It's been over 10 years since I healed several chronic dis-eases. Today I found myself looking back at old pictures of that small condo in Toronto, and everything came rushing back.
The kitchen with my juicer and my stainless-steel enema bucket. The pot of broth that was almost always on the stove. My apartment had a smell I'll never forget, rich chicken soup layered with cardamom, cinnamon and mastic gum, and on the days, I burned Boswellia sacra, the whole place would fill with this ancient, holy smoke. The hiking trail just outside my door where I'd go to breathe. My bathroom lined with containers of Epsom salt. The wooden box where I kept my favorite essential oils like little treasures.
That year was the most remarkable of my life. For the first time, I got off the cycle. Off the expectations, the obligations, the dreams I'd inherited from everyone but myself. And in that stillness, I discovered something I hadn't expected: solitude wasn't emptiness. It was a doorway. For the first time in my life, I could actually hear something sacred underneath all the noise.
That year is where I felt the weakest, and where I felt the strongest.
I was so consumed by the physical healing that I almost missed what was really happening. God was doing something quietly underneath all of it. He was allowing something He hates, suffering, in order to accomplish something, He loves: a healing that goes far deeper than the body.
Because sometimes God doesn't remove the pain. Not because He's forgotten you, but because He's in the middle of a surgery on your soul that you never would have agreed to if you weren't flat on your back.
God still works in this broken world, to open the eyes of the blind and to bring out the prisoners who sit in darkness. and His promises to those who seek him are eternal and trustworthy "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."
There is a deeper healing, a healing that only His Spirit can do.
"The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light."
