Everybody Has a Mountain
(“Because their minds are dull, and they
have stopped up their ears and have closed their eyes. Otherwise, their eyes
would see, their ears would hear, their minds would understand, and they would
turn to me, says God, and I would heal them.” Matthew 13:15)
What do you see, what do you notice?
Are they too q for you? Or too diminished, or too damaged,
or too sinful, or eat too loudly, or have parties with transgressors,
sharing food like family? What are you seeing? What makes you
keep your distance? Or make your insistence clear that repentance
is the only cure for the pain they carry from daylight to sundown?
Are you able, at a moment’s notice, to rid yourself of
easy aphorisms
that say little and mean even less. Do you discount the doctors who only
“practice”, why only God “heals”. Or can you see the doctors as the
hands of God, a miracle in the flesh, a co-conspirator in the dawn of
divine healing? Don’t diss the doctors. I’ve met more angels in white coats
than I have in blue suits occupying a box made for worship.
Everybody has a mountain they wish would move,
Everybody has waters they must traverse,
Everybody has danger that stalks them from long ago,
Everybody has a wasteland where food and water and health and matter
disappeared like an oasis approached at dusk.
Did you see the transman wanting to worship? Did you,
with all the
confidence religion gives you, declare “God does not make mistakes.”
Did you forget about congenital heart disease, spina bifida, or cleft palates?
Our world is full of mistakes, imperfection is the beauty of our mosaic.
Why tell a rugged tourmaline that it should be a nicely polished emerald?
You are right. God makes no mistakes. And the sister who know she’s a
brother, is not a mistake and never has been. The baby who needed a
heart transplant within 3 weeks of birth was not a mistake. She’s going
to college now. She’s a miracle of God’s partnership with medicine.
What do you see? What are you forcing them to keep
inside because
they know you’ll lecture them without knowledge?
Let us learn to hear again; let’s unstop our ears, let’s
open our eyes.
We are the ones who need healing. We, the ones who have boxed in
so many hurting souls, driving them further from the divine acceptance
they deserve.
Let’s turn. Let’s face Jesus. Let’s look at him
touching lepers, healing the
blind who everyone else thought was a sinner. Let’s watch him bring life
where everyone else was talking about death. Let’s pull it together,
sew it masterfully, a net that hauls all species of fish. Let’s build a
mosaic of healing to decorate the beauties of the Lord.
