good church today

The service was really inspiring this week. It was good to see Deno again - my old classmate - two weeks ago. She has been coming to church with me the last six weeks or so, but we had missed the last couple of weeks because she was at a wedding one week and I was doing other stuff Thanksgiving weekend.

But the message was about healing, taken from Isaiah 61:1-3. This is also the text with which Jesus announces his ministry in Nazareth according to Matthew, which almost leads to him getting lynched by a mob.

And the message Karen had for us this morning hit me very well: healing does not always happen in the way we expect it to happen. And we don't like that very much. I don't know if Becky was healed. She certainly wasn't physically, and the end, though it was to cancer, came very quickly. I hope that she did find healing in this life; I have certainly sensed her pain released since her death. I remember even being in the hospital minutes after she died, and I took deep breaths, the kind she couldn't take in the months leading up to her death, and I felt her released from that bondage. And I got a message from a friend in Iowa, who, granted did more drugs in the seventies than I would care to know about, had a vision of Becky to communicate to me, and it was a vision of healing.

It is certainly not the healing we wanted.

A year ago, I would have thought that the only way I could be healed would be to have another wife. A year later, I know I am in no place to have a relationship that is headed in that direction. I enjoy dating, and it is nice to get to spend time with a woman and flirt and stuff. But the healing I have received is not the healing I wanted, but in greater communion with Katie and ultimately in greater satisfaction with myself. I do hope that someday this leads to another wife and maybe even more children. But that someday is farther away than I would have been willing to admit a few months ago.

Healing will happen, just not exactly the way we expect it. That thought has been with me all day.