Healing

This past week so many of our church members had been infected with this new strain of COVID that our pastor considered not having a worship service on Sunday. Wanting to hold a worship service, he asked the church secretary to e-mail\call our church family, urging them to wear a mask and sit separately when they came.  A lot of people stayed home, but we did have a church service.  Now we pray people will heal.

              This experience, however made me think about the process of healing.  So I decided to do a bit of research.  The dictionary says, “Heal” means “to make whole or sound in bodily condition, to free from disease or ailment, restore to health, soundness.”  The internet tells me that healing is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair a damaged area of the body. 

              To be sure, I called our son-in-law, Dr. Jay Lenox, in Rockford, Illinois, who is an OB-GYN physician, just to back up what I had learned.  He agreed that we heal in two ways:  by regeneration where the dead cells are replaced by the same tissue as was originally there, and by repair, where the injured tissue is replaced with scar tissue.  Then he went on to remind me of the healing power of nature.  God has endowed our bodies with natural healing mechanisms, by which any healing process occurs.  With these natural mechanisms (ours immune system, our wound healing capacity, and countless other regulatory and corrective systems) life itself is barely possible.  Some part of the medical profession use the term “innate intelligence” to describe the body’s inborn ability to heal itself.  Jay went on to say this natural healing process applies not only to the physical restoration of health, but to the restoration of emotional, mental and psychological health.  In other words, a person must want to be healed.

              This last thought reminded me of an experiences a hospital chaplain had some years ago in another state.  He told me of a middle-aged woman, a trained professional health care provider who had been hospitalized.  She was clinically depressed, suffering physically and emotionally.    The woman’s daughter had been irresponsible, and the patient was troubled with the responsibility of raising a granddaughter, but the woman’s real problem lay with her younger brother.  She had helped raise this brother, and he was been viciously murdered by an ex-girlfriend and her present boyfriend in the process of robbing him.  This woman, livid with hatred, wanted to actually kill these two people herself.  However, she had a strong religious background which had taught her that she was a sinner to think such thoughts.  She had covered herself with guilt because she literally wanted to put a gun to the heads of these two people.  Wallowing in this hatred and guilt had put her in the hospital.

              “I urged her to talk to a friend, or to all her pastor, or to find a professional counselor and enroll in a group therapy,” the chaplain told me, “but she wanted nothing to do with them.”  She refused to be healed.  The chaplain was called to another job about that time and never learned what became of this poor woman.  Yet this story has always stuck with me.  Our bodies are so marvelously made.  We are blessed not only with the ability to heal from inside, but we have fine hospitals and educated, caring medical personal to bring us back to health.  Yet, we must want to get well. 

              Going back to our situation: fortunately, this strain of COVID is not so toxic.  People aren’t dying; they say they feel like they have a bad cold.  We pray for everyone to be back in worship next Sunday. I am confident that they want to be well.