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The Great Physician...

             for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Philippians 2:13)

If you’re like me, at times you look at your life and think that you are so far from being even 10% of the way to what you’re supposed to be.  Your life is such a wreck that those who might try to help you bring brooms and dustpans, not screwdrivers or a tow truck. Those are the bad days, usually, they’re bad days because we’re not getting our way, we’re not performing to the level we want to, and/or no one is telling us how wonderful we are. If you’re like me,  you might even be in the habit of whining to God about what a miserable louse you are. (Yes, I know, we shouldn’t do that!) And we go to the doctor to complain about this or that, and he focuses on something we hadn’t even noticed or that we were proud of.

Today’s verse brings to mind a video I’ve watched more than once of a doctor who was preparing to give a baby a shot. He tapped, tickled, and tossed tissues at the kid, made silly faces and noises and in the middle of it all, he jabbed the needle in. The child was amused and suffering from a mild sensory overload, so he didn’t even notice the needlestick. For those of us who have had surgery, it’s likely that we were sedated or drugged so we didn’t notice (or perhaps didn’t care about) the fact that someone was slicing us open.

Afterward, we have the task of recovery. When I had my foot operated on, after I recovered enough to remove my stormtrooper boot, I had to learn to walk again. It wasn’t hard, it was just awkward because I’d gotten used to functioning in the boot.

This is the image I have of this passage on a good day. God does a lot of work but I’m distracted so I don’t notice. Sometimes, I’m so out of it that I’m not aware of what’s happening. But then the time comes for recovery, when I have to stop or start doing something, or change the way I do it. It all seems so hard. I’m being so heroic.

It’s not that what we do as we recover or adjust is not important. It’s that it’s only important because God has done something to make it possible. The work that would take us years of study and practice, and which we would still likely not be able to perform on ourselves is what God does before we get started.

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