Remember Healed

This is kind of going to be a continuation of yesterday's post. Once you have dared to let go of God's hand, once you have stood on your own feet and realized that He has healed you, the hardest thing to do is to remember that He has healed you.

Let me put some emphasis in that so you read it correctly: The hardest thing to do is to remember that HE healed you.

My niece is a treasure. She's seven, and if you ask her how long she's been able to do something, she'll tell you, "Since forever." How long have you been able to read? Since forever. How long have you been able to talk? Since forever. How long have you been able to walk? Since forever.

As innocent and cute as it is coming out of her mouth, it's not so adorable coming out of ours. But isn't that the way it is? We start walking on our own and suddenly, we think we could always walk. Suddenly, we think never had a yoke. Suddenly, we forget that it was God who brought us out of that place and taught us how to walk and led us and guided us and broke our yoke. Suddenly, we forget He was there at all.

Then we have three ways of looking at things - either we healed ourselves, things just got better, or things didn't actually get better at all.

If we healed ourselves, we no longer trust in God because we do not recognize the need for Him. We trust in ourselves. When trouble comes, we know (or think we know) that we can get out of it. We can handle this. All by ourselves.

If things just got better, we no longer have faith in God; we have faith in circumstance. We start to say things like, "It will work itself out. It always does." We start to spout platitudes like "This is just how things go" and "It will be over soon." All by itself.

And if things never actually got better at all, we no longer hope in God; we no longer hope at all. We resign ourselves to things always being this way because it seems, even when it didn't seem so, that they always have.

That's the danger of not remembering that it was HE who healed you. That's the danger of forgetting that God was there. There's no reason for trust, no reason for faith, no reason for hope.

Becoming a man of God is a delicate balance. It takes the faith to let go of God's hand without forgetting how it feels to be there. It takes being led by ropes of human kindness and cords of love (Hosea 11:4). It takes daring to find your strength to find that God is your strength.

And it takes looking back toward Egypt and seeing two sets of footprints in the sand, remembering what it was when God took your little hand and led you out of there.