Answered Differently

SOME PRAYERS FOR HEALING are answered as transfiguration rather than cure. That is the claim of this chapter, and I will say it even more plainly before I defend it: God sometimes heals a person from the inside, in a place nobody prayed about, while the body goes on failing on schedule. I believe this because I watched it happen, and because years later I realized I had watched it happen once before, as a boy, without understanding what I saw. For a long time I had both prayers filed under Refused. Two funerals made me take them out and read them again. I want to tell you both stories straight, in the order they taught me, because what I learned at those two coffins I have never been able to learn from any book.

The first story begins with a diagnosis. Years ago a man in our community learned he had terminal cancer, and I use the plain word because he faced the plain thing without softening it. When the news came, we did what praying people do with bad news: we stormed heaven. His name went onto prayer lists. People fasted for him. For months we prayed fervently for his healing, in services and in kitchens and in cars, and I prayed with them, and what we asked for was the plain, medical thing: let the treatment work, let the scans come back clean. Then the word came from the doctors that nothing more could be done. He was going to die, and everyone who loved him finally had to say the sentence out loud.

My wife and I visited him in the ICU, expecting exhaustion. I have made many such visits, and I know the arithmetic a visitor does in the hospital elevator, deciding what he will say and preparing his face for the door. I had my small consolations ready the way you carry an umbrella. But what we found shook us. His face radiated peace. We had come to comfort a dying man, and within a few minutes we were the ones being comforted, trying to keep up. We spoke of family, memories, and, most surprising of all, joy. He knew exactly what was coming and roughly when, and he named it without flinching, so the joy was resting on no pretense at all. It was simply there, in the same room as the dying, lying deeper in him than the sickness had managed to reach. At some point I noticed that my wife and I had gone quiet, and that the dying man was carrying the conversation for the sake of his visitors.

One week before his death, we witnessed his baptism. He had asked for it himself. It was the most solemn baptism I have ever seen: water, and the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in a room that smelled of antiseptic. He chose a new name for himself, the way people coming to baptism sometimes do, and he took it from no saint. He chose the name Christian. He was not picking a label. He was being sealed with a name, and the name was a declaration: I belong to Christ. The illness had taken his strength, his years, and his future, and against that one word it had no claim. His face shone with a joy that only comes from beyond this world. What struck me in that room was his face more than anything he said, and it was his face I carried back out the door.

He died within the week. At his funeral I said what I believe with my whole being, though it took me almost until that hour to see it: his baptism was his blessedness, and his dying was the day death was swallowed up by life. For months we had prayed that God would heal him, and for months I had read the answer as No, arriving by degrees with each report from the doctors. I was wrong. God had healed him from the inside. The cancer was permitted to finish its short work, and underneath it, in a place none of our prayers had thought to point, God mended something that had been torn in that man his whole life. His life had become hidden in Christ, and its whole meaning was now Christ. Fear went out of him. He spent his last weeks handing peace to his visitors, which is strange work for a dying man, and it seemed to cost him nothing, the way a man gives freely out of a full account. He died baptized, named, unafraid, and glad. I do not know a better description of health than that. Our prayer for his healing was answered. It was answered differently.

Here is the theology underneath that hospital room, stated as plainly as I can state it. God's way with suffering is not to abolish it from outside but to enter it and transform it from within. Think of what the word "glory" usually calls to mind: radiance, majesty, light. In Scripture, glory attends the presence of God, in the burning bush, in the cloud on Sinai, in the brightness on the mountain where the disciples saw the face of Jesus shine. At Gol-gotha there is none of that. There is blood, silence, and abandonment. Yet that is the exact place where God chose to reveal His deepest self. His glory, it turns out, is not some dazzling display of might. It is love unto the end, self-emptying poured out in total vulnerability. The cross was an instrument of execution and shame, and God's answer was to climb onto it and make it the Tree of Life.

He went down into suffering all the way to its floor and began His work there, from the inside, and what rose out the other side was resurrection. The word the Gospels use for the day His face shone on the mountain is the word I keep reaching for when I remember that ICU: transfiguration. That is what the cross does to suffering. It does not overpower the suffering with strength; it transfigures it from within, by love. He leaves the suffering standing and changes what the suffering means. In that hospital the scans never improved, the body kept failing on schedule, and the family still buried him. But his dying had been turned into a doorway while we stood there watching, and he walked through it shining.

Paul knew this from inside his own failing body, and he wrote it down for a church he loved:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NKJV)

Read the first sentence slowly and notice what Paul concedes at once. The outward man is perishing. He offers no argument against it and no program to reverse it, and he lays no shame on anyone in whom the perishing is far along. He simply reports that a second thing is happening at the same time, in the same body: the inward man is being renewed day by day. Both processes are real. Both run daily. They run in opposite directions. In that intensive care unit we were given the strange privilege of watching a handful of those days, and near the end the renewal had become the more visible of the two. The monitors measured the one. The face announced the other. Paul, a man who had been beaten with rods and stoned and left for dead, calls such affliction light and momentary, and he can say it without lying because he is weighing it against an eternal weight of glory. That is the only scale on which the sum has ever come out.

Now a caution, and I mean it with my whole heart. What I saw in that room was a gift, start to finish. He did not manufacture it by effort, and I did not carry it in with my visits. I have sat at more bedsides than I can count where no such light appeared, where the dying was only dying, grim and slow and dark to the end. Do not turn this story into a formula that promises radiance to sick people who pray correctly. That would only rebuild the old vending machine and give it a hospital paint job. And it would grind up the next sufferer who fails to shine.

There is a cruelty that visits sickrooms wearing this chapter's truth as a costume: the brisk voice that informs a person in pain that their pain is really glory, and that they ought to hurry up and be an inspiration. Never be that voice. When you visit the sick or the grieving, do not rush to explain what it all means. Be present. Listen. And look, because if God is transfiguring something in that bed, you will see it, and your only assignment is to witness it faithfully. Ask the Spirit to help you see the glory hidden in the wound.

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THE SECOND FUNERAL IS far older, and it took me most of my life to read. When I was a boy there was an elderly woman I loved. Her body was bent double, and it had been bent for as long as anyone alive could remember. Her spine curved downward, as though invisible hands were pressing her toward the earth, and she lived out her whole life looking at the ground. She cooked that way, walked that way, received her guests that way. To meet her eyes you had to crouch down, and I often did, because I loved her face. In all the years I knew her, I never once saw her stand straight.

The grown-ups eventually told me why, in the reluctant way grown-ups explain such things to children. It had happened in the war. Soldiers had occupied the countryside where she was young, and they forced the villagers to carry heavy loads on their backs: crops, timber, sometimes stones for building. The weight was relentless and the years of it were long, and it crushed the spines of that whole generation by degrees, bending them a little further each season until they could no longer straighten at all. So her condition was an injury before it was anything else. Human beings did this to her, load by load. And long after the soldiers were gone, when the war had shrunk to a chapter in schoolbooks, she was still carrying it, because a bent spine does not know the war is over.

I will confess something I have never liked admitting. As a boy I was secretly afraid of her condition. I remember staring at her and quietly wondering whether it was hereditary. Would I also end up that way when I grew old? I would watch her move through a doorway, folded toward the floor, and then step outside and stand as straight as I could, as if straightness were something a boy could store up against the future. The fear sat right beside the love, and neither one ever displaced the other. She never complained in my hearing. Whatever she said to God across all those decades about her back, she did not say it in front of children. I do not know whether anyone ever prayed for her healing. I know that I never did. I was a child, and to a child she was simply what she had always been.

Then she died, and I was taken to the funeral, and there I saw something that has never left me. She lay in the coffin straight. The hands that prepare the dead had done what all her living years never could, and she lay out at her full length, at rest, as though the burden that bent her for a lifetime had at last been lifted off her back. I learned how tall she was at her funeral. A boy takes in a sight like that whole, without words, and then spends the rest of his life unpacking it. What I took in at that coffin was a wordless certainty: the straight woman lying there was more herself than the bent one had ever been permitted to be.

Many years later, reading the Gospel of Luke as a grown man and a clergyman, I turned a page and found her. Luke is the only evangelist who tells this story, and Luke was a physician, and he tells it with a doctor's eye for the body.

Now He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of in-

firmity eighteen years, and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up. But when Jesus saw her, He called her to Him and said to her, "Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity." And He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. (Luke 13:10-13)

Notice first what the woman does in that synagogue: nothing. She asks for nothing. She tears open no roof and reaches for no hem. Luke writes that she could in no way raise herself up, and that careful clause shuts the door on any notion that she simply had not tried hard enough. After eighteen years, I suspect, a person stops asking. The bent posture becomes simply what is, the shape of a life, the view of one's own floor. She had become one of the invisible people, the kind a congregation stops seeing precisely because they are always there. And she is the one, out of everybody in that room, whom Jesus singles out. He interrupts His own teaching to call her forward.

