In the week after preaching, and often while trying to pick through items for the following week, there is some time spent reflecting on the highs and lows of the previous experience. In the latter years of the old place of being minister I found it more and more difficult to deal with the texts about healing, as I stood looking at those in the congregation at various stages of illness. That unease has not eased in a new place for while I am still getting to know people, there is no reason to suppose this group is more healthy than another.

Health and healing raise questions at least for me, as the texts of miraculous healings appear. How do we preach them credibly when for us these miraculous acts are not everyday occurrences?

I don’t come to this question without a knowledge of ill-health. Just over 19 years ago in the midst of university finals and preparing for marriage, I found myself struggling to breathe easily or to walk any distance. Eventually I gave in and went to the doctor. They sent me to accident and emergency, where I was admitted with a deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary emboli. After a frightening stay in hospital where it looked like I might not go home, I was allowed home. In the months that followed I would discover that I carry an unusual blood disorder and that I would have to learn to manage my own health. For the past 19 years for the most part I have done that, with interesting moments at childbirth and if I’ve accidentally had an open wound.

So my discomfort with healing is not that it does not happen, but that it does not happen and return us to a previous state but instead to a new state. However in the midst of being seriously ill who wants to hear you will be healed but perhaps not to the whole you were before?

My tactic has often been to look at what lies around the healing for clues of what we become in Christ. Being “well” is emotionally and spiritually to a place where we trust that everything we are and experience lies within God’s care. Yet I still feel that what the text says does not get the airing it deserves.

Oh well, this week we face justice and I’m sure that will be a different struggle.