This is the second part of my thoughts on faith, prayer and healing.

Life is full of uncomfortable moments. Discomfort has a way of making us pull back.

Sometimes we distance ourselves to survive. Sometimes to protect our hearts. Sometimes because the pain of hoping, really hoping, feels heavier than the pain of letting go.

For many of us, the discomfort comes when prayers don’t work the way we believed they would. When we prayed with every ounce of faith we had. When our faith felt desperate and embodied, like the woman who reached through the crowd just to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe, believing that even contact would be enough.

Sometimes when healing doesn’t come, it can shake more than our bodies or minds. It can shake our trust. It can cause us to question the relationships around us.  It can quietly turn childlike faith into confusion and frustration.

We may begin to wonder: If I believed like that and it still didn’t happen… what does that mean about God? About me? About the people who prayed with me?

As we grow and mature, we wrestle with life in new ways. Faith can deepen, but it can also become more complex. What once felt simple now asks us to hold tension. To live in the “already and not yet.” To grieve what hasn’t happened while still daring to hope.

What has helped me in my own life is shifting the question.

Instead of only asking When will I be healed?

I’ve learned to ask, What is the meaning of my life just as I am?

I believe I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Not someday, now. Not after healing, today.

I believe God is using me for good, even in my brokenness. Maybe even through it. Maybe that is enough for this season. As I continue to pray for healing in my brain and body, I also pray that my life would increase compassion and grace in this world. That mercy and love would be how I choose to use the life I get to live.

I want to say this clearly:

I love that people pray in faith for my complete healing and for the complete healing of those I am honored to walk with in suffering. I am grateful for it. Their faith does not threaten mine, it strengthens it.

I have had to work hard to choose not to allow the enemy to bring harm to my relationships with people who care for me deeply. I do not want disappointment to steal connection. I do not want unanswered prayers to turn into isolation. I do not want fear to decide who gets to stay. These are people I love and I know they love me as well.  

I remember being one who prayed for healing that didn’t happen.  There is a disappointment I carry that lives deeper than words because of it.  It remembers a hospital room. A brother lying still. Machines breathing when he could not. Prayers whispered and pleaded for him to wake up. He never did.

That loss still feels unfathomable. Grief doesn’t just live in my heart, it settles into my bones. It aches there. It pulses there. Even now after years have passed, it can rip through me without warning, reminding me that love never disappears just because a life ends.

Yet as I have spent years contemplating life and death, healing and sickness, ability and disability, I have learned something tender and difficult: if we are willing to seek long enough, even through squinted eyes blurred by tears, something that resembles beauty can sometimes be found on the other side.

Regarding my brother’s life and in the wake of his death, it was in that searching that I began to see hope take an unexpected shape.

My brother’s life ending gave new life to others through organ donation. I didn’t get to meet all of those who received his gifts, but I did speak with two of them.  What a sacred joy it is to know that someone else woke up to breath, to movement, to possibility, because my beloved brother chose to give.  As they struggled with survivors guilt, I asked them to know how grateful I am that they survived and carry part of my brother here on this side of heaven.   

His life did not end without impact and while that truth does not erase my grief, it allows it to sit beside something else: reverence. Meaning. A quiet kind of gratitude that honors both the loss and the lives that continue because of him

One of my deepest anxieties has been this: What if healing doesn’t happen on this side of heaven? Not just for me, but for those who are praying, hoping, and believing with me.

My prayer is that no one loses their faith if healing doesn’t come in the way or time we long for. I desire that we are able to say to one another, It’s okay if it doesn’t happen today. I will still hope with you. I will still believe with you.

Maybe the holiest question we can ask is this: Will you still love me just as I am?

Because I will. I believe God does too. That love, steadfast, patient and present love is not defeated by waiting.