In my week’s trips I encountered a woman who spoke of Jesus and prayer but was very against the bible. She said she believes the Jesus of the bible is satan and shared her reasons.
“He told the woman who asked for healing that he’s not here for her – only the chosen people. What kind of horrible god would tell a woman he’s not here for her?” And as days passed I thought about this and today God spoke to me the answer.
We see Jesus as a man and forget that he was connected to the source that knows our every thought. Jesus spoke the woman’s thoughts to her in that encounter. A woman who had been taught that she’s not good enough for God because she’s the wrong color, the wrong bloodline or isn’t accepted by the right religious people was facing a man who people say is the Messiah – a man who’s healing people by the power of God; and what’s on her mind in that moment?
Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Can I be healed even though I’m not one of God’s chosen?
Jesus wasn’t saying words to her from God the Father when he said “I’m only here for the children,” he was speaking her own doubt back to her so she could remove the ONE BLOCK that stood between them and the very block that needed to be resolved in order for him to heal her. She needed to know God loves her and she is chosen and worthy of healing but what she said next is quite profound. “Even the dogs get to eat the breadcrumbs that fall on the floor.” She spoke of how she viewed herself after a lifetime of being oppressed by the religious leaders in a society where she was deemed a dog at their feet. She spoke of her life experiences as a poor beggar that was denied by these people who claimed to represent god and yet in her truth, she still believed she should be healed because even the dogs get to eat the crumbs.
Jesus told her that her FAITH had healed her. It’s by our FAITH that we are saved from each situation, healed from every form of sickness and can walk in freedom of this grand truth that we are LOVED BY GOD no matter who we are, what we’ve been through or how awful this world has treated us and spoken down to us.
WHY WOULD GOD CREATE CANCER?
In my next flight I was with a man who told me that the night of our flight was the anniversary of his father being killed in a plane crash when he was 10 years old. I felt his pain enter me even though he wore a smile. Then he shared stories with me about his mom and the conversation led to God, beliefs and miracles. He said that he had bid a trip he never thought was possible and right after his mother passed, he got that trip assigned.
“Do you think your mother in Heaven had something to do with it?” I asked. His eyes lit up as he nodded. “I think so.” It was such a beautiful moment for me because the conversation to that point made me feel separation between us as I believe in miracles and have experienced many and he didn’t seem open to my side of the topic. But then it shifted again….
“If there’s a being called God that created us and sees kids on this planet carrying cancer, I don’t want anything to do with him.” Then he shook his head. “No, I don’t believe in God.”
I remembered years sitting in a parking lot asking God in my silent prayers why he would allow kids to get cancer. But thinking back on my writing I did on that I realize how much has changed in my views on how I phrase this question today. Then it happened this morning when I was washing my face.
“Condemnation causes cancer,” I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit say to me. And as a light bulb seemed to go off in my mind I could see every person in my journey who had cancer and the tie between them all. It was guilt and shame they’d been carrying.
The man I was close to who died of cancer years ago left a note for his wife in his coat pocket. It was a confession of an affair he’d had years back. This man had literally been carrying this note in his pocket for years and never found the courage to give it to her. The deepest weights weren’t in the letter – they were in the truth he carried in his heart on the matter, unspoken and unresolved. The truth will you set you free.
Then I thought about the family I met just last week in Huntington Beach. The woman was a former preacher and had 3 kids; One of the children had recently died of cancer, her second daughter is in stage 4 cancer now and her son is in remission. As I was there he was carrying heavy anxiety as he’d been avoiding going back for a scan to see if the cancer had returned. In my talks with him he talked to me about his sexuality. He was gay and then he said that God had freed him from that lifestyle. Today he lives with his mother (the preacher) and is alone in his 40’s. He doesn’t date or have a social life outside of his family and in the 2 days I spent with him I must have seen him break out into tears at least a dozen times.
The lady seemed very kind and talks about God and scripture constantly. But on my last night there a woman came over who was hysterical. She had just left her husband who she says abused her for many years. She’s an orphan and has no family other than her kids. I gave her a prayer candle and told her that when she prays the Angels lift her prayers up before God. Then a few minutes later I was alone in the kitchen and the preacher woman came to me and condoned me. She said, “Don’t ever tell anyone to call in angels. You don’t know what you did that girl. The devil comes as an angel of light. We must only tell people what the bible says” I felt God tell me to be quiet. So I simply responded, “Please don’t speak to me about God.” and she left. Then a few minutes later she came in an apologized. I left her a note when I left with a prayer candle enclosed that spoke a scripture from the bible in revelation 8:4, “When the children prayed their prayers mixed with the smoke of the incense and were lifted up to God’s throne by the hands of the angels.”
It’s interesting the bible is used so heavily to condemn and tell people what to say, do, eat and how to live (as a law), but rarely do people seek it for the messages of prayer and miracles. And even in those stories it’s about our perception. One woman read the story of Jesus healing a girl and took offense to it because Jesus first told her “I’m here for the children.” She focuses on that rather than being excited that a miracle took place for that girl. The girl got the healing. God healed her. Jesus healed her and took away her sickness. Then a few minutes later she cried saying she wishes there was no sickness on the earth.
We are so confused in what we want. To we want a world with no sickness or to sit around arguing over the person of Jesus and picking apart his words to accuse him and find fault? Do we want to accept the gift of a prayer candle from my hands (made for prayers of healing) or do we want to argue the text that talks about angels in a book?
Do we want to fight or do we want to love? Do we want to judge or do we want to be healed?
I often feel like that breadcrumb woman today. I don’t feel accepted in any church I’ve visited. I don’t have a big job or big bank account anymore and without a successful business under my name my phone never rings. I feel invisible to the world I once belonged to and pointless – as if the only good I ever had that made me loveable was found in the gifts I could give to another in material things or opportunity. I’ve asked for a place to live, I’ve asked for jobs, I’ve even asked for prayers from others and felt like a beggar on the floor – seeking breadcrumbs. I’ve been rejected and casted away as unimportant by so many people. And yet, that’s exactly where the woman was at when Jesus gave to her a miracle.
So maybe this lesson is for me here and now to cast off all the words of humans, all the church-hurt I’ve endured from people who talk about sin rather than FAITH and ignore that FAITH is the only thing that’s ever made anyone whole in that book they live by. I have faith today that Jesus will heal me and my son and my daughter and will give us a place to live even outside of our human means of what we have in income and that God will be make a way up for us not because we belong to a religion, wear nice clothes, belong to a certain bloodline or even because we deserve it… To be honest, if I were to put my actions against the rules of the bible today I’d be a chief of sinner. So I know I don’t have my own righteousness to bargain with God. I don’t ask him to provide because I deserve it. But only because I’m asking him to.
