The Promise of Healing
By Anthony Casperson
10-26-24

For me, this past week has been filled with thoughts of pain, doctors, and hospitalizations. That's kinda obvious, considering I had neck surgery on Tuesday. And spent most of the rest of the week in the hospital.

I've been dealing with pain and numbness for years. Including numbness in the tip of my thumb for over 4 years.

And while the past 1½+ years have been filled with a lot of tests and procedures, there had been little in the way of relief. Those who know the whole story can attest to quite a lot of troubles sent my way during this time.

Because of all the failed attempts and increased problems, I really doubted that this surgery would work. And I still don't know how much the surgery has actually helped yet, because my body has to recover from how much it had to be restrained for the surgery. The pain won't go away instantly, for sure.

However, on this past Wednesday, the physical therapy people came to my hospital room to get me up and moving. When they questioned what the problem had been before, I mentioned the numb tip of my thumb. They asked how it felt now.

I hadn't actually thought about it until that moment. And even the neurosurgeon who performed the operation had told me that the numbness there was from so long ago that feeling might not ever come back into the thumb. So, I really wasn't expecting to feel anything.

But as I rubbed my thumb to see how it was, I literally sat there speechless because it could feel again.

I know that it might seem like such a small thing. And there's still a long way to go. A bunch of pain and healing and stretching ahead of me. But the sensation in my thumb feels like a promise of future healing.

In the days since that realization, I began to consider a greater promise of future healing. The way that the presence of the Holy Spirit is a promise of future spiritual betterment, in a similar vein to how my thumb seems to be a promise of my future physical betterment.

Only the Holy Spirit is a much more guaranteed promise.

Both Ephesians 1 and 2 Corinthians 5 speak of the Holy Spirit as the guaranteed seal given to followers of Jesus that's the down payment for the new and holy bodies we will receive after Jesus returns.

He is the promise of a much more glorious healing.

Paul even speaks in 2 Corinthians 5 about how our bodies groan to be clothed in the life of God. We groan as we await the fullness of God's promise. But it is the Holy Spirit that gives strength to our hope for that glorious future body.

(I know that I can't wait.)

So yeah, in this life, we'll still have pains and struggles. We'll still have to deal with the death and decay brought about because of sin in the world. And it won't be fun.

But when we who follow Jesus take a second to regard the presence of the Holy Spirit—when we feel where numbness had so long reigned—we can feel the sense of hope and promise. One day, the pain will all be gone.

Until the day that Jesus returns, we will ache and grimace and groan. But there is long-awaited healing at the end of it all. A new and holy body that I'm sure we all would rather have.