5 Minute Devotion: The Great Physician
Sometimes it can feel overwhelming trying to choose what to read out of your whole big Bible. It might even be intimidating deciding how to spend your quiet time with God when there are no prompts or guidelines. That’s why we’ve asked former Collide staffer, Michelle Holladay, to write this devotion to help take the guesswork out of your study time and relax into prayer and reading.
Read Luke 4:14-21
While thinking about what it means to be broken, I was reminded of a literal break my body endured. A few years ago, I fell while running, dislocated my elbow and fractured my radius. It HURT!!! For the first few days, I felt helplessly stuck. There were so many things I could not do and I was forced to do the one thing I absolutely hate to do – ask for help.
With the pain and severely limited range of motion, it was difficult to imagine my arm would ever feel normal again. Other parts of my body were affected as they had to temporarily compensate for the loss of one of its members. I had a long road ahead of me. Passivity was not an option; I had to show up for physical therapy, do the painful exercises, endure the setbacks and listen to the advice of my trusted physician. It was hard work and there were many days I just wanted to crawl back into bed.
My arm is healed now; I can see the evidence when I look at my x-ray and see the mended bone, but I am not the same. I still have pain at times which my doctor says is not likely to ever completely go away. I don’t always trust my arm to support my body weight and I have irrational fears of falling. There have been positive changes as well. The inability to exercise for a time forced me to confront some of my body image issues while discovering different forms of exercise helped strengthen muscles I hadn’t been using. I have been reminded that I have some pretty amazing people in my life and I’m getting better at asking them for help when I need it.
I realize my broken arm is trivial compared to some of the other traumas that break us, but the tangible example has helped me see the effects of brokenness more clearly. Brokenness is painful and hard and crushing and sometimes feels unbearable, but brokenness does not have to be forever. The pain may never cease completely and we may never heal back to the way we were before, but that’s okay. In fact, that’s a good thing. We will learn valuable lessons from our pain, find strength we didn’t know we had, and grow in ways we didn’t think we could.
Wherever you are in your healing process, I hope you won’t be passive. I hope you will show up for life, do the hard work, endure the setbacks, discover the people in your life you can rely on, and learn to trust our Heavenly Father, the Great Physician. Will you let Him hold you and whisper softly in your ear as He guides you back to wholeness?
Want to read more from this series? Search ‘Devotion’ on our main blog page.
