Your head is throbbing again, and the light hurts your eyes, and your stomach churns with that miserable sickness you know too well. You have been to this dark room before, and you wonder if relief will ever come. It is a strange kind of trial, this pain that hides inside the skull, invisible to others but as real as any broken bone. And you have cried out to the Lord in it, I know you have, and you wonder why the healing tarries.
Let me sit beside you a moment and speak a quiet word. Our Lord Jesus Christ entered Peter’s house one day after a long stretch of preaching and healing, and He found a woman burning with a great fever. He did not stand at the door and shout instructions; He came near. He took her by the hand, and the fever left her. That is His way still. He does not shrink from the sickroom. He does not despise the aching head or the queasy stomach. He who made your eye knows its every nerve, and He who fashioned your brain understands its every secret pathway of pain. And He is not far off.
You ask for healing, and you do well. But do not think that His love is measured out only when the pain lifts. The very pain itself comes to you through His appointment, not as a mark of anger but as a strange, black-edged envelope carrying a letter of His faithfulness inside. I have seen saintliest souls bedridden for years, their faces shining with something not of earth, and I have heard from their lips the choicest words of holy experience. The Lord knows how to make a sick-chamber into a sanctuary. He knows how to use that throbbing head to teach you dependence, to drive you to the shelter of His wings, to make you pray as you never prayed when you were well.
And there is this to hold fast: the Tree of Life that stood in Eden was guarded and hard to reach after the fall, but in the heavenly country it grows on either side of the river, always within reach, always bearing fruit. Healing is not a distant hope for some far-off day only. Christ’s healing power reaches into this very hour. Sometimes He heals the body with a word, and the migraine vanishes like mist. Other times He heals the spirit in the midst of the migraine, and you find yourself carried on a current of grace you cannot explain. Either way, you are in the hands of the Great Physician, and He has never lost a patient yet.
So when the pain surges and the nausea rises, whisper His name. Look to Him as the eye looks to the hand that shields it from harm. He is more watchful than a hundred sentinels, and He sees the assault of this affliction from whatever quarter it comes. He will keep you as the apple of His eye. And if He does not choose to lift the trial this hour, He will surely lift you, up into His peace, up into His patience, up into a fellowship with His sufferings that is a strange and sacred gift.
Let me pray with you now.
Lord Jesus, You who stilled the storm and rebuked the fever, look upon Your suffering child. This pain is a heavy burden, and we bring it to You with groans that words cannot carry. In Your tender mercy, speak the word of healing, quiet these throbbing nerves, settle this churning stomach, soothe these aching eyes. And if, in Your unsearchable wisdom, You ordain that the thorn remain a while longer, then give grace equal to the trial. Let Your presence be so real in the dark room that the darkness becomes light about You. Bear Your lamb in Your arms, and let no pain drive them from Your side. We ask all this in Your precious name, Jesus. Amen.