He is
risen! He is risen, indeed! Today millions of us around the world
celebrate Jesus’s resurrection.
Resurrection has been on my mind a lot in the last year.
Just what is
resurrection? It sounds so fantastical,
even alien for us 21st century people. But what I’ve come to understand is that
resurrection isn't just something that happened to Jesus 2000 years ago. God resurrects, brings things back to life, here
and now. The way that God created the
human body to heal itself is truly miraculous and is a type of
resurrection. I never thought I would
look, feel, and function as well as I do now after my crash. As the Apostles’ Creed puts it, “I believe
in…the resurrection of the body.” Resurrection
is not just for the hereafter; it’s part of the exhibition of the kingdom of
God in this life.
When I’m
under extreme stress, I get insomnia. I
don’t have difficulty falling asleep, but I awake in the middle of the night
and can’t go back to sleep as my mind races, turning the problem over and
over. This happened to me when I was
unemployed for about six months in 2009.
It happened again last year about two months after my crash, when I was
waiting for my jaw to heal before I had surgery in July. Every night for about two weeks, I woke up at
4:00 A.M. and couldn’t go back to sleep.
It didn’t take long before I was exhausted both day and night, but I
still woke up every night like clockwork.
I tried techniques that have helped me with milder cases of insomnia:
counting backwards by threes from 300 (really!) or slowly working my way up
from my toes, imagining each part of my body being totally relaxed. During my post-crash insomnia, I often got up
to read, but that didn’t work either.
The one thing that brought me comfort, if not sleep, was prayer.
God and I
had a lot of conversations during those wee hours. One night I was feeling particularly grateful
for the healing that I knew was occurring, however slow it may have
seemed. Somehow that helped me realize,
more than I ever had before, that just as surely as God heals our bodies, he
also forgives our sins, healing our souls.
Maybe that's why so many times Jesus forgave people's sins at the same
time he healed their physical afflictions.
Psalm 103 ties all this together beautifully: "Praise the Lord, my
soul, and forget not all his benefits - who forgives all your sins and heals
all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love
and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth
is renewed like the eagle's."
Naturally, I
wish that I hadn’t crashed, and I wish that I didn’t have the scars I’m left
with. Even so, God has brought new life to
me and, I hope, others through A Year of Centuries. This helps me understand a little more about
what Jesus faced in the last days of his life.
Obviously, he didn’t want to suffer and die (remember his prayer in the
Garden of Gethsemane before he was arrested), and I’ll bet he would have preferred
not to have the scars from his crucifixion.
Most of all, I’m sure he wished that humankind was not in the sinful,
dismal state that it was and is. But
thanks be to God that he has the last word!
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