What A Comfort

“He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.” (Ps 147:3 AV)

What a comfort!  Those of us who struggle to be what God wants us to be can deeply appreciate the verse above.  We have lived, fought, and failed to be what God wants us to be.  We have fallen to the flesh, the world, and the devil.  We have done some good, but not nearly as much as we had hoped.  The thing is, we serve an infinitely merciful God!  As much as we have failed to measure up to the full stature of the LORD Jesus Christ, His mercy goes infinitely beyond it.  We can look back at this past year and celebrate the good that He was able to accomplish through our yielded hearts.  We can praise Him for all the lives that have been touched because He has allowed and empowered us to serve Him as best we can.  Yet, there are those times we wish we could take back.  There are those choices we wish we hadn’t made.  We have caused wounds to the soul and our heart is broken over what we still remain to be.  It is the promise above that gets us up every morning.  It is the knowledge that in the end, He will fix everything!  And I mean, everything!

I haven’t spent a whole lot of my life in the hospital.  I had my tonsils out when I was in grade school.  I spent a few days in the hospital after a severe concussion.  And I had outpatient shoulder surgery.  Other than that, I haven’t had any serious hospital stays.  So, I can only imagine what it might be like for someone who had a serious hospital stay.  Several years ago, my friend Mike rolled his jeep.  He was airlifted to Nashville.  For the first few days, it was touch and go.  He suffered many broken bones but the worst of it was severe head trauma.  I remember being with the family for several days.  They stayed in the lobby of a very large level-one trauma hospital in the Nashville area.  The entire extended family was waiting for this emergency to play itself out to its divinely appointed end.  Whatever that might be.  I still remember the first time I was allowed to see him.  It was not pretty.  He was bandaged and in a body cast from head to almost his toes.  He was in a medically induced coma.  The ICU to which he was assigned was an open unit.  No solid walls were separating the patients.  They were in stalls in a U-shaped pattern around the nursing station.  That way, the nurses could tend to the patients extremely quickly.  All I could think to do was to pray and ask the LORD to spare Mike’s life.  Which He did!

Mike made a full recovery.  It was a miracle.  There was no humanly possible way Mike should have made it through such a tragic accident.  But God is bigger than anything we will ever face and it is His providential care that gets us through it.  When it comes to the battles of life, our God is bigger.  We will fall.  We will bump our knees.  We will cause harm to our lives and souls.  But God is always there.  He will pick us up out of the messes we have created, clean us off, and bind us with the balm of Gilead.  He will heal us and put us back on the road to spiritual growth.  Just like a human father would never allow his child to suffer more than he or she needs to, God will not allow us to go through this life with gaping wounds and shattered lives.  He is in the healing business.  He is in the restoration business.  He is in the business of taking a life wrecked by poor choices and making something beautiful from it.  Our God loves us more than we can ever comprehend.  I, for one, and so grateful for the reminder and comfort He has provided in the verse above.  Praise be to His name!