Do You Want To Be Made Well?

Do you want to be made well?  Jim Wood asked the team to contemplate this question in our after dinner devotion.

By today most of our team has experienced the deep privilege of home visits.  As we trek in small groups across Kenya entering into homes of dirt floors, tin and potato sack walls we can’t help but think to ourselves: can anyone be made well?  There are times I’m sure, where the mission-hearted ones of us contemplate living in Africa.  I think ultimately that would be the easy route as far as creating a comfort zone.

The real challenge for us is going to and returning from Kenya and figuring out how to move from one life to the next.  How do we cope with the crisis situations we sit next to on a plastic stool or lace-covered cushion in each home visit?  How do we love with our entire selves and not bring a child home with us?

Today we all learned about an American trance we are lured into, a trance that causes us not to be ready at the moment Jesus wants us to do something we don’t think we can do or

“get up and walk.”

We learned how to heal ourselves from this trance through the story of Jesus healing the paralytic beginning in John 5:1.  We have to want to be made well.  We have to tell Jesus “I want to be made well” and as a group member pointed out this evening, one thing we have in common with each African, each starving child, is that we want to be made well.

by Morgan Burrows, college student and member of First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia.