I’m literally flooded with emotions right now. I don’t know what to think—it is like my head is not on straight &/or I’ve been smacked across the back of my skull with a heavy, blunt object.
There is an old gentleman who runs a food shop / sidewalk eatery out of his house that pretty much every farang staff member at GES has gone to for who knows how long. His name is Sombat, and apparently he has been dealing with a rather serious gastrointestinal problem for many years. It had become so bad in the recent months that the doctors were telling him that they would have to perform surgery in order to fix whatever was wrong. The downside is that Sombat is well advanced in years—probably about 70 years old—and as far as surgery goes, the older you get, the less advantageous the risk of an operation becomes.
His pre-op screening was scheduled for Wednesday—yesterday. On Tuesday this past week, one of my fellow teachers, Matt, & I stopped and talked for a bit with Sombat after we had finished our meal. Matt asked if we could pray for him before he went to see the doctors the next day. Sombat, like the majority of
Wednesday came & went. Today, I just finished my meal at Sombat’s place, and after paying, I asked the man how his doctor’s appointment went. He told me, as best as he could with his limited English, that the doctors took a scope and looked up inside him from underneath & down from the top side for the problem. He told me that the doctors said the lesion in his “stomach” had sealed up, motioning with his hands by taking his pinkie finger and wrapping around it with his other hand, as if to seal off the tip from the rest of the finger. Instead of the surgery that the doctors had told him was going to be mandatory, they gave him some medicine to take & he was told to sleep a lot for the next month, until he went back for a final check-up.
He stopped, looked at me and said, “Your God. I believe it was your God that heal me.” There was a look on his face of unmistakeable joy and honesty that it would have been impossible for me to in any way think he had just been polite, trying to make the farang who prayed to his foreign God feel good for offering up “good hopes.”
I walked away surprised, overjoyed and completely taken away. I’ve pretty much been a basket case ever since. Here I am in
I find myself reaffirmed that God does listen; that prayer does work; that God does love; that God exists. Furthermore, I find myself horrified at how I’ve let my walk with God very much slip away, recounting the many adventures that we have had together in my life.
Then there was this man, a Buddhist, who had more faith in my God than me. A man who believes that a God who was not his own reached out and healed him. That takes faith; more faith than I can confess to ever having. God has always been mine—He’s always been “there”; a part of my existence. There hasn’t really ever been a leap to grasp Him for me, as fundamentally, my very life has been founded on Him from day one of my life. I grew up in a Christian home & decided to follow Jesus at a very young age, so in that respect, I’ve had it easy. On the other side, though, I’ve never been subjected to the “otherness” of God—having to reach out and take hold of a supernatural being & relate with him without really having a background to set that relationship. I haven’t had to decide to switch allegiances from one god to another or from one set of religions / spiritual beliefs to another. Yet, here is this man who credits this God, which wasn’t his own, for restoring his health.
Increase my faith, God. Increase my faith.
3 comments:
I don't understand faith. You really, really believed that God would heal your friend's dad, and he didn't. This diminished your faith that "if we ask for anything in the name of Jesus—and that if we pray and do not give up—then whatever we ask for in His name, the Father will give us, because He likes to give good gifts to His children."
Well ya, of course it did. Your experience directly contradicts what you believed. You'd have to be a pretty irrational being not to have your faith shaken by that experience. (Not your faith in the broad sense, necessarily, but your faith that God will heal people if we ask him.) So how does the Thai guy have more faith than you? You both believe the same thing: that God healed him, and you believe for the same reason: because you prayed for him and he got better. The only way I see that his faith could be in some sense greater is if he believes that your God will answer all his prayers this way. And if that's what he believes, his great faith won't last very long.
I don't say this to pat you on the back, or to be argumentative. I just don't understand what people like you mean by "faith". Do you think God wants us to believe the way you did for your friend's dad? Then why does he make it impossible to do so? Or do you think He just wants us to believe that he could (but probably won't) heal any given person? Hell, even I believe that. Or does God want us to kid ourselves that the odds of a given prayer being answered are higher than statistics or personal experience suggests?
It's cool about the guy being healed though.
Jake;
The reason why I say/think that this guy has a stronger hold on faith in God than I do is because he had to stretch out beyond what he knew & come to a conclusion that was contrary to everything that he had believed--contrary to everything that his life experience, his heritage and his culture has told him. Flying in the face of everything that he has ever known, some people prayed for him in the name of a God other than the "one" he knew and worshipped--and this other God healed him.
It's easy for us who have had God in our culture, in our lives, in our daily existence to believe that he may potentially exist--mostly because He's talked about everyhwere. For this guy, though, there is no real knowledge of God. Thailand has a Christian exposure level of less than 1% per capita. Less than one person in a hundred has ever heard of the Christian God over here which is something that we at home take for granted.
It's easy for me/us to believe that God might heal people. It's more difficult for us to believe that He will (maybe due to our own lack of faith or our skepticism or our reliance on worldly knowledge which, admittedly, make butt-loads more sense), but we still believe that this God we know is powerful enough & capable enough to do anything. It's something that I think we in North America take for granted, and because of that, I think that we do not grasp fully the implications of what we claim to believe--hence a replacement of "faith" for "acceptance of what the majority of Christians say or think is right". I don't think that the acceptance of a plausibility argument can possibly equate itself to the fundamental characteristics of a real, bona fide faith.
Will God always answer prayers from or for Sombat like this? Who are we to say that He won't? Perhaps Sombat has had an experience of God that has given him a perspective which allows true faith--one that will allow him to "ask whatever you want in [Christ's] name and [He] will do it"? I don't know. It's at least possible [plausibility argument ;)].
I think that the thing I've needed to learn is that I don't know the mind of God; that when He says He wants to give us good gifts, perhaps my idea of "good gifts" isn't totally accurate. As if I were a child asking to have nothing but candy & ice cream for every meal for the rest of my life. Some things might be good, but I firmly believe that God always chooses the best (better?) alternative for us when we ask Him for things--whether it results in our prayers being granted, or whether it doesn't.
My two lepta.
Seems to me the proper response to miraculous healing is "HOLY SHIT THE LAWS OF PHYSICS HAVE JUST BEEN BROKEN!!!" Faith or not, a "real" healing is supernatural stuff and total amazement, not expectation that it should happen regularly or predictably, is the proper response.
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