Daily Devotion

The Edge House campus ministry is like the inn on the road to Jericho in the story of the Good Samaritan: a place of healing, of storytelling, of transition. I’ve been thinking about healing a lot in this year of Our Lord 2020. Healing, my friend Ruth used to say, isn’t the same as a cure. Sometimes, God be praised, there is a cure for someone’s illness, whatever it might be, and they walk away physically whole. Sometimes there isn’t. And sometimes—miraculously or because of hard work—there is healing: transformation and a closing of a spiritual wound. God doesn’t always cure us, but God always, always heals. Eventually.

Every one of us has an inner wound. I mean emotionally, of course, spiritually. Maybe it’s something we can point to directly to in our childhoods or maybe it’s something that we became aware of over time, but we’re all trying to protect ourselves, trying to keep anyone from even noticing that we’re wounded. Trying to keep even ourselves from noticing it. That would be the worst, if someone saw how broken and hurt we actually are? But this is exactly what God is about—offering healing for that wound. 

Sociologist Jim Finley says, “It’s not what was done to you, it’s what what was done to you did to you.” Read that again, the grammar is weird. Healing is what happens when we look clearly at what happened in us because of what was done to us. Healing is an acceptance—not approval, acceptance—a clarity, a willingness to do what we can and to let go of the rest. Healing—whether it’s from a personal rejection, from the grief that comes with disease, from societal ills like racism or transphobia—healing can come as a surprise and an unexpected lifting of a burden, but it can also come after working hard to see our own or others’ pain. 

What do you need healing for right now? And when have you experienced healing? How did it happen? How was God involved in that moment?