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"What do I do with all these rotting fish!? ?"

Saturday, March 3, 2001

Luke 5:27-32
Luke 5:27-32
Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick"


A couple of weeks ago PBS took me into a Civil War hospital. Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary were heartbroken at the savagery unleashed by the decision to make war.

Every kind of brokenness lay in that awful place. Tearing shrieks drowned out the quiet voices of mostly helpless physicians. Infections killed far more people than bullets, and there was nothing much the doctor could do. Fear and pain and death filled the air.

The lobby of Provena's Covenant Hospital, a few blocks from where I sit, is full of light and flowers. Magazines, easy chairs...the hallway to the elevators is lined with beautiful paintings and pictures of men and women who were healers. There's a nice cafeteria in the basement...but Margaret and I don't go there on Friday night for dinner. Always when I go into the hospital, I feel the edges of fear and pain and death, they whisper their presence, they are nearby.

In our life together Margaret and I talk often of physical healing. I imagine the power of Jesus sweeping through the hospital halls, pouring into rooms, healing broken people, fear and pain and death reeling, running, failing, gone. At the Vineyard several years ago we heard a man, Mahesh Chavda, tell the story of God raising an African child from the dead through his prayers. In Carman's song "Lazarus,'1 Jesus voice rushes through the fog to the dead man, lifts him with its power into life from death, and all of rejoice. This has/could/will...happen to me!

Mike Campion, a psychologist who attends Vineyard, says, "If I visit a church and everyone seems to have it together, I get out of there!" The only way I' ll ever see the power of Jesus flowing into my fear is to know I'm afraid, and show I'm afraid, and give that fear to God. And that's a whole lot easier to do together, than it is to do alone.

God, your healing flows to me because I acknowledge my sin. Open my eyes to the core of my being, Lord, and don't let me turn away. Let me see all there is to see, and speak. Then you hear me, you touch me, you forgive and heal me.



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