What do we do when we pray and believe for healing, but experience loss?
How do we process it when we give ourselves to the spiritual battle over another person’s life, believing for miraculous healing, but the breakthrough doesn’t happen?
Our community recently experienced a loss like this—the loss not just of an incredible human, but also of the faith that believed wholeheartedly for a miracle that never came. Words are never adequate in these moments, yet we need to process, to find a way forward through the grief of loss as well as the grief of disappointed faith.
How do we understand our loss?
How do we keep believing?
Why did it turn out this way?
These questions are obviously too big for one small blog, but I want to invite us into the beginnings of the conversation because we need to grapple with them. If we don’t face them, they will erode our faith in God. (I dive much deeper into this in my book.)
When I look back over the difficult and painful seasons of my life, including my own struggle with undiagnosed pain in my arms and wrists, I recognize that so much of the why of life’s losses is unknown to me. In these seasons, disappointment comes quickly, and we can feel like Jacob wrestling with God, wanting to know why. Why did this happen? Why haven’t I experienced healing?
These questions are especially hard if, like me, you believe healing is always God’s will. The Bible tells us Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed…” (Acts 10:38). God not only “pardons all your iniquities,” but he also “heals all your diseases” (Ps. 103:3). All is an absolute word. It leaves no room for exceptions. It denies the existence of people God doesn’t want to heal. In his life on earth, Jesus met a lot of sick and injured people, and he did not turn a single one away. He healed them all (see Matt. 4:24; Mark 6:56; Luke 4:40). And when the apostles continued his ministry, they too healed all who came (see Acts 5:16). This is my theology of healing. Yet, I have not yet experienced full healing. And my friend did not experience healing in this life.
In these moments, we have a choice to make. The rest of our response and our grief journey hinges on this choice. Will we demand answers—put God on trial? Or will we accept the unknowns and choose to trust God anyway?
Instead of demanding answers, I have decided to embrace mystery—embrace the fact that we don’t always know why things happen, but those circumstances don’t change who God is. And they don’t have to change my belief in him and his promises. Healing is always God’s will. The fact that I haven’t yet experienced healing does not mean he is withholding it from me. The fact that some incredible people have died while believing for healing does not mean it was God’s will for them to die.
None of us knows why not everyone is instantly healed. None of us knows why some people believe for healing in this life, but only experience it in heaven. God didn’t answer that question in the Bible. Instead, he told us that he has provided healing for us through Jesus’ death and resurrection, and he wants all people to experience that healing.
As we continue to pray for healing for ourselves and others, that’s where our focus must be. Instead of demanding answers, we must choose to trust that God is good and that he is our healer even before we experience healing. Even if we never experience healing.
Mystery is part of life as a human. When we refuse to accept mystery, we put ourselves on the road to bad theology. It’s foolish to try to explain what God hasn’t explained. Life doesn’t fit into a formula. Simple explanations for complicated matters (like why bad things happen or someone didn’t get healed) always end up misrepresenting the heart of God.
Even when we do not understand the why, we can still hold to the truth in faith. God loves us. He is fighting for us. When hard things happen, he is in it with us. He never leaves us. This is what faith looks like, and it is how we say no to disappointment.
The inability to accept mystery and relinquish our need to know why leads to disappointment with and offense toward God. If we need to blame someone, it is easy to blame him. “After all,” we reason, “if God is all-powerful, he could have healed this person. Since he didn’t, it must be his fault.”
When it comes to the painful and mysterious parts of life, the question why hasn’t borne any good fruit in me. It has only stirred up anxiety and accusation. It has stunted my grief process too, because it kept me focused on distributing blame rather than finding healing. It is OK to not know why something happened—to recognize that God did not ordain those events—but not need to have an opinion on or explanation for why they happened. It’s OK to say, “I don’t know why that happened.”
Someday, I believe we as the church will step into a much greater revelation of God’s healing power and the authority Jesus gave us, and we will see so much healing that it will actually be shocking to us when someone doesn’t get healed.
Until that day, we live in the mystery, and we get to choose to keep trusting God and keep praying for healing, even in the middle of why.
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