My father sent me a note and a verse along with a prayer. I was fresh out of the hospital and still involuntarily “bent over” from my recent abdominal surgery.
“And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, "Woman, you are freed from your sickness." And He laid His hands on her; and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying God” (Luke 13:11-13).
Everything was a chore while “bent over”—from laying back to sitting up to walking the steps. I guess I expected those, but I didn’t expect to have trouble sneezing and coughing, too. I can’t imagine carrying water or making supper or any of the slightest routines of life in the ancient world with which this real woman must have struggled for eighteen years. I was scantly bothered by eighteen days (and counting).
But my father in his note encouraged me to focus on the end result—“she was made erect again and began glorifying God” (vs. 13). No longer “bent over”—or at least 99% restored (my wife wonders if I have shrunk in stature!)—I am faced with the privilege of glorifying God. I am honored with putting my voice into the chorus of testimonies that calls the world to ascribe the weighty importance due God to God. This is glory. It is all God’s.
So whether it is eighteen years and then healed by one word from Jesus or eighteen (and counting) days and healed by Jesus slowly using doctors, antibiotics, pain medicine, the recuperative qualities of the human body and time—it is my turn and my distinct pleasure to glorify the mysterious God we serve.
I say “mysterious” because our God is also glorified a little later in the gospels by letting His friend Lazarus die in his sickness and begin rotting in the family crypt (John 11:4). And equally bizarre, our “mysterious” God tells Peter a small piece of “the kind of death [by which he] would glorify God” (John 21:19). Glory to God is not always obvious and it is not always unto life. Glory to God is often complex and invisible and impossible to comprehend without faith. Glory to God is deep and wide and even the culmination of our greatest fears and our slenderest prayers all converging in a single moment. Yet whatever the concoction of blood, sweat, tears giving glory to God is the whole-person bowing before the sovereignty of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who not only is in control, but who is thoroughly good—saying along with Job, “Though He slay me, I trust in Him” (13:15).
I guess the real question as I stand more and more “upright” with each passing day, would I have given glory to God without the pain? Only God knows. All I know is that glory is His and I will not hesitate to ascribe to Him the glory due His name.
