Bargains with God

Unimaginable love at the bottom

I lie on my bed and make bargains with God.

You can heal me, I know that you can. I want a miracle, one of the holy fire and rushing wind variety. I want to close my eyes and feel the Spirit moving through my body and when I open them again, the world is changed.

Take up your mat and walk.

I will let my voice become yours. When I rise up, I'll let loose all my shame. I shall be your prophetess.

I’ll open my mouth and your voice will come forth.

Just heal me! And it will be done.

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Trading myself for a miracle.

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God – thank God – is wiser than me. Nine years on and I've had no holy fire. Healing happens at a godawfully slow pace. It isn’t fast enough for me. Because I would, if I'm honest, still quite like that lightning healing. Most of us would choose hare over tortoise.

Yet when our bodies bend and they break in the pressure of illness, I'm learning it is a kind of invitation. An open door to a deeper healing.

It takes courage to choose to love a broken body in a world full of perfect images. To love the vulnerable you, the failed you. The you that has fallen down and may never get up again.

Illness is a portal to this love.

When day after day, month after month, maybe even year after year passes and still we are not healed, we are left in the mouth of an unimaginable choice. All we believed we once were has gone. All we had hoped for is fading.

How do we respond to such pain?

What do we do now, flailing adrift in the destruction of our lives?

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The choice that opens itself, here at the bottom of it all, is so big our small hearts can barely take it in.

We can choose to love ourselves anyway.

To love in the collapse of our lives, to love in the failure to get up.

What we are left with, in the wake of it all, is love.

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Fear is stubborn. Cycle after cycle of fatigue, I find myself fighting, until at last I remember. Salvation isn't healing. It's love.

I stop fighting. I let myself be ill. Over and over and over again.

I can be ill for infinity.

This is the love that lurks inside a long illness, a gradual re-weaving of the whole. A love of self that owes nothing to the outside world. Acceptance of ourselves that maybe we had never thought to find. Never dared hope for.

We think that we want to be healthy and healed and whole. But what we truly want – every single one of us – is to be loved when we are broken. We want to feel loved and safe in our most vulnerable moments, even the kind that last our whole lives.

Especially the kind that last our whole lives.

I ask myself, wouldn't you rather have this? Grace over holy fire?

Little by little, love is weaving me into yes.

It takes time. So I give myself time.

I give myself infinity.

It feels like a miracle.

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So don't make bargains with God. Or if you do, trust Him not to answer them. The healing you think you want is almost never the healing you need.

Let yourself fall. Let yourself fail. Let life sweep the legs out from under you.

This is where it all begins.

Shadows playing on my wall

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A few you might have missed

If you enjoyed reading Bargains with God, here’s a few older pieces from Falling Free that might strike a chord. They were popular with other subscribers, and they’re some of my personal favourites too, because they were such a joy to write. Take a look below, or dive into the archive.

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Thank you, friends, for being here with me.

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