The trouble for the blind man, if he cannot renegotiate with the God of the sighted man once he is healed, is that he fails to see at all. Like so many of us, he may begin to look only for the other broken things in his life, the things for which he is going to need a Healer, the things that will keep bringing him back to Jesus. Because he wants to want Jesus but with sighted eyes, it's a different Lord.
(And now is the time to say that if you haven't been reading along all week, this doesn't make sense. Head back a few days and start with Monday. Then Tuesday. This is a building story.)
We all know someone like this - their life is one train wreck after another. Maybe we have been someone like this. It's not particularly that the stress is fantastic or that life is meant to be so terrible; it's that a person has figured out a certain way to live and a certain way to relate to his world from this brokenness. Without it, he has to renegotiate everything - his relationships, his meanings, his questions, his confidences, himself, his God. In a fallen world, it's a whole lot easier to find a new brokenness than to navigate a healing. That's just the truth.
There are some problems with this, and perhaps you're already starting to see them. If your life is characterized by brokenness and if you believe it must be in order to find your way to Jesus, have you ever encountered Him at all? Really? Because if you keep coming to Christ as Healer but never accept healing, you cannot ever truly experience Him even as you've hoped to find Him. If God heals you and there continues to be something broken in your life, how long can you trust in this God? How often will you keep coming back to Him? At some point, that wears really thin. Brokenness becomes a stumbling block to your faith, not the cornerstone of it.
Another problem is this: what kind of relationship do you think you're preserving with your brokenness anyway? Honestly. Because keeping yourself in a broken state so that you have to come back to Jesus is not the foundation of any relationship; it's the hallmark of dependency. And when you are dependent on Jesus, you cannot love Him. It may feel like love, but it cannot be. It's too tenuous. It is built on a perpetual hesitancy and a backdrop of doubt. You keep coming, hoping to find the Healer, but prepared that you may not. Prepared that He may not heal you. Prepared that He may fail. You don't come trusting Him; you come questioning. Forever. Because every brokenness is new and it's a new chance for God to either affirm your faith or let you down. You never get to draw close to Him. You never get to start to establish that relationship. Because you're always taking it back. You're always taking healing and turning it back to brokenness. To a new brokenness, maybe, but brokenness just the same so that you never truly see Christ as Healer. You can't. You've never let Him actually heal anything. You've been too busy looking for more broken things to even see healing with your sighted eyes.
Ironic, huh? The very thing you think is keeping you drawn to Jesus is actually keeping you from Him.
This is a problem for a lot of us. It's this thing our twisted minds do without our even being aware of it sometimes. For most of us, our lives aren't really train wrecks. They aren't one devastating thing after another. They aren't really so hard as we make them out to be. It's just that we don't know how to live easy. We don't know how to live healed. We don't know how to live sighted in a blind man's world.
But we have to figure it out. We have to. If we ever want to truly see Jesus, we have to let Him open our eyes. And we have to be willing to keep them open. We have to figure out how to keep coming after Him when He is who we hoped He'd be, when we have no need of Him but only want. (It's more complicated, I know - as fallen men and women, we always have need of Him.) We have to figured out how we relate to Christ the Healer when we have been healed.
If we don't, we damn ourselves.
Tomorrow, I'll start to break down one way we start to renegotiate this relationship.
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