Chaplain's Corner

I have a friend who sometimes calls and suggests a topic for an article. I love that she does this, believe it or not, writing 26 articles a year sometimes leaves me wondering what I should write about next. Her most recent suggestion had to do with prayer. She wondered aloud with me on the phone and her questions went something like “Why are we always praying for healing? Don’t we believe that Heaven is a place that will be free of all the ills of this world? Why would we want to spend any longer here than we have to?” The conversation was particularly focused on older people and people with serious illnesses. It is a good questions and it isn’t the first time it has been posed to me.

Praying for healing is a practice that goes back thousands of years. Both the Old and New Testaments provide accounts of people who when experiencing sickness, prayed and received healing from the Lord. Certainly in the Gospels we see time and time again that Jesus responds to the request of the sick and providing healing. Some, who do not believe the Bible to be true, insist that these are just stories, tales of Jesus’ powers invented by his followers to support their teachings about his divinity. But I’ll ask your forbearance, I personally believe that the Bible is true, every last verse, and if my belief is right it certainly provides encouragement to ask God for healing when we are sick.

But the fact that the Bible encourages us by these many examples to pray for the sick that they will be healed doesn’t really answer the questions. So why, if heaven is such a wonderful place, would we want to live any longer than absolutely necessary?

The Bible does indeed teach us that heaven is a wonderful place. Listen to the way it is described in the next to the last chapter in the Bible, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev. 21:3-4)  NO more death, NO more mourning, NO more crying, NO more pain:  why wouldn’t everyone want to be in a place like that?

Yet, many find joy here on earth. Many live in the wonderful reality of a family that surrounds them with love. Many have known the gifts of health and prosperity and satisfying relationship and frankly have enjoyed their lives. Not that their lives have been trouble free, but the troubles have not overwhelmed the joys. It is my suspicion that the degree to which this has been our experience, we will have a longing to be healed when sickness comes our way, for we will want to return to this state and continue to enjoy these gifts.

An elderly lady I spent time in the hospital with just recently came right out and said this. If my memory serves me right she was in her late 80s. She had come to the hospital because she had fallen at home. She was pretty bruised up but nothing broken, the doctor was investigating to see if some reason for the fall could be discerned. As we talked, she shared, “I know I’m getting old and I should want to go to heaven, but I have such a wonderful family and I want to see my grandchildren and great-grand children grow up. Is that wrong?” Of course it is not wrong. What a blessing to have enjoyed such a joy filled life and to be surrounded by such love.

But, not everyone has such a blessed earthly experience. We often forget that all around us, right here in southeastern Manitoba, there are people who know little of the joys of this earthly life. Many have lived in families where abuse and rejection and pain were and continue to be more the day to day reality than love. Many have lived and continue to live with bodies ravaged by some illness, injury or disability that makes every day a challenge, just to do the things most of us do without even thinking. Many live on the very edge of hopelessness, clinging to small shreds of hope that the experiences of their lives regularly tear away at.

Then look beyond Canada, to the second and third world nations; to places who have known little but war for years, where mothers and fathers are dead leaving children orphaned and destitute; where communities are in ruin, having had their infrastructure destroyed by the conflicts of many years. Regions where there is no hope of a better day, for it has been so long since there was a better day, nobody can envision one any longer. We can hardly bear the images on World Vision commercials the suffering is profound, great and unrelenting with little hope of change. But millions of people wake up and live in that reality day after day. These people, by far the majority of people alive on earth, live in conditions that seem normal to them, for they have never known anything different. But those conditions have eroded hope, decimated joy and make love a seemingly unattainable fantasy.

Maybe the reason some of us want to be healed and live on in this world is that relatively speaking, we have had it really good, we have known so little suffering, so little pain, so little soul numbing tragedy. But there are many in our world, and believe it or not, many right here in our region who would not pray, “Lord, please heal me” but instead, “Lord, in your mercy, call me home to heaven.”

Some would call such folks “escapists”. Maybe they are but walk a mile in such a person’s shoes and maybe, just maybe we would understand. Is it wrong to want to escape the troubles of this world? Is it wrong to long to be with the Lord in a place where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away?” I personally don’t think so. In fact, the scriptures encourage us to have this heavenly hope. In Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi he mused about this longing “what shall I choose? I do not know!  I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body”. Paul’s only sense of responsibility to remaining in this world was that by living here, he could be of service to others.

Now think just for a moment about Paul’s experience. His life was not easy. He had experienced a lot of trauma. He didn’t regret the difficulties of his life, but he had no desire to experience more of them unless they would serve an eternal purpose. I think Paul lived with a pretty lively longing in his heart to leave this world and all its troubles behind and finally know the peace and comfort of heaven.

But this longing should never be confused with despair. Those who live with a longing to die and go to heaven are full of hope. They are not depressed, they do not see life as meaningless. They are not to be confused with people who are in danger of committing suicide. Far from that, they are people that want to live meaningful lives everyday, no matter how difficult, how painful, how discouraging it may be. They want to live to honor God and they trust God to determine when and how they will escape this world and all its troubles and find themselves in the glory of heaven.

If you do not have a deep and powerful longing to go to heaven, maybe you have been blessed with a pretty good life here on earth. But there are many, many God-fearing people who are trusting Jesus every day who have a growing and powerful longing for heaven. So, although many might pray for God’s healing, it is equally right for a believer to express a desire to be delivered from this life through death, so that they might enter into the place where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away?”