Healing Correctly

 While doing some early holiday shopping in a local store, I happened to overhear the owner talking about a recent injury of hers: an accident on vacation that required a couple of surgeries and long-term recovery. As she was updating a couple of customers about the injury that currently has landed her in a wheelchair, one of them told her, "Well, I hope you heal up quickly!" And the sentiment was lovingly intentioned. However, the owner followed up with a statement that gave me reason to pause, and I've been thinking about what she said ever since. Her comment? "Well... rather than have it heal quickly, I'd rather it heals correctly." 

Healing the right way over healing it fast. I realized not many people are patient and realistic enough to walk through any form of pain with such honesty and perspective. I certainly wasn't for many years... until I learned differently. In a culture that wants to solve and accomplish anything as rapidly and efficiently has possible, it can be extremely hard to accept the fact that some things take time. Especially when it comes to matters of the heart and mind, certain issues will take more than a hot minute to unwind. 

Pain has a way of messing with your courage, of testing your fortitude, of asking you to endure more than you think you are capable of. It can push you to a breaking point where you wonder if you're actually going to make it or not. And pain also requires that you settle in for a longer journey than you bargained for. 

I was reminded of this while talking on the phone a few days later with a long-time friend I hadn't spoken to in eighteen years. He and his family were very dear to me while I was growing up, and I have many happy childhood memories of playing with his children and enjoying food, fun, and great time together. But our reunion has also brought some sadness with it as his sweet wife, whom I absolutely adored, and their adopted teenage daughter died in a car accident just four years ago. This conversation was the first time we'd talked since then. 

As our conversation progressed and we eventually landed on the topic of his recent loss, he painted a very real and raw picture of what a grief like that feels like. He spoke of how it still seems sometimes like just a headline one would read in the paper and not something one ever dreams would actually happen to them. And yet, through it all, grace and goodness kept emerging. God, however disguised in the heartache, still shown through. Even as he has happily remarried and is moving forward, the pain still lingers... and always will. But he made a choice that he was going to shoulder this as a son of the Almighty and accept the harsh providence of God in this as still wise and kind. It is evident that he has done his best to heal well rather than to just heal quickly and get on with life like our society pressures one to do. 

I thought of my own grief journey following the loss of my dear Alex and how, very early on, I made a similar decision upon learning the news: I would figure out how to carry my grief in such a way that I healed correctly, even if it took time. Honestly, it's taken longer than I expected. Loss and pain of any sort has a way of doing that. Healing from other hurts in my life has taken longer than I expected. And yet, through it all, I've prayed for patience in the process because I've realized that, unless one lets things run their course - unless one allows for certain things to heal and develop and work themselves out in their own time - one never learns the value of that beautiful verse which says, "he has made everything beautiful in its time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). 

If I do not learn to wait for God, how will ever learn the secret to His mysteries? If I do not let the Great Physician do His work (and do it on His own timetable), how am I ever supposed to heal and mend as He intends? 

Healing isn't often rapid. Anything broken thing doesn't just get sewn back up in a jiffy. And it certainly doesn't get sewn back up exactly as it was before something or someone shattered it. Pain remakes us in ways we don't expect and for reasons we don't always understand. And yet, God uses it to shape us and grow us into people of strength and hope and bravery - people who can survive and learn how to thrive again, one day. But in order to get there, it will take a lot of time and faith and trust and patience. It will look like a step forward and several steps back. It will be irregular and unpredictable. But it will guided by the trusted hand of One who knows what it's like to suffer to the utmost and overcome. 

Perhaps our souls aren't that unlike the business owner's injury and we might do well to realize that we're in this for the long haul. Untangling generational wrongs, learning to forgive, moving forward after loss, letting go of someone special, living with a serious health problem, understanding trauma, discovering your true self... all these are things that won't happen overnight. We may be able to do a lot of other things in a finger-snap, but some stuff isn't so easily solved, and we have to learn how to be okay with that. How to give life and God and ourselves and others time to sort things out. 

Healing is possible. Always. But it just may not look like how we expect it to or in the timing we originally thought. Sometimes God needs to break us even further in order to set us on the right path to wholeness and sometimes we need to accept some scars as evidence of where we've been. But what will decide the degree to which we are made well is our expectations and our willingness to cooperate. Whatever it is that we're facing, are we looking to heal correctly? Or are we just simply wanting to heal quickly?