Supernatural or Super Natural?

I'm currently sitting at my desk in the mostly-empty church office on a Monday, taking care of a few things that will make the next few weeks a little bit less stressful. We're beginning work to make twenty short-term missions trips possible in 2008. We plan to launch the teams by the end of January... that doesn't mean they'll leave in January, it means they'll be announced and applied for etc. Will I be off this cold (and lovely) island quite a lot this year? Yes. Excited? Yes.

The Causeway Coast Vineyard takes a sabbath month in December, so many of our ministries are closed down. They even close the office for two weeks and cancel church for two Sundays (which is mainly because the university closes, but they say they'd keep doing it even if we had our own building). Anyway, things are slow. We still send out groups on Friday afternoons to talk to the kids, and still go out on Saturdays to pray for healing.

People here are healed constantly. Nobody quite knows what's going on; and though, theologically (theoretically) speaking, it tends to get muddled, it's really quite simple. They pray for healing in the name of Jesus and just left and right cancer, dyslexia, and of course, uneven legs, are healed (if you haven't heard, it's a mysterious trend that God follows to lengthen legs to match each other).

Yes, there are loads of people who sit awkwardly unhealed at the end of prayer--and continue to be unaffected after they leave, disappointed. One woman on the healing team is fighting the same cancer she saw healed, and all of the team leaders get flu symptoms this time of year, just like everyone. One guy at the church is in recovery from a major surgery that he hoped to avoid and was prayed for everyday for weeks, probably longer. The H.O.T.S. (Healing on the Streets) team is constantly praying with no visible result. But they just keep on going because, maybe it will happen again today.

What's great about these people is that they don't pretend to know anything about why or how we see healing sometimes and not others. They aren't scared to look stupid. They aren't brainwashed, and the strangers they pray for aren't crazy. It's actually real, and it's astounding how normal it is. When something is healed, you don't look on and think I've just seen a miracle! It's not as if something is erased from a person; it's like things are as they should be. People should be healthy, shouldn't they? It's the sickness that is unnatural, not the healing. And besides, that, Paul says, to live is Christ, to die is gain--meaning that our lives are connected with God, and that death is a step up, because we get to be with God, without sin (which is, separation). Of course death has become natural, but the bible makes it clear that death was never the point--that's another thing for another day.

I thought that witnessing healing would increase my faith, or make me a supercharged Christian. But it hasn't. And that's because it's just so normal, so average, so anticlimactic. Honestly, I get more excited about a person who overcomes self-hatred, selfishness or disappointment--which are spiritual cancers. But these physical healings are simply signs that God loves people and that we aren't as far from Heaven as it sometimes seems--in Christian circles, we call it "signs of the Kingdom." And though it sounds ludicrous, I believe fractals in nature and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing style are as much signs of the Kingdom as healing. They aren't an end in themselves, but they point us toward our purpose, which is to love God.