Daily Devotional: Healing & Wholeness: Healing Takes Time

This is an opinion column.

MADE WHOLE

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28

REFLECTION

We live in a world that wants healing to be fast. We want the prayer to work immediately. We want the breakthrough to come on the timeline we had in mind. And when it does not, when the healing is slow, and the process is longer and harder than we expected, we begin to wonder.

• Did I not pray the right way?
• Is God not answering?
• Maybe this particular wound is beyond healing.
• Maybe I have to just learn to live with this.

Those questions are honest. And God is not offended by them. But they often rest on an assumption that healing should look like a light switch, immediate and complete. Most healing, physical or emotional or spiritual, does not work that way. It works the way a broken bone heals, slowly, from the inside out, in a process that is invisible most of the time and requires patience from the person going through it.

Paul’s declaration that God works all things for good is not a promise that everything will feel good or resolve quickly. It is a promise about the arc. About what God is doing in the long view, in the whole of a life surrendered to Him. The painful season is not outside of His working. It is inside of it. He is not waiting for the hard thing to be over before He gets to work. He is working in it, through it, and sometimes specifically because of it.

Healing that comes slowly is not lesser. Sometimes the slow process is where the deepest work happens. The places in us that needed the most careful attention, the roots that went the deepest, the damage that was the most layered, those are the places that take the most time. And God is in no hurry, because He is not working toward a deadline. He is working toward wholeness. Those are two very different things.

Where in your healing journey are you most tempted to conclude that God is not working because the process is taking longer than you expected, and what would it look like to trust the arc rather than the current moment?

PRAYER

Lord, we confess that we are impatient with the pace of our own healing. We want to be further along than we are. We want the wound to be closed and the scar to be faded and the work to be done. But You are working in all things, including the slow and painful ones. Help us to trust the arc when we cannot see the progress. Remind us that the pace of healing is not evidence of Your absence. You are here. You are working. We will wait on You. Amen.