the people look like trees

Last year I left the Los Angeles Urban Project (the summer missions trip i did in South LA) with a couple questions. One of the biggest ones involved a healing story i experienced. See I have jumper's knee, or tendinitis in my knees, so if i work them a lot they hurt and begin to swell. This was especially bad in high school where i went through a period where i had to take pain killers just to even go to practice. My knees would swell up every day and i had to ice after everything. One day at LAUP, after going for a run my knees began to kill. Walking was hard and trying to go up stairs was impossible. So i asked a couple of my house-mates to pray for me. And indeed, afterwards it did get better. But the next day i woke up and they were still hurting. That day i kept praying for them and eventually the pain went away.

I believe God performed a miracle that day. Since that healing my knees have never been that bad again. I can exercise without icing and i hardly iced at all this past volleyball season nor did i take pain-killers which had become pretty routine at one point. Because of that dramatic difference in the state of my knees i know that something had changed that summer. But though my knees were ultimately healed, one thing i couldn't understand was why it took two days. Why it took one group praying with me one day and then me praying more the next. And the story that i kept thinking about was the healing of the blind man from Mark.

Mark 8:22-26 reads:
When they arrived at Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man to Jesus, and they begged him to touch and heal the man. Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. Then, spitting on the man's eyes, he laid his hands on him and asked, "Can you see anything now?"
The man looked around. "Yes," he said, "I see people, but i can't see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around."
Then Jesus placed his hands over the man's eyes again. As the man stared intently, his sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly.


I could not understand this story at all. I had my theories for it but none of them made sense and as to how it spoke to the healing of my knees i was dumbfounded. This Sunday i heard a preaching of this story that finally makes sense to me about my experience.

The reason Jesus has to heal the man twice isn't because Jesus made a mistake or that his healing power wasn't sufficient enough the first time. Nor was it necessarily a lesson on the blind man's faith or the man's courageous to tell Jesus he made a mistake (as we had once discussed in Mark study). Jesus is showing us here how much we need to depend on him. He's showing us how the more we depend on him, and allow him to work on our lives, the more complete and healed we can become. In this sense it is sort of about the blind man's faith because the blind man does have to continue to allow Jesus to work. This is a reminder to us of how much we need Jesus.

We want to have control of our lives. I know i for one want control. I like being the master of my own destiny. Therefore if there's something i think i need to work on then i will work on it until i feel like i've mastered it. Take sports for example. In basketball i would work on skills until i mastered them. I would spend days breaking down my shooting form until i was satisfied, or working on my dribbling, left-handed dribbling, shooting with my left hand, crossovers, shooting threes, and so on. I would work on these individual skills until i felt like i was good enough at them to move on. I think a lot of times that attitude gets translated into the spiritual realm as well.

If i have a problem i will pray that God would give me the strength to move past it so that i can move on to other issues. I think this story is a reminder of how that's not always the case. There are issues we will periodically struggle with for possibly the rest of our lives. Some huge ones i can see this summer include learning how to be patient with people who annoy me, or how to work with/for people i don't respect. Just because we are able in one circumstance to finally learn how to have patience and love for an individual doesn't mean that we're cured of those issues. Others will come around that will challenge us and then we are back to having to lean on God.

This story tells us to be humble and to not think that we are insusceptible to issues we've dealt with before. It tells us to recognize that we must come to the Lord day by day asking for his power in our lives to overcome the issues we face.

Even with the healing of my knees, though they are noticeably better this year then ever before, there are still some days where they hurt real bad. And in those times i can do nothing better then to turn to God and ask for his healing. I don't know if my knees will ever be pain free, but i do know that God has the power to take that pain away. Our lives are a never ending journey towards becoming better then what we were the day before.

Again, to quote my verse of the summer, Ephesians 3:20,
Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope.

All we need to do is to recognize our dependence on him and then to ask him to work in our lives.