Part III: Revelation, Submission, and Healing

White punctate matter. When you don’t know medical jargon on an MRI report, you screwgle yourself trying to make sense of it. Those tiny white dots that had shown up on my scan were signs of vessel disease that increase my risk for stroke, heart attack, dementia, and depression. Or… it could be a product of chronic migraines. The night of my hospital discharge was my only known experience with such, so I chose to believe what was behind door number one. It made the most sense.

I wish I could say that since the start of this health storm, my everyday prayers for healing delivered me into the arms of peace, a peace that passes all understanding. But the truth of the matter is that even though I believe God is all-powerful and he has my best interest at heart, the sky darkened daily, and I often rode out storms clinging to a random piece of flotsam.

The thing I just couldn’t shake was why I didn’t feel healed. I thought I had heard Him whisper to me several times over the previous month that I was. I claimed it. But I didn’t feel it. Or rather, my symptoms clawed and scratched at me, hell-bent on keeping me captive.

On Tuesday, September 17^th, I’d had enough of the emotional turbulence. I wrote one of the longest prayers of my life, pouring it all out to God. I detailed my discouragement in being stranded in the wilderness while so desperately wanting to walk into my promised land. Was this refiner’s fire? What was the purpose in this? Was I dying? Was I not? I needed Him to speak. I completely emptied myself out and asked for Him and only Him. I was desperate.

And that’s what true submission looks like. It’s a desperation that leads you to completely relinquish your own will. I told him I would just sit in all of this. I wouldn’t try to escape it. I wouldn’t budge no matter how painful it would be. I would sit for however long it took for him to tell me what it was he wanted me to hear. Whatever I needed to hear. And when I sat in the silence, that’s when I heard the whisper:

This season isn’t about your plans. It’s about drawing you close to me. It’s not about your healing. It’s about my presence.

The very next night, my pastor’s wife spoke about the “power of the pause.” This is really simplifying what she spoke about for thirty amazing minutes. Minutes that I had to fight back tears just listening. She told us how important and powerful it is to pray with boldness, pray in the Spirit, pray with the authority that Jesus gives us. But so many of us have missed the boat when we don’t intentionally create time to just listen. We talk at God all of the time and ask him for so many things. But as soon as we say “amen,” we go about our day. We miss His still, small voice. God used that night to reinforce that he needed me to sit in the silence so I could actually hear Him above the noise of my own brain.

As soon as our group dismissed that night, I stepped outside to an incredible heat lightning storm that I was able to watch from my car the entire twenty-minute drive home. Beautiful flashes of lanterned light, hidden behind a screen of clouds. I drove home in silence taking in the beautiful affirmation of both God’s power and beauty and confirmation of what I felt the Holy Spirit was saying to me during that Bible study session.

The next morning, eager for my quiet time with God so I could just shut up and listen, I closed my eyes and just meditated on Him before reading Scripture. During my meditation, a single, tiny white dot appeared in my mind’s eye, and I immediately recognized it as “white punctate matter” from my MRI scan. I focused on it, and within moments, it dissolved. I knew God meant what he had been telling me all along.

Beverly, you were healed since the very first time I told you. But for you, it’s a process. Not a one-time event.

God brought me through this fire to show me that even though all the things I want to accomplish in this new season are good things, he needed my spiritual foundation to be healed first. I needed to give up the reins and allow him to lead, to allow him to sit behind the steering wheel instead of being my designated backseat driver. I needed to allow him the space and time to speak to me so that all of the good things I had planned could actually be great things instead.

God could have miraculously healed me the very first time I asked. He could have spared me from all of this in the first place. But he knew what bringing me through the fire would produce. More often than not, the process, not the destination, is the most important part of our journey.

He is a good Father.