I’ve watched people in physical strife before. Loved ones fighting cancer mostly, or recovering from a car accident, or sports injury or knee replacement type of surgeries. I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for me and my kids. I don’t know how hard it is to fight cancer or live through chemo. I do understand the battle of physical injuries. I had surgery at 19 that hospitalized me for over a month in which they reconstructed my esophagus and I had to learn to talk again. I have overcome two types of addiction, alcohol and smoking. Now, I have overcome Lyme and the myriad of co-infections that took up residence with it.
What I can tell you in each of these circumstances that I learned more with each one, is that the battle to heal did not reside in the physical body. All the pain, symptoms and healing was taking place there in the organs, and various systems of the body, but that is not where the battle was taking place.
The actual battle was in the heart and the mind. Overcoming addiction physically was the easy part – but overcoming addiction in the mind was where the blood was spilled in overcoming. Its why I tried and failed so many times. Its why addicts fall off the wagon over and over again. The emotional and spiritual control it takes to beat a physical stronghold or disease is going to blow your mind. I had no idea.
Think about it, this is why they bring puppies and music and clowns to the cancer ward in hospitals. This is why Make A Wish matters. Personal affirmations make a difference. Happiness and Joy can turn the tide for a physical illness. Do you think it is the chicken noodle soup that heals or the loving hands that make it and deliver it in bed with a smile and hug? This is why hugs matter. This is why prayers matter. This is why it matters the music you listen to and the shows that you watch. It matters. The spiritual world has a stronger influence that we can even imagine on our physical one.
What if we are not warring against flesh and blood while healing?
I was reading this morning in Mark chapter 2. There was a man so stricken by paralysis that he had to be carried around on a stretcher. His four friends were so advocating for his health that they broke into the house through the roof to get their friend to the healer inside. Being an advocate is another soapbox I love to stand on, but that is for another day. It is the reaction from Jesus on the inside of the house that I love.
Jesus doesn’t miss a beat and says to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
What? Did he not see the stretcher? Did he not see the love, advocacy and tenacity of the four friends to fight for their friends physical body? Did he not understand why they had come?
Notice, the man, nor the friends complained. Not a single word of defiance. Not a single, “thanks, but…..”
It was others that questioned his authority to forgive that brought out these pivotal words from the Healer.
Jesus says in verse 8, “Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’?” Then almost as an aside, he tells the man to pick up his mat and walk.
Notice he doesn’t just forgive, discuss his authority and then heal. He says the phrase “which is easier”. If you read this again and again, it will occur to you what he is saying. God can heal the physical body. God can heal the physical body easily. It is so easy for God to heal, that the woman in Mark 5 just had to touch the garment of Jesus to be healed. But why does he do it second here? Why does it seem like a footnote?
Because healing the spirit and emotions of a person is more difficult. Not only that, but healing the spiritual and emotional self is more important. In fact it is the most important. I mean, it seems from the story, that it wasn’t even on Jesus’s radar. He was focused on the heart and the heart alone.
If we are on solid emotional ground, regardless or our circumstances, then the physical battles of this world are easier. I did not say easy and neither did Jesus. Healing from Lyme is not easy. Not even close.
What I can say with profound emphasis, the emotional and spiritual strength that it took to overcome Lyme disease was by far more difficult than all the physical difficulties combined. What I can tell you that because the emotional, spiritual and mental battle is so difficult in this healing that you must have Jesus to do it. Trying out of mere human strength will not be enough.
Blessings and healing,
Janice Fairbairn
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