January 13, 2015
Turn and Be Healed
I’m healing from a stress
fracture located above my left ankle and I’m a little out of sorts that it wasn’t
diagnosed sooner. Since I hadn’t had an accident and there was no redness or bruising,
the medical provider didn’t think it was broken. I hobbled around for six weeks
before an X-Ray was ordered and I was fitted with a boot. I groused to the
therapist about the delay in diagnosis and was surprised to learn that many
stress fractures are so thin they actually won’t even show up on X-Ray until
they begin to heal. I’m now pondering the fact that our need for healing,
whether physical or spiritual, is not always obvious to us, or to the
professionals. Speaking through Isaiah the prophet the Holy Spirit said, “For
this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and
they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear
with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them” (Acts
28:27 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----What is a calloused heart? Merriam-Webster offers, “a: feeling no emotion b: feeling or showing no sympathy for others :HARD-HEARTED,” as the metaphorical meaning of “callous”. It gives “hardened or thickened” for its technical meaning. Calluses form where recurring pressures might injure the skin and other stuff underneath it. The target of the metaphorical callous of the heart then is a condition by which the normal thought and emotional flow causing sympathy and feelings for others is truncated or halted by some form of mental backpressure.
-----It takes thought, emotion, and imagination to sympathize. So also, hardly hearing is not a condition of ruptured eardrums or broken anvils. Ezekiel referred to having ears to hear but not hearing (12:2). The condition is not physical. Physically speaking, the mechanism of the ear delivers nothing but neurological stimulus to the brain, a portion of which automatically makes a first level sense of it, an emotional sense to rhythmic melodious sounds, or a mental sense of rhythmic patterns we call words. That’s having ears to hear (in Ezekiel‘s use of the phrase, but not in Jesus‘ use of it.) But it takes attention given to the heard words - a search for validations and then for correlations and then for recognition of conclusions and finally for acceptance of conclusions - for metaphorical hearing to happen. The same can be said for eyesight. Having the ears to hear and eyes to see to which Jesus often referred was to have both the interest to think over what is being heard or seen according to previously learned perspectives. Hardly hearing with their ears is hardly caring about what’s being said or hardly having any perspective to recognize what‘s being said. Closing eyes is refusing to care or think about it.
-----A few times a year my back will tense up and go into spasms that can last as much as a couple weeks. I could run off to the doctor. But I’m the richer for rarely doing that. When I slammed that baby deer on my motorcycle, I eventually got to my feet and was able to move enough to determine there were no major bones broken. So, with having only about two syllables per breathe, I sent the ambulance away empty and took a ride to work from Char. But I could tell I did have a break in my ankle. A broken bone just has “that feel”. Yet, I knew it was either not a significant break, or it was a break to a non-load bearing bone, because it didn’t hurt to walk. This is the same thing I do when my back tenses up, or my bad knee gets sore, or any other of a vast variety of maladies recur. I attend the sensations and think about them logically. I’m not usually wrong in concluding what postures to take, exercises to do, or dietary adjustments to make for things to get better. Though I have had maladies requiring a physician’s help, and being no doctor, I yet have a doctor in me in my ability to give scrutinizing mental attention to symptoms with analytical thought according to what I’ve learned over the years.
-----Attention, reason, and background (which sometimes begins with nothing more than the Holy Spirit, but always comes to include the Word of God) are the elements of hearing and seeing as Ezekiel and Jesus meant. The more attention and reason you bring to sights and sounds, the more you hear and see, and the bigger becomes your background. The more you see and hear the Bible, the more accurate becomes your background. All these can help your bank account, as they do mine, while breaking the doctor’s.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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