“Your faith has healed you…”

 

“Please just pray for me.” Flora’s beautiful face looked up at me beseechingly. Had my lack of faith in instant healing caused me to forget even to pray?

                Her blatant faith renewed my own, and I lay on her lap and poured myself out in prayer for her. I knew that she had the faith to be healed, and because of that, I was able to have that same faith for her.

I’ve always had trouble believing that God would work an instant miraculous healing through my prayers. This is because the healing would be contingent upon His will, and I feel inept to discern who He would want to immediately heal and who He wouldn’t. But through Flora, I experienced an invaluable truth…

                …My friend Sanele had wanted me to meet his gran, Flora. She was joy and light as I spoke with her in fragmented siSwati, Sanele filling in where I lacked. It wasn’t long before I discovered that she hadn’t been able to walk for the past three years, which had made the normal “gogo” (grandmother) duties of gathering firewood and fetching water for cooking and bathing impossible. She had become fully dependent on her grandsons to take care of those tasks for her. Simply the exertion needed to cook was difficult for her.

                I didn’t even know what could be wrong with Flora to disable her from something as basic as walking for three years. It seemed like she might want me to take her to the clinic, but I didn’t have any money at the time, and I didn’t want to assume that my teammates could afford it either. I explained this to Sanele, saying that I would let him know if we were able to bring her to the clinic later, and he translated what I was saying for his gran. I moved to leave, thinking that there was nothing else I could do for her.

                That was when Flora asked me to pray for her.

                I don’t know if it was my still-wavering faith or the fact that my teammate Katie came to get me, but I didn’t even find out if Flora could walk before saying goodbye and going back to the center. But the next day Sanele came to me, full of excitement, telling me that I needed to go and see his gran.

                Flora began shouting to me while I was still a ways off. She was walking! She was dancing! And as I ran toward her, she even managed to run a short distance to meet me. God had healed her and empowered her to walk that same night I had prayed for her.

                Lesson learned: In hindsight, I believe that Flora’s healing had everything to do with her faith to be healed. My faith had been as shaky in praying for her as it had been in praying for others who weren’t healed. And this isn’t to take the view that if someone has the faith to be healed they always will be, because their healing still hinges on God’s will.   But God taught me clearly that night to at least ask Him for their healing, because neither can I know that it’s His will not to heal a person unless I ask. Yesterday I was reminded of this lesson when one of a make (Swazi mother) told me her stomach was hurting. She wasn’t nauseous, so I opted against Pepto Bismal, but then I realized that I should simply pray for her stomach to get better. I asked God for His healing as simply as the situation merited, and when I came back outside minutes later, she told me her stomachache was gone.

                I want to clear up some potential misunderstanding. What I’m learning in this is simply to ask God for healing since I so often forget to. Although my faith is growing through watching God heal people, I don’t consider this to be the reason for the healings. I believe that Swazis often exhibit that same faith we read about in healings Jesus cites as the reason for His healings. We often find Him saying, “Your faith has healed you.” Somehow I had gotten this confused before and always thought that for God to heal people through me, I had to have enough faith. Now I’m beginning to see what a self-focused view of healing I had. Healing has little to do with me. All I have to do is ask. Healing has everything to do with God’s power and the individual’s faith to be healed. And wouldn’t this be the case so that I can take no credit in my faith for their healings? I am merely a conduit of God’s power to their faith.