Made Whole

So we're back where we started, with a seemingly-important question: will you be healed in heaven? 

Jesus says it's better for you to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye than to be thrown with your whole body into hell, and He says this while He holds out His own nail-scarred hands. 

And yet, there's something inside of us - something inside even me - that wants to believe that the burdens of this earthly life won't be forever. There's something inside me that wants to be healed. That wants to be whole. That wants to know what I'm like when I'm not held back by a body that is weaker than I want it to be. 

There's something in us that wants to see the lame man walk. That wants to see the weak child thriving. That wants to see the blind man looking around in wonder. That wants things to be very good again...because they don't feel very good right now. 

I don't have the answer. I don't know what God's really going to do with this. But I have two possibilities that roll around in my heart. 

First, maybe God just makes all things new. Maybe He just heals everything and you finally get the body you want and the freedom of movement and the strength of stature and the stamina and the wholeness that you seek. Maybe there's a distinction between the Kingdom we're living in now and the eternity that's coming and we can live in the Kingdom with one eye, but in eternity, we'll have two again. 

Maybe the promise of heaven is everything we dream it will be, everything we want it to be, everything our hearts yearn for when we think it has to be that way. 

Second, though, maybe wholeness isn't physical. Maybe the knocked-down, dragged-out, scarred-up body that we come crawling into eternity with doesn't matter as much as we think it does. Maybe we get to eternity and we don't get out hand back and we only have half our vision and we can look down and see the scars of our sojourn on earth and...we still feel whole. 

Maybe we just don't notice our limitations any more. Maybe we don't feel restricted by it. Maybe it just is what it is, but we are fully capable, fully well, fully whole anyway. Maybe we're able to do all the things we want to do through some process that we don't understand from our position on earth, but it makes perfect sense from God's perspective. 

One of the things that I've learned in a lifetime in my own broken flesh is that it doesn't always matter what the paper says; it matters how my body feels, how it moves, how it's functioning. In fact, a lot of the time, you'd look at the documentation and wonder how, exactly, I live the way that I do. I've met many other patients over the course of my life who can say the same. 

So maybe eternity is like that a little bit. Maybe it doesn't matter what the body looks like...maybe it just works. 

And maybe you look down and see the scars of a life as well-lived as you could have, knowing what you saved yourself from when you cut off that hand, making it all out through the one good eye you have left, and you're just filled with thankfulness for the goodness of God...for the grace that brought you this far. 

For the love that brought you home.