What Does Healing Look Like?

As I've been reflecting on healing, I am beginning to realize that healing doesn't always look like what we think it should. For one thing, as I mentioned before, it isn't always instantaneous. I'm beginning to suspect that Voila! healings are quite rare.  Not that they can't or don't happen, but it seems like most healing is a process...a sort of unfolding.

It sort of reminds me of the way a flower blooms. While there are some flowers that pop open overnight, most of the time, it's difficult to point to the precise moment when a flower has bloomed. From bud to blossom is a process, one that we can see only with time lapse photography. But even as we view it, there really isn't a single frame that we can highlight and say, "Yes, here is where the flower bloomed."

Perhaps that is how it is with healing, especially our emotional wounds. One day, things are just a bit brighter or clearer or safer. One day, it's afternoon and I realize that I haven't felt that awful surge of panic for several hours. I can't say that I am healed, but I begin to see that healing is possible and that perhaps the process is underway.

However, that requires trust...trust that healing is possible and the trust that is happening even without tangible evidence.  Sort of like a flower that is still in the bud, I need to trust that there will be bloom.

Healing Across the Borders of Time

I mentioned last post that I have six prayers for this Year of Faith, the first being for healing. 

Not physical healing but rather healing of those things that have been transmitted through the generations that now cause me to suffer in ways that God might not intend.

The first time I came across the idea that we might be able to heal across time was in a small book about healing your family tree.  I'm not even sure who the author was.  At the time I thought it was an odd idea, both that a family tree needed healing and that one could do so. However, as I've grown older, the idea became more viable. After all, when we go to the doctor, one of the first things s/he has us do is fill out a form that asks if there is cancer or diabetes or heart disease in any close family member.  If the propensity toward physical illness can be transmitted, why not the tendency toward spiritual illness?

As I looked back over my family lineage (with the help of a genealogy chart), I realized that as far back as I know, both sides of my family have been subject to divorce. It was hard to find a single couple that didn't experience it, and certainly none of the family branches were spared.

Another trait is, as I mentioned earlier, a tendency toward depression and anxiety. I was shocked at just how many people in the family suffered from these twin demons.

There are more, in varying degrees, that flow like malevolent sap through the tree, withering and stunting the growth of the leaves and oft-times preventing good fruit from being produced.

So I decided that my first prayer would be to ask that somehow, through God's grace, the effects of the origining sin (not Original Sin, but, say, the first time divorce entered the family) be healed and the effects be halted; that whatever suffering that exists in my life and the lives of my family members because of these familial traits be removed.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting. All I know is that I do expect that the prayer will be answered. How, when and where, I don't know.  But this is the Year of Faith...and I'm trying to exercise my own, often wobby faith.