What If Healing Comes Through Tears

In 2006, worship leader Laura Story received news that would reshape her understanding of God's goodness. Her husband Martin was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He survived the surgery, but the aftermath brought seizures, partial blindness, and significant memory loss. The life they had planned together was gone.

In the years that followed, Laura wrestled honestly with God. She didn't pretend the pain away. And from that wrestling came a song called Blessings that asked one of faith's hardest questions: What if Your blessings come through raindrops? What if Your healing comes through tears?

The song struck a nerve because it named what so many of us experience — that God's healing rarely looks the way we expected. We pray for the tumor to vanish, and instead we receive strength to endure. We ask for the broken relationship to be restored overnight, and instead the Lord walks with us through the slow, painful work of rebuilding.

Laura didn't write Blessings from the far side of a neat resolution. She wrote it from the middle of the mess — which is exactly where most of us live. And that is the testimony: healing does not always mean the removal of the wound. Sometimes Jehovah Rapha, the God Who Heals, does His deepest work not by taking away our suffering but by meeting us inside it.

The question for us this morning is not whether God will heal. It is whether we will recognize His healing when it arrives wearing clothes we did not expect.