Healed and Wounded

“So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.”

I wonder, is this always what healing in scripture looked like? The 10 lepers that Jesus healed reported themselves as clean to the temple authorities. Was their skin clear, renewed?

Elly is, this month, healed of leprosy. She has completed one year of daily medication, that miraculous MDT treatment that revolutionized this horrible disease. The local clinic took a sample from her skin tested it. The results came back: negative for the presence of leprosy bacteria. The disease once progressing in her body has been destroyed, she is healed. We sat together at our table and each prayed. Judah started us out, “Thank you, Lord, for healing my sister from leprosy...” We have celebrated. Thank the Lord for healing, for medical science, for the WHO’s leprosy program, for Arnold and the local puskesmas that have treated her.

I think she is a walking depiction of all of us, really. Here she is, healed. The disease that afflicted her is gone. We, once afflicted by sin, are washed, purified, and presented clean by the blood of Christ. This is miraculous.

But today I wash the crusted blood off of her nose, which is numb and battling infection. Many days throughout the day blood drips and we tell her to go and attend to it. All day we remind her not to touch her nose, to keep her fingers away, not to pick at the scabs. This is the task of a mother, what child does not have to learn not to pick their nose? But what if the nose has no feeling, and cannot use pain to the tell her that what is being picked off is live skin? 

She is healed, but the impact of the disease remains. She crawls on the floor with her friends, pretending to be a cat. Her knee cannot feel the rug burn happening, and we bandage the wound when I find it. A boil grows on the back of her arm, and without pain she does not know it is there. I find it when her upper arm is swollen and hot, and we treat it. She falls when playing tag with friends and continues to play, unaware of blood dripping down her leg.

We are healed. But there is damage done in our souls. We are numb, sometimes unaware of what is harming us. Healed, but not yet fully restored. The battle is won, but we are still the walking wounded.

The doctors say that once the disease is stopped, the body, especially in someone still young and growing like her, still can heal. Our bodies have remarkable capacity for fixing themselves. I imagine the nerves and synapses, damaged and unusable, receiving a pulse of whatever life it is that courses through a functional nerve. After years of being dead, I imagine resurrection slowly, nerve by nerve, returning feeling to the skin. I imagine these spots slowly shrinking. I imagine pain striking her where there once was no pain, so that without having to process and come to a conscious self-disciplined decision, she simply feels not to pick at that live skin. I imagine those long wounds finally healing.  I pray for a day when there are no more wounds.

It's so profound that this is a disease that is beaten, but there is still impact that must be fought and treated. This is the reality I experience in my everyday life with Elly, and what I experience in life as human being redeemed. It is the state of my own heart. I love that there is hope. That because the disease no longer rules, we slowly heal, returning to a state of purity, returning to where our restored conscience accurately tells us what to avoid to be fully alive.

We pray every day for Elly. I am in the weeds of treating and coaching her to have discipline that other kids don’t have to have, to protect her from what pain protects other kids from unconsciously. I pray one day the impact of this disease if fully reversed in her. I hope.