The Easy Thing

God requires no sweat nor snake oil. He's not waiting on us to help ourselves before He will step in. He doesn't want to be the God of last resort for us. 

But that doesn't mean He doesn't require anything at all. 

What God requires of us is that we swallow our pride and come humbly, knowing He is our only option. He requires that we come knowing that the outcome is entirely out of our control. He requires that we come putting it all on the line...and outside the lines, thinking outside the box because we know this God doesn't live in one. He requires that we know that whatever happens, it's all Him. 

And when we come like that, coming to Jesus is the absolute easiest thing we ever do for our own healing. Seriously. 

It doesn't sound easy because it requires us letting go of so much, and it doesn't sound like anything at all because we aren't actually doing anything. But coming to Jesus is something. And...it's the easy thing. 

I guarantee you that whatever hoops the priests tried to get the broken to jump through were not easy. Have you seen in the Old Testament what folks had to do for just a small spot of mold in their houses? They had to tear out that entire section, clean it, and patch it and make it new again. Just because of a little mold. Now, imagine having an actual affliction! Jesus doesn't pull out the blind men's faulty eyes, clean them, and put them back in; He just heals them.

It wasn't easy for the bleeding woman to visit a thousand doctors. It was a heavy financial investment, a lot of travel (by foot, mind you, across great distances). It was the repeated stripping of her body and exposing the fullness of her shame to someone who would treat her body as an object in whatever passed for medicine in those days, forgetting that there was a woman in that flesh. Jesus neither requires us to expose our shame nor to stand there as an object lesson. 

I don't know if you've ever been prescribed a washing, but prescription washings are too often a layman's exercise in lab chemistry. Even if someone else does the mixing for you, it's still rough. I've been bathing my little dog in a medicated shampoo for a few months, and she has to sit in the tub for 10-15 minutes with this foul-smelling concoction on her, trying not to get it in her eyes, shaking it all over the bathroom, and crying the entire time. I guarantee that Naaman's prescription to dip himself seven times in the Jordan was the easy way.

I love the way the Old Testament says this in this story - if God had asked you to do some really hard thing for your healing, wouldn't you have done it? So why won't you do the easy thing? 

The father didn't have to have any more conversations with the demons. He didn't have to beg them any more. He didn't have to try to make deals with them - and if you have a child in your life, you know you would try making a deal with the devil himself to save your child from the harsh realities of a demon possession or anything else that threatened to kill them. None of that any more. Those were the hard things. He had one conversation with Jesus, and that was the easy thing. 

Again, it's not the thing we think we want to do because it doesn't feel like doing anything, turning our healing over to God and taking it out of our own hands. But it's the only thing we really can do. Even in our own hands, we don't control the outcome, no matter how much research we do or how many good choices we make. So why not put it in the hands of the One who does have the outcome, too? 

I'm telling you, it's not the last resort and it's not nothing. It's the easy thing. And it's everything. And it's the only thing.