Healed in this world or the next?

Warning! This is going to be another discussion of religion. If you want to skip this one, I’ll see you tomorrow.

The Pastor at our church has been preaching about healing over the last few weeks. He’s not talking about going to the doctor, getting a prescription, and getting better. He’s talking about God healing people. Jesus did it all the time in the Bible. So, why can’t it be done in the modern era?

Now, he doesn’t have anything against modern medicine and seeing a doctor. But he goes on to say that God is the only healer and that it is through God you will be healed, not necessarily the medical community. I know I certainly have my own concerns about modern medicine. It seems that every time they try to do something to cure me, it has unintended consequences. My own faith in the medical community is dwindling. They have put me on drugs to control my blood sugar which apparently has flipped off whatever switch it is that sends the signal at I’m full when I eat. It leaves me feeling hungry all the time. Even after I finish eating a meal, I still want more food. There’s also the bouts of non-stop vomiting, which seems to be from their diagnosis of colitis. OK, great, but can we at least figure out what is triggering those sessions so I don’t have to go through them any more?

One of the many points he brought up is people say “If it’s God’s will, I’ll be healed.” The Pastor is quite adamant that it is God’s will that you be healed. He made great efforts to point out all the places in the Bible when Jesus healed someone, that it doesn’t say if it was Jesus’s mood to do it, or his feeling to do it. He just healed people. So, God wants you to be healed. I gather his main point of this is that it serves the greater glory of God when God heals someone. Fair enough.

We have a gentleman in our congregation who had stage four stomach cancer. He somehow spontaneously healed from that and is now in perfect health. I’m happy for him, truly. Cancer is a shitty disease and I’ve lost several people I care about to it. The Pastor is big on pointing out how God healed the man. Both of them are also big on pointing out that God can do the same for everyone.

Another point the Pastor made was God always heals people. Either in this lifetime, or the next. All those folks who didn’t get healed in this world and died (assuming they are born again Christians and going to Heaven in the afterlife) are no longer suffering in the afterlife. They are whole and complete. Hallelujah!

Sorry, but I call shenanigans. What’s the point of healing some people, but letting a whole bunch more suffer? This is supposed to show off God’s glory? As I said, I’m happy for the gentleman in our church who got healed from stage four stomach cancer. And if God can do it for him, he can do it for everyone else. But I have a whole list of people, good people, who died of cancer and other diseases. Some of them were very devout. I’m not asking or healing for my own troubles. If the things I have to deal with are the worst I have to go through, that’s not too bad. But I have prayed for healing for a large number of people, and as far as I can tell, God hasn’t listened. If God wants everyone to be healed, and it is His will that they be so, well, it certainly seems to be sending mixed signals.

The ancient question, to which no one has yet been able to provide me a satisfactory answer, is “why do bad things happen to good people?” Why did God heal the guy in our church, but not the whole list of people I know who died of nasty diseases? If God doesn’t care about me, that’s one thing, but he doesn’t seem to care about any of the people I care about. And that goes directly against what is preached each and every week that God loves us, cares abut us, and wants us to be healthy, wealthy and happy.

The only way I can process this conundrum is to conceive as God as a writer. Bad things happen to good people to make the story more interesting. There are “bad guys” in the world because the good guys need to have something to struggle against to make the story more satisfying. And sometimes I guess you have to throw a miracle into the mix to keep things interesting.

Ultimately, understanding the workings of the Universe is above my paygrade. Doesn’t mean I still don’t want to know. I just do what I can to try and not screw up the areas I have some small control over. I guess I must accept that I’m not going to know everything and to stop trying to second guess God. He’s going to do what He wants, when He wants. People tell me He has a plan, and His ways are not our ways. All I can say is that the world might run a little better if He’d let us in on what the plan is.

If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum