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Healing |
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We know that George Fox was a healer. We know the early Christians were healers. Where has this lost element of healing gone? it has not gone far. It is deep within each follower of our Lord Jesus Christ. He promised us that if we followed Him we would be healers. The early Christians and Quakers, that renewal of primitive Christianity, were healers. They expected healing and it occurred. It is not my wish, not for a moment, to suggest that Friends eschew the help of the medical community. In fact I was raised in Christian Science where there were frequent and terrible consequences from rejecting doctoring. No, we have much to be grateful for in modern medicine. And yet, each of us longs for a deeper healing than any could be found in a pill. We long to fin ourselves whole and complete in Christ. That healing is available to each of us at this very moment. What would such a healing look like? Would it involve perfect bodies? I think not. After all, even Christ and George Fox did not crave a perfect body. But we may still look to them to see how a healed self appears. It appears as one who is perfectly accepting of all that God gives us in this life. “Not mine but thy will be done” was the claim to health which Christ accepted. His perfect peace was not contingent upon the perfection of body, but was found in opening His arms to all that God required of Him. This perfect acceptance is our healing. Might it mean a healing of body? Sometimes it does indeed. George Fox healed. Once when he healed a young woman people who saw this miracle asked him how it was done. He said he looked beyond the body and its ills until he saw nothing but the Light. The body of the young woman was healed. And yet when his own poor body, battered by the abuse of prison, at last was left lifeless, can we assume that he was not looking into the Light? I think not. He accepted whatever healing the Lord gave, be it improved bodily condition, or peace within a broken body. We can expect healing. But we must not outline the nature of that healing. No doubt Fox would have been tickled pink if his body was suddenly whole and vigorous as it had been in his younger days, but in looking at the Light, in seeing nothing else, another and higher healing was given him; he was taken Home. After many years in Christian Science I was at last released into the loving arms of Friends. I had never experienced healing in Christian Science, though I had diligently prayed for such healing. Once a young Quaker, I continued to pray for healing. I thought that healing was the sign of a true Christian. Yet I was outlining what I meant by healing. I was dictating to God. I meant the healing of the physical body. It did not even occur to me to look for anything else. It took some years among Friends before I understood what it was I saw among Quakers. I was seeing healed lives, regenerated by the deepest trust in God. I was much drawn to Friends. I wasn’t sure why, but I saw a peace in their eyes, a beauty and grace in their lives, a quiet trust in their smiles. In time I understood this was the look of a healed life. Some had various physical problems. My lifelong training in Christian Science told me that such problems were because they were not truly healed in Christ. But nowhere had I met such committed Christian lives as I found among Friends. Nowhere had I found such calm trust. At long last I let go my assumptions about what healing looked like, and my outlining. I turned at last with a more humble heart to the Scriptures and the works of early Friends. I stopped reading them with an overlay of Christian Science, as I had been doing. In essence I had said, “Where it corresponds with Christian Science it is true, but nowhere else.” I doubt my eyes yet shine with the beautiful trust I have seen in older Friends, but I like to think they are shining a bit more. I know my heart is more peaceful than it has ever been before. Is my body healed of all the irritating aches and pains? No, as I grow older they grow more. But they bother me very little. He stands before me day and night. I wake to say, “Jesus, I trust in thee!” And all else seems unimportant. This, to my poor mind, is the greatest healing for which I could ask. It is all I wish.
- Francis-Clare Fischer
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