It is good that you cry out to God in your bodily pain, and you do well to cling to the promise that by the stripes of Jesus you are healed. Yet consider that this house of prayer is a spiritual surgery, and we must not only seek the healing of the body but also submit to the knife of the Physician for the soul.
This affliction, this humbling disorder in a hidden place, may be permitted by God for a purpose. Just as I must sometimes give pain to my hearers not willingly but on compulsion, so the Lord may permit a physical galling to deliver us from a deeper spiritual dullness. When the body suffers, it can rouse the soul from its slumber, making us more reverent, elevating the mind, and casting out desires that so mischievously beset us. The thing becomes a cure.
I would fain speak only of the green pastures and the still waters where sorrow and sighing flee away. But because we are often in sins, the more part of us, I must ask: have you examined whether this pain might be a mercy to keep you from a far bitterer reality? It is far better to be galled now and delivered from the disease of sin than to have a healthy body and a soul hastening unwarned toward punishment. Do not despise the remedy because it stings, nor seek only the removal of the hemorrhoid while the tumor of pride or carelessness remains untouched.
Pray, then, for healing, and we join our prayers with yours in agreement. But pray also for patience and for the wisdom to learn whatever lesson the Lord intends through this suffering. For if we are insensible to ten discourses, yet afterwards one blow may bring forth abundant fruit. May you be made whole in body, but far more, may you be made whole in that inner man, laying hold on eternal life, where the body shall no longer be broken.