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Home Is Where We Heal.
Here is my shortlist for good health. Get plenty of rest, breathe clean air, eat a balanced diet, exercise, and don’t do drugs. What is the first thing they do when you are admitted to the hospital? They connect you to an I.V. machine, and they place a loud alarm beside your ear so it goes off all night, and you can never get any rest. Then they lock all the windows so you cannot get fresh air, and you end up breathing in all the illnesses and diseases of the hospital. Next, they serve hospital food. Then they strap you in the bed so you cannot exercise, and then they pump you with drugs.
I usually keep my opinions to myself. But one day, I was with a patient in the hospital when the I.V. alarms went off. They were so loud I could not hear. Naturally, none of the staff came to silence them, so I went out and found a nurse. As we were walking back to the room together, I told her exactly what I just wrote above. At first, I thought she would be mad at me, but she surprised me. She said, “You are right. You do not begin to heal until you return home.”
Why is that? It is because of God. God gives us everything we need in our bodies to heal. Doctors do not heal broken bones. God does this by putting stuff inside of us to help us recover quickly. We are fragile; we get hurt very easily. In life, we get banged up and bruised. God gives us what we need to heal.
I broke my thumb. I figured that I better check it out when my thumb looked like it had a golf ball inside it. I was in the emergency room for five hours. So it cost me seventy-five dollars to register for the first time, one hundred and fifty for the nurse to take my temperature, three hundred for the x-rays, and three hundred for the doctor to tell me that my thumb was broken. I knew it was broken; otherwise, I would not have gone to the emergency room. The doctor told me that there was nothing he could do about it. He sent me home to take care of it. That is, rest, eat well, and do not bang it with a hammer. It healed.
When Jesus gave the twelve apostles power to heal, he did not send them to the hospitals. He sent them to peoples’ homes because that is where people heal. God sends us also to heal, and we do this in our homes. We tell the sick or the injured, “I will take your calls and cover for you. You rest. Let me open the window so you get some fresh air. I will cook you a nice dinner.” We do not look down on or treat them negatively. We lift people up, and the way we do that is we act like God, Who is gentle, kind, loving, and caring.
Life beats us up, and we all need healing. So, God sends us home to heal.
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