in each of us, pushing us toward wholeness, the process of healing is like removing sticks and leaves from a stream until the water runs clear. If we simply get out of the way of the Lord's work in us, we can trust that we are being led to the particular kind of wholeness God wills for us.
Very often the results of our healing are increased faith in God and a new empowerment to love and serve others. Frequently we find that the very thing that caused our greatest brokenness becomes transformed into our own unique giftedness.
Tilda Norberg and Robert D. Webber. Stretch Out Your Hand: Exploring Healing Prayer. (Cleveland, OH: United Church Press, 1990).
Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible. If we have not undergone that inner liberation in which the individual strands of the nets in which we are caught are severed, one by one, our activism may merely reflect one or another counter ideology ... We may simply be caught up in a new collective passion, and fail to discover the possibilities God is pressing for here and now. Unprotected by prayer, our social activism runs the danger of becoming self-justifying good works. As our inner resources atrophy, the wells of love run dry, and we are slowly changed into the likeness of the beast. ...
Prayer is the field hospital in which the spiritual diseases that we have contracted from the Powers [of this world] can be diagnosed and treated.
... we pray for whatever we feel is right and leave the outcome to God. We live in expectation of miracles in a world reenchanted with wonder. ...
Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. ...
No doubt our intercessions sometimes change us as we open ourselves to new possibilities we had not guessed. No doubt our prayers to God reflect back upon us as a divine command to become the answer to our prayer. But if we are to take the biblical understanding seriously, intercession is more than that. It changes the world and it changes what is possible to God. ...
Praying is rattling God's cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God's hands and the manacles off God's feet and washing the caked sweat from God's eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes. ...
The issue, after all, is not whether we are spiritual giants, but whether God really is able to do something. Faith is not a feeling or a capacity we conjure up, but trusting that God can act decisively in the world. ...
When the miracle happens, we feel that God has intervened in a special way. But God does not intervene only occasionally. God is the constant possibility of transformation pressing on every occasion, even those that are lost for lack of human response. God is not mocked. The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but they are inexorable.
Walter Wink. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium. (New York: Doubleday. 1998).
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