As you can guess, I hear from a lot of people who have been injured in accidents and I spoke with one last week, a mother.
She was talking about her son, Brett. My heart broke with hers as she described how her son, Brett, had become paralyzed from a fall. So much hurt and pain and fear of the future.
She was calling from her son’s bedside at the hospital and she mentioned to me how together they were reading the Bible, actually she was reading to Brett the book of Job, and she told me over the phone they had become inspired by that verse right at the end of Job where it says that the Lord, after all Job’s sufferings, made him prosperous once again and gave him twice as much as he had before. “Joni,” she said “that’s what Brett and I are believing.”
There was a long silence. I imagined the young man lying in the bed next to her with tubes running in and out of him. I could picture him fighting off discouragement and fear – the same sort of feelings I once struggled with when I was in the hospital. I could so identify, but I could also understand that almost 40 years separate me from the kind of pain Brett and his mother are presently dealing with, and so much has changed in that time.
Finally, Brett’s mother broke the silence and she said “Yes, Brett and I are praying for complete healing. We are believing that God is going to give my son back double what he’s lost.”
I sat there a little shocked and wondering if that mother understood what she was actually saying to me, a woman who has not been physically healed. Who, in fact, is injured very much like her son. It was one of those odd moments where I felt somehow suspended above the scene as though I had some different, or older, or maybe more mature perspective, because when I heard this mother say those words “We’re believing God will give my son back double; we’re believing that he’ll be healed,” I immediately thought, “Oh, but God has given me back triple.” I couldn’t tell her that, and I think you can understand why.
There is a time to listen and a time to just keep it to yourself. After all, the grief of loss is fresh. She’s a mother who can’t be expected to want anything less for her son than a body that will work. I can understand that. I can appreciate that. And so, as she continued to talk about her hopes for physical healing for Brett, I continued to treasure quietly in my heart all the triple-fold blessings – not double, no, no, no, much more than that, triple – maybe even quadruple blessings. I have been given back so much more, and I’m not talking about the chance to write books or travel or speak – no, no, no, it’s deeper, God has given me a rock-solid settled soul. Peace that’s profound. A deep, rich contentment that can’t be shaken. He has given me the chance every day when I wake up to lean hard on Him out of desperate need and I do not think I would be doing that if I had been healed.
Maybe to be healed is to receive double back what you lose, but to not be healed sets the stage for the Lord to bless the latter part of your life much more – triple-fold, quadruple-fold – much more than the first.
Used by permission of
JONI AND FRIENDS
P.O. Box 3333
Agoura Hills, CA 93176
© Joni and Friends