The Ugliness of Healing

JAMMED! It had happened a couple of weeks before…and the pain of it was so intense that I cringed simply at the remembrance of it…I had been barefoot. My feet were cold, and I thought wading my feet in a nice hot bath would prove relaxing and comforting. My left foot had already been plunged into the luxury of the steaming hot water in the deep porcelain tub, enjoying its revelry while it awaited its counterpart…but, the right foot never made it into the tub. As I lifted the final foot to join its partner, I must have slipped – the next thing I knew I heard a (((BANG))) ((CRACK))) and a sharp STABBING pain shooting up the top of my foot with intense ferocity! I looked down, biting my lip to keep from crying out – the two middle toes of my right foot were already bloating into 2 misshapen reddish balloons and a streak of blood began to ooze from the nail bed of one of them.

The weeks that followed had been excruciating. I was forced to wear an open-toed shoe due to swelling and discomfort, and I adopted an awkward limp, since the toes had lost their ability to bend. I had even wondered if the toes were broken at one point, as I considered their ever growing size and the ghastly shades of blues, blacks, and greens that enveloped their entirety, colors that crept up the top of my foot like a menacing ivy attempting to conquer an abandoned wall.

Now, a few weeks later, with chin rested atop my bent knee, I attended my toes – touching them ever so gently while I reminisced upon the whole ordeal. As I looked at my wretched foot, it amazed me that, although the swelling and colors seemed to worsen as the days passed, the pain of the injury actually lessened despite them. Moreover, my toes’ mobility grew with the passage of time even as they became increasingly grotesque in looks. In other words, the uglier my foot’s appearance, the more their healing ensued.

Couldn’t the same be said of our own journeys of brokenness and healing in this life? Think about it! Have we not all heard the saying, “it will get worse before it gets better”? For example, in a financial crisis, sacrifices must be made in order to come out of the red, correct? This might require a variety of uncomfortable abdications, such as the selling of precious items, the downsizing of living arrangements, even the loss of conveniences, like electricity, if the finances are to be “healed.” What about dieting and exercise, those New Year’s Resolutions we so gallantly profess? Those first weeks and months of working out and calorie awareness are nightmarish – the muscles so sore, you can hardly move, and your hunger so severe that your stomach feels as if it were beginning to eat itself. Then, of course, there are the relational issues. Saving one’s marriage often requires confrontations with oneself and one’s spouse that one or both parties would rather avoid, and there are often many nights when the opposite side of the bed is a lot colder than usual as a result. And what about illnesses that suck the lives out of our loved ones? Cancer seems only to be eradicated by the very thing that makes the patient’s condition apparently worse: chemotherapy.

If we were to take an inventory of our lives, we would find that many hardships that we have faced often took turns for the worse, becoming uglier and more discouraging, long before they began to show signs of improvement and healing...that is – if we allowed them to progress and not given up in the process. How many times have we stopped the course of healing based on appearances, rather than reality? How many people have ended up bankrupt, in a divorce, or relapsing back into their old ways of eating and sedentary lifestyles because they gave up based on the ugliness of their healing?

If we all were to give up in the face of the grotesque reality of every healing journey – we believers would not have the hope of our faith. The ugliest time in history was on the Friday evening of Christ’s crucifixion: the Creator of the universe had been viciously tortured, brutalized, and murdered in the public eye for all to see in both the natural and supernatural realms. The temple veil was rent in fury, the earth quaked in despair, even the sky blackened in its dismay as the Light of the World was snuffed out on the cross…

…and yet – at that very moment when the ugliest of gruesome realities was in full swing – the most beautiful healing commenced invisible to the human eye– our sins, the “jammed-ness” of our souls, were being removed as the direct result of Jesus’s horrific sacrifice.

But no one could see it – all they could see was the tragedy of this perfect man’s demise – but in another realm, underneath what man could see – the greater healing, forgiveness, was being purchased on behalf of ALL mankind. It was not until 3 days later that the natural eye was enabled to see the beginning signs of this inner miracle. Until the dawn of that Sunday morning, our spiritual healing was “incognito,” unnoticed – and only understood by the unseen realm.

If God had given up on the basis of Friday’s ugliness, we would not have the hope of our calling, which was birthed on that following Sunday. Healing is an ugly process, an ugliness that Jesus knows better than any of us. But if we will be patient and not give up our hope, braving the bruises and swelling of our own lives and hardships, we will begin to see the beauty of victory as healing runs its course. Healing may be ugly at its onset, but its result is everything that epitomizes the essence of beauty.

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints… for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” (Eph. 1:18; Gal. 6:9)