A (not so) brief paragraph on the process of healing.

The Process of Healing

Healing, in its various forms, is a complicated process. While God sometimes chooses to intervene in miraculous and seemingly immediate ways, more often God leads the human to healing through a process. The reasons for this are many and often known only to God. However, through the wisdom of scripture, tradition, and personal experience, there are methods through which we find healing often happens.

One of these paths is having another bear witness to one’s pain and suffering. Witnesses hearing testimony and confession confirm the reality of one’s story. Any individual who has long held a secret to the point that he or she doubted its truth will attest to the incomplete but remarkable relief experienced by speaking such secrets aloud to another person. Healing also often occurs in the context of relationship. From relatively high functioning individuals to the severely character disordered, we all posses a level of inherited and acquired relationship patterns that are convoluted by sin. By entering into loving and caring relationships with others (and with God) that disrupt or frustrate these patterns and provide new ways of relating, we can experience a measure of healing. Such experiences compel us toward healthier and holier interactions with one another and with the Creator.

Finally, healing is reflected in the developmental process. God, being fully aware that we are never fully aware, orchestrates our individual experiences in such a manner that we learn in a cumulative but somewhat lock-step way. Each experience has the potential to yield new insight that we previously could not grasp because of the cumulative nature of each experience before that moment. Such a developmental path to healing accounts for the temporal nature of certain dis-eases.