Pray for someone who needs healing.

There is not a week goes by that I don’t pray for healing for someone.  I expect the same goes for you.  We pray for God’s healing grace to touch a friend’s depression, a young child’s fever to break, a marriage falling apart to be whole and well, that a person looking for a job is enabled to provide for her family, and we that our own dis-ease is healed.   

Sanjay Gupta, CNN Medical Reporter tells us “I was never formally trained in the interplay between the type of healing we think of in hospitals and the type of healing that takes place in the private recesses of our minds. Yet over time I've come to deeply appreciate the role of prayer in the healing process. Often patients or their loved ones have prayed with me before surgery.”

Jesus’ healing ministry is often an embarrassment for us sophisticated, modern Western people, as William Willimon reminds us.  We can take Jesus as a teacher, but Jesus the healer is something else for us who have modern medicine, the beneficent side of science. 

Still I pray.  For healing.  I’ve learned this from Moses in Exodus, from David in the Psalms, from the Prophets in exile, from Paul and the other Apostles.  I have learned this from Jesus our Lord whose three year ministry was populated with instances of healing.  Luke 4:40 tells us that people were brought to Jesus with various kinds of sickness, and “laying his hands on each one, he healed them.”

I invite you to pray today for someone who needs healing – physical, emotional, spiritual – healing.  If you have the opportunity, tell this person, maybe visit them.  Your presence could very well be part of the healing they need today.  May the grace, peace, and joy of being Jesus’ follower fill your life today. 

p.s.
Thoughts on healing are multifaceted.  Here is something sent from MINemergent.  A great thought on how we contribute to the healing of others. 

Service heals

Fundamentally, helping, fixing, and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing is mutual. There is no debt. Fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In 40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.

Rachel Naomi Remen

Excerpts from the article "In the service of life"