God is the One Who Heals

I have this really bad problem, I like to fix things. Now I am not talking about fixing the pipes under a sink after someone thought it would be a good idea to try to cram a whole turkey down it. I am talking about fixing people who are broken.

Now I realize that we are all “broken,” and in need of being “fixed,” but for some reason I like to think that I can fix people all by myself. So I put people on my back, tie them down, and just start walking in the direction of their problem, bent on making everything better as quick as possible.

I do this partly because I am impatient, because I care, and because I want things to be fixed now. I don’t like to wait. I don’t like the process that healing can be sometimes.

There is this story in the John 9 where Jesus is walking down the street with his disciples. As they are walking, they look over to the side of the street and see a blind man sitting there on the street.

Now Jesus’ disciples ask the typical awkward question the disciples always seem to ask, which ends up with them putting their feet in their mouths, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Now I love how Jesus responses, ““Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

Basically Jesus states, no one sinned the make this man blind. He is blind because he is broken and in need of healing. Therefore, this broken man’s brokenness will be used glorify that God and show others that God is the one that heals.

After Jesus speaks to his disciples, he gets on the ground and spits in the dirt making some mud. After the mud is made. He places the mud over the blind man’s eyes.

I know I am not the only one who thinks that this is a little weird. Yet, as I started to think about why Jesus did this, I realized Jesus was a pure genius. Since this man was blind and he couldn’t see Jesus, so he touched and spoke to the blind man because that is just how the man needed to be touched.

Unlike must healings in scripture, after Jesus touches the man, he sends him on a journey saying, “Go, and wash in the Pool of Siloam.”

The blind man then gets up and walks the distance to the pool of Siloam to be healed. The man wasn’t healed from his blindness just as Jesus touched him; he had to take a journey that Jesus sent him on to be healed.

As I meditated on this passage, I realized that sometime the journey is necessary to be healed from our brokenness.

When I was in elementary school I was hanging out and swimming at my cousin’s house on a hot summer day. As we were all playing by the pool, one of my cousin yelled out, “Last one in the pool is a loser!”

Now I did not want to be a loser, so I jumped from where I was toward the pool. The issue with that idea, was that a large item was in my way: a diving board. As I came down into what I was hoping was the pool, I hit my knee on the diving board.

Now on the surface of the water, I looked down into the now bluish-red pool; I realized I had somehow cut my knee pretty badly in the process of trying not to be a loser.

As I got out of the pool, my mom and aunt found the largest band-aid they could find to cover my hurt knee.

As the weeks went on, my cut did not heal. The problem was that every time I moved my knee the cut reopened, no matter how many band-aids I put on it.

Teens, heck everyone, are really good at putting band-aids over cuts that need deeper healing.

I think the reason that people are so good at doing this is because it is easier to put a band-aid over a cut then to go to the doctor, who might hurt you in the process of healing you. They know that the journey to be healed is not always an easy journey to go on. So people try to heal by getting drunk, doing drugs, looking for love in sex, or shopping until they drop. You see, it is hard walking through town with mud on your eyes, I mean; people might look at your weird?

As youth leaders, volunteers, parents, or pastors, our job is to point students and people toward a journey that brings healing. To point people to the only God who can bring healing, even if he has to put a little mud on our eyes to do it.

Here is the reality, we cannot fix people, we cannot fix ourselves; only God can fix us and redeem us.

Then once redeemed we can cry out, “I was blind but now I see!”