The “long answers” for all of these questions are obviously tied to the book itself. The reason I included the questions at all is that some of the content can be “slippery.” The words sound familiar, and that familiarity can make it easy to rush past the question with tired answers, and to miss what might be new to those of us who adopted tired answers too easily before, and could stand to think about things in fresh ways – to find love in new ways.
1. If you pray for healing, and do not receive healing, what does that make you feel?
What it does in me is stir emotions of neglect. I find fear and anger well up in me, as though God is ignoring me or as though my situation doesn’t matter to him. What happens for me is that I get confused about what is true and enduring, like his love and his consistency, and which me-based sorts of evidence I want to use to measure God. In human relationships, this is a simple boundary issue – the acknowledgment that the there are two of us in the relationship, not just me. What happens when I ask for healing and do not receive it is that I am faced with the truth that I want to be God’s god. What I’m learning, though, is that the more I give up control – letting God be God – I actually feel less anxiety, whereas when I try to tell God what to do, I feel more.
2. How do you feel about a God who talks about love, but doesn’t heal you?
At first I thought this question was simply me tipping my hand about the depth of codependence in my heart and in my world. Then I started thinking about how many Christian’s I’ve seen abuse themselves by forcing kindness and generosity when it simply wasn’t there – how many times I’ve seen phrases like, “Man, you’re supposed to be a Christian” used to coerce people to act. Love may inspire action, but coercive selfish demands don’t foster healthy love.
3. Do you believe, in everyday thoughts, not just Sunday school thoughts, that God is good?
I finally do, though these days I’m finding that the goodness isn’t about whether or not God will heal me. I’m finding that as I obey and move forward, things are going well for me. And as things go well for me, I want them to continue to go well for me. So I want to control them. So I don’t want God to control them, because I still tend to think he may kick them away. What I’m praying through these days is my desire to learn that that he loves me at new levels. I’m risking the good stuff and the control and trying to let him do with my world what he wants to do…and trying not to sabotage it myself (because if I ruin my own good stuff, I won’t have to deal with being angry or betrayed by God and seeing how petty I really am, and how little I really do trust him).
4. Where might your thinking need to change if God is good AND he doesn’t heal you?
God’s goodness is not tied to my wholeness. The more that I am forced to experience his love, in my brokenness, the less emphasis I put on my brokenness. In this way, I am being shown what truly matters.
5. Read Romans 7. What do you think of the idea that your brokenness may not be you, but sin living within you, as a disease within your body (or “members,” as Paul says)?
I don’t feel guilty about a disease. I turn to face it and treat it, or live with it. I am finding that there is a difference between my self and my sin, and only my pride and desire to by God’s god keeps me from living in that truth.
6. If it were true that it is no longer you who sins, but sin living within you, how might that truth change the way you experience your failures?
Could it be that our sin is a reflection of the lack of intimacy between ourselves and God? I don’t mean that to sound like we sin because we’re not trying hard enough or that we’re not sincere enough or something like that. I wonder, though, if our failures are tied to our desires to be God’s god. Even the areas where we have absolutely nothing to say about how we are – physical features, etc – do we experience failure or shame or wrap sin around who we are by identifying with what is wrong, what is unhealed, what is not perfect, and could that be lessened by a prayer that went something like, “I repent, please draw me closer to you. I cannot change this or fix this, please help me accept myself so that I may draw closer to you instead of using my flaws to maintain distance from you. Please show me how you see me, how I truly am.”
Maybe?
7. Where have you been taught that your sins are a matter of your personal weakness, rather than an aspect of the fall of all creation?
I think I’ve learned this from just about every person uphill from me who wanted me to do something, or whose approval I craved. I have measured adequacy and the meaning of my shortcomings through any eyes but my Lord’s.
8. Why do you want to sin less?
My hard truth bet is that for most people, we want to sin less because we want to need God less. We want to have control over our own worlds and hate being reminded – in ways that really get to us – that we are contingent beings who only exist because God decides, moment by moment, that our existence is his good pleasure.
See the previous chapter’s discussion questions here.
See the next chapter’s discussion questions here.
