I was meeting with Church tonight, and we were praying for a girl who had been diagnosed with a gallbladder and liver infection. She might need a transplant, it might be cancerous….lots of things still up in the air pending some scans. One thing that was clear was that either way she was officially given 1-5 years to live. The Church began to pray for a healing. Part of me felt like that was good, but part of me felt that it was wrong somehow. That we needed to step back and seek discernment on this.

I kept feeling God say to me that her body was standing in the gap. She lives in an area where Christianity is the minority and satanism and witchcraft abound. I am no expert on satanism, but from what I have heard, Satan uses physical ailments to ‘punish’ his followers. Regardless, I just felt like God was telling me her body was bridging the gap between the suffering of the world and what her area was most familiar with, and the power of God to overcome it. I don’t think healing will happen anytime soon, but I do think her body is meant to be a testimony and that the illness is absolutely ordained.

Sure enough, after they prayed for quick healing someone spoke up. “I feel God asking a question: ‘Will you search My depths? In the midst of your blindness and due to your faith, will you search My depths?’ Immediately I related it to what we had just prayed – in our human tunnel vision, our blindness to the big picture God sees, we were praying over a symptom. We should have been searching the depths and praying into this girl’s destiny.

Jesus’ love is constant. It’s all the time. We’re never without it. And yet….it manifests itself in many different ways. And often it doesn’t look like what we want. But it’s love. Will we search the depths and see love for what it is – even when it seems like temporary hardship? A friend of my church has a heroine addiction, someone they met recently and have been working to reach, got pulled over a few weeks ago with drugs in his possession and went to jail. Jail is unfortunate, but with lots of prayer over withdrawal symptoms, it ultimately is giving him the solitude and opportunity to get clean – he even has the chance to go to a 15-month program to help with his recovery. If not for his arrest, this wouldn’t have happened and he’d still be in the clutches of addiction. Will we search His depths to see love when the world sees misfortune?

So I challenge you all today to search the depths. See how God is loving you today. It might not be in a way that’s very fun or very obvious, but it’s there and it’s exactly what we need. Search the depths and find it.

God bless!

~Rebekah A