Pray for the Wrong Things

It's been about a year since I posted this blog post about broken relationships, at the end of which I implored myself and others to heal.

In taking my own advice, I prayed and begged and chanted and asked, "Lord, please heal me". Anytime I hurt, it was my mantra: "Heal my heart, Jesus".

Regardless of your point of view on a Higher Power, gifts of the supernatural, or medical advances, we can probably agree that where healing is concerned, it is the responsibility of the sick person to try to get well, physically, emotionally, or spiritually.

Heal (verb) - to cause to become sound or healthy again, to alleviate distress, to correct or put right an undesirable situation. 

Over the next 9 months, time faded some scars. The moments I dwelled on the pain became fewer, turning days to weeks. But still, it festered. Then, I started to see the same emotional hurt cropping up in other places, with other people. My heart was most definitely not healed.

One night, talking to myself in the shower (as many are in the habit of doing) I realized that in all my time praying for my own healing, I had never once prayed to forgive the ones who hurt me. To forgive them meant to let go of any part of me that felt justified for my hurt. To pardon. It meant to take the focus off me.

I had been praying for the wrong thing all along. 

I didn't just need to heal. I needed to forgive.

Jon Acuff

If "to heal" means to put something back to the way it was, I didn't want that. After all, what was the state of my heart before the alleged hurt? I did't want to go back there. I wanted to move forward.

Even tonight, months after this shower-revelation, my husband I reflected on how transformational forgiveness is. It's what sets apart salvation in Jesus Christ from any other religion. It is not just about being good, or even just about love, it is about the ugliness of sin covered, then removed by one Act of Forgiveness. "It is finished".

Furthermore, it is the very pattern of scripture. First forgiveness, then healing. When Jesus healed the paralyzed man, He first forgave his sins, then gave him the ability to walk.

Forgiveness changes you.

Clearly, this was a thing 2000 years ago and here I am thinking I invented it in 2015. In my shower.

I'll probably keep learning and relearning this lesson but I know that for now, it came at just the right time, for my past and my present.

Healing may return to the former, but Forgiveness transforms from the inside out. I don't just want healing, because I don't want to return to any state I once was. I want to be stronger and gentler and kinder and wiser. If that's the case, I need forgiveness and I need to forgive.