Incredible Moment with a Paralytic

This Scripture was just read in our liturgical calendar last week, so its implications are still fresh in my mind. A deacon friend of mine preached on it and we were discussing what had come from his preaching just yesterday. (Another miracle story from someone else who works with him... a four month old baby cured of brain cancer... that baby now grown into a beautiful young woman... a woman with a droopy eyelid.) Her eyelid is an outward sign of the Holy Spirit's healing power in her body at four months of age. it was not her faith, but the faith of her parents and their friends who created a network of prayer after cancer had already ravaged the nerves that control the eye's opening and closing, and was growing fast enough to kill her. When the surgeon reluctantly went back in to operate to try to relieve the pressure... he found the tumor gone and no sign of cancer. Healing miracles still happen in our own time. She is living proof.

I have a friend currently battling cancer. He's been through two aggressive rounds of chemo and the lymphoma just keeps coming back, somewhere else. Now he has a tumor on his spine and it's taken away the use of his left arm and partial use of his right. My deacon friend and I went to see him in the hospital yesterday, and he related the miracle story he had heard from his colleague.

As I drove home last night I wondered why it is that all my prayers have been for emotional and spiritual healing... a whole lot of "if it be your will, please heal this man of his cancer" instead of calling down the power of Christ for a miracle. My faith is not like those of the paralytic's friends. If I am honest, I cannot find that certainty within me to demand a healing for this man. I wish I could. He deserves way more than my puny attempts.