Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise.
Jeremiah 17:14 (NIV)
Praise Before Anything Changes
A chair comes into the shop with a cracked rail and arms worn pale where people gripped them for a hundred years. The restorer could take it down to bare wood in an afternoon and send it back looking new. He won’t. He glues the joint, warms the old finish, matches the color as near as he can get it, and leaves the wear alone, because the wear is most of what the chair is now. His whole skill is knowing where to quit.
Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed. Jeremiah prayed that in a bad stretch. The people he’d been sent to had stopped listening to him, and while he prayed they were needling him about it, asking where the word of the Lord had got to and why it hadn’t come true yet. He asks to be made well, all the way, and both halves of what he says rest on God. Heal me and I will be healed. Save me and I will be saved. Whatever God does with him is going to hold, because of who’s doing it.
He gives his reason for asking. For you are the one I praise. The answer hadn’t come, the mocking was still going on, and the message he’d carried still looked like it had failed. He called God the one he praises in the middle of all that.
Read as a guarantee, this would be cruel. People have prayed these words with everything in them and stayed sick, and their faith was never the problem. Jeremiah asked for the whole healing and his own life stayed hard. He kept asking anyway, instead of trimming the request down to a size he could manage on his own.
Both prayers get prayed. Help me cope is honest, and God hears it. Jeremiah asks for the healing itself, with nothing to go on but the God he was talking to.
Around five the woman who owns the chair comes for it, runs her thumb along the rail, and walks it out to her car. The restorer sweeps the bench, sets down the next piece, and stands there looking it over.
A Prayer to Remember
Do the part I can’t do. I’ve gotten good at working around this, and I’d rather be well than skilled at hiding it. You know how long it’s been. Nothing has changed yet, and I want to say your name today anyway, with the thing still sitting where it is.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
