The Hand I Have Not Laid Since

The plates were still on the table.

That is the detail he cannot get rid of. Not the words he used, which he has forgotten, and not the faces, which he has probably invented since. The plates. Somebody had scraped one and stacked it on another and the sound of that had been the last ordinary noise in the room before he said it.

He said, would it be all right if I prayed for your back.

His brother-in-law had been off work eight weeks by then. Something in the lower back that the scan had a name for and the physiotherapist had a plan for, and it had turned him into a man who stood up out of a chair in three stages. And it was a good evening, and everybody had eaten, and something rose up in this man that he can only describe as certainty, and he asked.

His brother-in-law said yes. Of course he said yes.

So he stood behind the chair and put a hand on a shoulder and asked God, out loud, in front of his wife and his mother-in-law and two teenagers who had stopped looking at their phones, to heal that back.

And then it was over, and the room was very quiet.

His brother-in-law said thank you, and meant it, and stood up out of the chair in three stages.

Somebody put the kettle on. Somebody said something about the traffic. And this man stood there with a hand that had just been on a shoulder and did not know where to put it, and he has not offered to pray for anybody since. That was four years ago.

Now understand what he actually took away from that kitchen, because it was not disappointment. Disappointment he could have carried. What he took away was a verdict about himself, delivered in silence, with witnesses.

He decided he was not one of the people who can do that.

And every time since, and there have been many, the moment has come and gone. A colleague with a diagnosis. A woman at a bus stop with her arm in a sling. His own daughter at two in the morning with an ear infection, and him praying about it silently in the corridor, which he told himself was the same thing, and it was not the same thing, and he knew it while he was doing it.

You know this corridor. You have your own kitchen and your own stacked plates and your own evening you have replayed until it wore smooth.

And you have made the same quiet decision he made, which is that you will not put your hands on anybody again, because you cannot survive the silence twice.

Nobody was ever handed the healing

There is one word in the middle of this and it is plural, and the plural is the whole answer.

Paul is listing what the Spirit gives, and when he reaches this one he does not write it as a title. He does not say a healer. He does not say the healing ministry. He writes it in the plural twice over, gifts of healings, as if each one were a separate parcel handed across on a separate day.

To one there is given gifts of healings by the one Spirit. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, who distributes to each one individually just as He decides.1 Corinthians 12:9 and 11

Read the last clause slowly, because that is where you have been standing all this time without knowing it.

Just as He decides.

Not just as your faith allows. Not according to how well you asked or how steady your voice was or whether you had eaten too much before you stood up behind that chair. He decides, in the moment, one gift at a time. Which means nobody in the whole of Scripture ever carried healing about with them like a set of keys. It was never in anybody's pocket. It was handed over, once, for that person, and then it went back into the hand that owns it.

And nobody was ever handed the healing to carry about with them. The written word writes it plural twice over, gifts of healings, and ends with just as He decides, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has replayed one kitchen for four years.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word puts the distributing in the Spirit and the deciding in Him, and the Spirit is the one who supplies rather than filling a reservoir in anybody.

And here is what that does to your kitchen.

If nobody holds the healing, then nobody can fail to produce it. You did not withhold it. You could not have withheld it. You are not the reservoir with a blockage in it. You are the one who asked, and the asking was the whole of your part, and you did your part completely on the evening you have been ashamed of for four years.

The silence in that room was not a verdict on you. There was no verdict in that room. There was a man who asked, a God who is good and free, and a plate somebody had scraped.

And nothing about you is under review for four years of a corridor. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who prayed silently outside his own daughter's room and knew it was not the same.