I will never forget the five nights we spent in the ICU with our then five-year-old daughter, Macey. She was so very sick when we took her to the hospital. She had been losing weight and just wasn’t herself. Then she started throwing up. It lasted a few days, and she was so weak. We knew something was really wrong. All we knew was we needed the God who heals.
Scary Days
As soon as we got to the hospital and got her into a room, a nurse turned to me and said, “It’s ketoacidosis. I can smell it on her breath.” That meant nothing to us in the moment, but we would come to understand all of it later. Over the next few hours, they arranged transport by ambulance to the Childrens’ Hospital of Philadelphia where she would receive the care she needed as a type 1 Diabetic. She was admitted to the ICU. There were so many doctors and nurses coming and going. They spoke of brain damage and the severity of her situation. It was completely overwhelming. Those were some dark days filled with fear, anxiety, and what-ifs.
God got us through those days, and Macey is doing well today. She wears both an insulin pump and a glucose monitor. But I have a special place in my heart for Type 1 Warriors.
(Macey is the one next to me, on the right.)
The Death of a Little Girl
When I read the story of a little girl being sick and then dying, it tugs on my mama’s heartstrings. And that’s the story we read in Luke 8.
The girl’s father, a man named Jairus, comes to Jesus and begs him to save his little girl. The little girl was twelve, and she was dying. He knew it, his wife knew it, and probably the girl herself knew it.
Jesus agrees and begins to make his way to Jairus’s home. It takes him a little bit because the woman with the issue of blood stops him, and He heals her. A messenger comes and finds Jairus and tells him, “Your daughter is dead. Don’t bother the teacher anymore.”
Just Believe
Jesus overhears the man and turns to Jairus and says these words, “Don’t be afraid. Only believe, and she will be saved.” Then they continue on to Jairus’s home. When they get there, only Jairus and his wife and Peter, James, and John are allowed inside with Jesus. Jesus takes the girl by her hand and says, “Child, get up.” The very next order is something that captures my husband’s and my attention. Jesus says, “Get her something to eat.”
Now allow me to hypothesize here for a moment. This is pure conjecture. But Matt and I often wonder if the girl in this story had diabetes. Obviously, they wouldn’t have even known back then that’s what it was. She would have just gotten thinner and thinner and sicker and sicker until she eventually slipped into a coma and then died. So when Jesus comes to her and heals her and then tells them to give her something to eat, it strikes at something inside me. The cure to helping someone whose sugars are too low is to give them something to eat.
Jesus Heals
So did she have diabetes? Maybe. Maybe not. But it certainly has made me think about what it must have been like for Jesus to heal people when he was here on earth. He knew every single disease and ailment He was healing, and yet, so many of those sicknesses weren’t even labeled yet. Can you imagine Jesus healing someone with diabetes? He heals them and can’t even tell them what it is. What would He say? “It’s a disease that they’ll discover in about fifteen hundred years, and they won’t have a cure for it for another five hundred years.”
God is our healer. His name, Jehovah Raphah, means, “the Lord Who heals.” We see this in Exodus 15:26.
He said, “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his sight, obeying his commands and keeping all his decrees, then I will not make you suffer any of the diseases I sent on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.”
Exodus 15:26 NLT
Don’t Stop Asking
It brings me such comfort to know this name of God, the God who heals. I don’t know what you need healed today, but I know the God who does the healing. It may be a physical ailment, or it may be spiritual or mental. I don’t know what it is, but God does. And He’s a God who heals. It’s in the very nature of who He is.
Whatever you need healing from today, take it to the God who heals, believing He will heal. Don’t give up on asking and believing.
And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. You fathers—if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
Luke 11:9-13 NLT
More Encouragement
For more encouragement, check out my post, When Trials Knock Your Feet Out from Under You. A book I’m working through right now is Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It.