I conducted the wedding of a young couple called John and Sonia on Easter Saturday during my first year in active ministry. They were not churchgoers and their only link with the life of the chapel where they were married was that John’s grandmother was a loyal member. By way of preparation we had talked about the meaning and the practicalities of the marriage commitment. I had also told them my own conviction about Christianity as personal relationship with God.

John was taken ill the day after the wedding with symptoms that were first thought to point to epilepsy. Before long a brain tumour was diagnosed and he started a period of many months in and out of hospital. I went to visit him on several occasions. I don’t think I ever suggested to him that I would pray with him for healing. In private I was regularly praying that he might be healed. He did spontaneously start asking me a lot of questions about God, not embittered ones about his predicament but the searching questions of someone seriously in pursuit of faith. I gave what answers I could but had no idea in what particular way he might come through this seeking phase into a sense of discovery.

One day I visited him in hospital and he wanted to tell me what had happened the previous day. Apparently he had been drowsy, in and out of sleep, and a man he didn’t know had come and stood by his bed and said ‘It is time to give your heart to the Lord’. I did not gather how long the man stayed or what else he might have said. The impression I got was simply ‘A man came and said this and so I did it’. I was bewildered about who this strange pastoral visitor could have been. I certainly never met him and John never mentioned him again.

John died a few weeks later. From the intervening time I remember the quiet unassuming clarity I saw in him of having moved into a place of knowing God for himself. Without doubt this was a transforming factor for him in coping with his sorrow and the sorrow of his wife and family.

My sense of surprise at how God had worked went hand in hand with accepting that my prayers for his healing were not answered. Not long afterwards, with this and other instances on my mind, I talked to an elderly minister who had a considerable experience of healing ministry. He told me that the whole area remained mysterious to him. He had sometimes seen extraordinary things happen before his eyes as he laid hands on people and prayed for them. But there were no guarantees of any kind. Currently his own wife was very ill. Various Christian friends had come to him saying they had prayed for her and were sure she was going to be healed. But he had no personal conviction about it.

Now more than thirty years later my wife and I readily remember some remarkable instances of physical healing. When such things have happened we have rejoiced in them. Of course we do not dream of generalising that everyone is going to be healed of their infirmities if only ‘believing’ prayers are offered. It is right for Christians to live exactly within the terms which Paul’s Epistles prescribe out of the experience of the very first Christian generation. Luke is the ‘beloved doctor’ and medical resource and dedication are gifts from God. There are also times when healing is experienced beyond medical resource, as it was so often in the ministry of Jesus, and some Christians have particular aptitude in this ministry even though the source of healing is God himself and not human giftedness. Paul saw remarkable things happen at his own hands (as he testifies in 1 Corinthians 12.12 and as Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles endorses). But Paul also clearly views the Christian life as lived out within experiences of weakness of which the frustration of physical infirmity is one category. Famously he records an intimate experience of God telling him ‘My grace is sufficient for you’. This was in a severe personal affliction (we are not told its exact nature) where he had solemnly prayed three times for release (2 Corinthians 12.7-9).

My wife and I prayed with a lady who was troubled with a rash, a nasty and persistent one which had repeatedly defied diagnosis or treatment. We didn’t know and couldn’t promise that God would take it away in answer to prayer. But we suggested that we should at least ask God’s help and guidance. She was partly willing and partly hesitant, typical of many Christians who regard their own discomforts as minor and hardly right to trouble God about. But with Paul’s example in mind we suggested we would pray with her briefly on three occasions.

After the third time she told us that she’d had a dream. In the dream she saw a little matchstick figure of a person and a large hand above with a finger reaching down. The little person was jumping up and down to try to touch the big finger, at first very feebly but gradually jumping with more and more resolve until finally a contact was made. She believed it carried a message about reaching out to God whose love and power are there for us. Then over a period of weeks the rash disappeared, absolutely steadily but so gradually that the recovery would never have made it into the Guinness Book of Amazing Miracles. Even where God works the door is regularly left open for either faith or unbelief.

Is it ‘unfair’ that God apparently allows one person to be healed and not another, seems to rescue one and not another? Yes, it can seem as unfair as life itself can seem unfair. (In terms of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews I would rather be rescued from the mouth of a lion than sawn in two). But as committed Christians we have all signed away our right to life anyway. ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord’ (Romans 14.8). This is more than pious resignation. It is a reality of relationship with God. Whether we are healthy or afflicted, successful or struggling, we belong to him and need intimacy with him.

The picture of the matchstick figure jumping to reach the big finger applies beyond the realm of healing into other areas where we need to call out to God, including the renewal of the Church.

Teach us to pray > Prayer and healing