Healing Is Only Difficult When You Think You Have Something to Do With It

These words Chris Gore once spoke have been quoted many times in lessons I have heard over the past six years. They resurfaced this morning, and something in me stopped and listened — the way you listen when someone names a truth you have been circling for months without quite landing on it.

"Healing is only difficult when we think it is something to do with us."

There is something deeply true hiding inside that provocation. We cannot manufacture our own healing. That much is certain. The striving, the grasping, the relentless self-improvement projects — they hollow us out rather than restore us.

Yet we are not passive, either.

We can surrender. We can tell the truth in the dark places, even when our voice shakes. We can forgive — and forgiveness costs us something real, something precious. We can repent where repentance is needed, establish boundaries that protect our hearts, grieve what was lost, rest when our souls beg for it, obey what God places before us with trembling trust.

But here's where the burden becomes clear: none of those things makes us the Healer.

Our part is participation. His part is transformation.

Perhaps that's precisely why healing becomes so exhausting when we quietly turn it into another assignment — another task on an endless list: I need to fix myself. I need to get over this. I should be further along by now. I need to work harder at healing.

Suddenly, healing itself becomes another burden. Another place where we've failed. Another evidence that we're not trying hard enough, not faithful enough, not surrendered enough. Jesus never asked the wounded to become their own physician. He invited them to come. Not to work for His welcome. Not to earn restoration. Not to perform some invisible healing labour that proves their worthiness.

Simply, come.

There is something wonderfully liberating about those two little words.

God does not stand at a distance, waiting for me to become sufficiently healed before He comes near. He is the One who comes near to the broken-hearted. He binds wounds I cannot reach. He restores places I cannot repair through determination, discipline or sheer force of will.

This is the liberation that has been trying to find me all along.

There is a beautiful, startling paradox here: healing may involve difficult things — genuine, honest, costly things — without healing being something we accomplish.

Grieving can wound us deeper before it heals. Forgiving can cost us dearly. Facing truth can be achingly uncomfortable. Learning new ways of living, new ways of receiving love, new ways of standing in our own skin — these take time, they require courage. Surrender itself may happen again and again, each time feeling like we're starting over.

Yet beneath all of that — beneath the grief and the cost and the time it takes — is grace. Pure, unearned, unconditional grace.

This is the distinction that could sit at the very heart of Healing 💔heARTs💖: Healing becomes heavy when I make myself responsible for producing what only God can restore.

Notice the subject of that sentence. Not me. Not my effort. Not my work or my worthiness.

He heals.

I don't heal myself.
I bring God what hurts.
I cooperate with what He reveals.
I obey what He asks of me.
I receive what He gives — freely, generously, persistently.
He does the healing.

Perhaps our greatest work in healing is learning to stop trying to take His job.

Perhaps surrender is not giving up on healing at all.

Perhaps surrender is finally placing the broken pieces into the hands of the One who knows exactly how they were meant to fit together. The pot does not restore itself. The wound does not bind itself. The broken heart does not have to become its own healer.

It simply needs to remain in the hands of Jesus.