The initiative in this healing runs entirely from His side. His action does not rise from the measure of her desire but from the overflowing generosity of His own life. He does not wait for her to ask. Then comes the word: "Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity" (Luke 13:12). Loosed, as though she had been tied, and a few verses on Jesus says exactly that, calling her a daughter of Abraham whom Satan had bound for eighteen years. He treated her bentness as a bondage, a knot tied onto her from outside, and His word knew how to find the knot and undo it. It was the same word that once called light out of the darkness at the beginning of time, and it went straight to the root of her wound. The weight had been laid on her. He lifted it off, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God, which tells you what a straightened human frame is for.

There is a deeper mystery folded into that Sabbath scene. The One who loosed the bound woman would Himself accept bonds. The very hands that laid hold of her and set her straight would soon be stretched out and nailed to a beam. The eternal Son would bend Himself beneath the weight of the cross, not as one conquered, but as one who went down freely into the depths of our own distortion so that we might be lifted. That quiet loosing in a village synagogue was an early beam of the light that would break on Easter morning. The word that straightened her back is the word that would go down into death and climb back up out of it.

You can see why I cannot read that story as distant ancient history. The woman I loved as a boy was bound too, by the war and by men, and for far longer than eighteen years, and no one in this life ever spoke the loosing word over her. Here I have to say exactly what I believe, because it would be easy to say something merely pretty and untrue. The undertaker did not heal her. What I saw in that coffin was the work of human hands, and even as a boy I knew the difference. But I believe that what those hands did by craft, God has promised to do in truth, and that I was shown the sight decades early, the way you might be handed a photograph of a country you will one day walk into.

Some healings arrive in this life, on a Sabbath morning, in front of witnesses, and the whole room rejoices. Some arrive on the far side of death, where we are not permitted to watch. The same Lord stands behind both, and His word loses no strength over the distance. It reached across eighteen years of bondage. It can reach across death itself, which held Him from a Friday to a Sunday and could not keep its grip. That is one reason why, at funerals, I so often find myself reading from the last pages of the Bible:

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

Notice the wiping. It is a hand's gesture, close and particular, the thing a mother does for a crying child, and John reached for it over every grander verb available to a man who had just been shown the throne of God. And the promise is itemized, like an inventory of everything the bent woman ever carried: death, sorrow, crying, pain, and then the widest entry of all, the former things. I take the former things to include wars, and soldiers, and loads of timber and stone, and the slow crushing of a spine across the years, and whatever has been pressing down on you while you read this. Passed away, all of it. When I stand at a coffin now, I am no longer looking only at what the world did to a person. I am looking at the last thing the world will ever get to do to them, and past it, at the straightening.

Few of us are bent in body the way she was. But many of us carry a bending of heart or spirit that is just as real and just as heavy. Some are bent by old wounds that never healed, some by memories that still press downward, some by burdens carried for years without relief, and some by silent battles no one else sees. To every one of them the Gospel of Luke says what it finally said to me. Christ notices the bent ones first. He does not wait for perfect prayers or perfect strength.

He enters the hidden places where we are bowed low and speaks the same word over our lives: you are released. Whatever has bent us, fear, shame, grief, sin, exhaustion, or memories older than we can name, does not have the final say. Christ does. And when He calls us to stand, something in creation itself begins to rise with us. Sometimes He straightens a person on a Sabbath morning, in full view, and the whole room rejoices. Sometimes He straightens them past the coffin, at the far door, where a boy who loved them can only glimpse it early and wait for the day he sees it whole.

So the two funerals sit together in my memory now, both re-filed under Answered. A man we begged God to cure was trans-figured instead, and carried joy straight through death under a new name that told the truth about him. A woman nobody thought to pray for at all was straightened on the far side, where the request I never managed to make was granted anyway. Both times I was watching so hard for one shape of answer that I nearly missed the answer that actually came, and both times I was standing in the room.

So when you pray for healing, and you should pray for healing, pray with both eyes open. Be willing to discover that the healing is underway in a place your requests never mentioned. Perhaps you long ago marked such a prayer Refused and stopped looking at it. Take it out and read it again, slowly, in the light of a hospital room and a coffin. It is possible that what God declined was only the shape you specified, and that the substance of what you asked has been arriving all along by another door.

One more admission before we go on, because honesty requires it. Some prayers are answered exactly as asked. The scan does come back clean, the wanderer does come home, the door does open, and the answer arrives wearing the very words of the request, so precisely that the one who prayed laughs out loud at the fit. I have seen this too, and I would be a poor witness if I hid it. But in my experience those answers almost never come quickly. They come after years, sometimes after decades, and the years are never idle. They press on the request, and they press on the one making it, until the person praying has had to decide, again and again, in dry seasons and against all visible evidence, whether the request still stands. God, who could grant in an instant, sometimes lets a prayer run long. What that length is for, what it costs, and why an old widow pounding on a judge's door became our Lord's own picture of how to pray, is the road just ahead of us.