REFLECTIONS
January 22, 2006
 
 
and all who touched him were healed
Matthew 14:36
 
 
Before the Surgeon’s Scalpel
 
“I think you are cured,” he said to me. It meant that chemotherapy would end. It meant I was cancer free. How glorious my doctor’s words were, the words we prayed for, yet even as I heard them I felt that something was missing. I wondered what it was.
My new friend Abraham Verghese understands what was missing. Abraham is a physician with a real passion for healing. He knows that there is a difference between being cured and being healed. He explained the difference in the following excerpt from a barnesandnoble.com interview:
“To understand the distinction between ‘healing’ and ‘curing,’ let me use an analogy: If you have ever been robbed, and if the cops came an hour later with all the stuff taken from your home, you would be ‘cured’ but not ‘healed’—your sense of spiritual violation would still remain. In the same way, all illnesses have these two components: a physical violation and a spiritual one.”
As I reflect on my encounter with cancer almost 10 years ago, I remember the night before the surgery. I remember wondering about the prognosis of my future that surgery and pathology tests would determine. I remember facing the uncertainty of life or the quality of it should I survive. I remember concern on the faces of my family as they gathered around me in prayer. It was a concern I did not share for I remember a state of well being, comfort and peace. It was the feeling of being healed—and that had come months earlier. 
In fact it was almost six months earlier. I rose from my morning devotional when I was struck by the awareness that I was leaving the best part of my day to set about doing what I had always done. I knew that I no longer wanted to do those same things. It was then that my life changed. I touched the Lord and my life has never been the same. On that day I was healed even before the surgeon’s scalpel ever touched my skin.
I am blessed to have been cured of that disease. I fully understand that I might have been healed without being cured. But I might have been cured without being healed. Since that day, I have prayed for others to find the same state of well being, comfort and peace that I found back then. Only now I am clearer about what to pray for. 
From my doctor’s touch I was cured.  From my Lord’s touch I was healed.
And that is my prayer for you.                            
 
“You are the light of the world,”

Richard Ì


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