And Christ healed my children in just the same way as He healed that man who was deaf and dumb. He did it by TOUCH!
When my children were younger all three of them required very extensive speech therapy to treat their stuttering.
This speech therapy involved meeting with a speech therapist weekly to learn the therapies that would be applied and to assess their progress and then going home and implementing that therapy with the children so that they would be able to speech fluently and without stuttering.
Because the stuttering was very severe in the case of my eldest son, and moderate in the case of his brother, and perhaps because by the time their sister developed a mild stutter we had already been treating stutters for years and years and years and so we were in routine, I took speech therapy very seriously!
This meant that I spent many many hours at home sitting with books trying to work through the speech therapy when my children were very little.
In fact, speech therapy was so overwhelming and all-encompassing in our home, that when my youngest brother was choosing his university degree, I strongly recommended speech therapy for him because I felt that we would always have need of a speech therapist in the family.
I was thinking about those days of speech therapy the other day because they reminded me of the miracle of Christ’s healing of the man who was deaf and dumb…
“They brought to Him a man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought Him to lay his hand upon Him. And taking Him aside from the multitude privately, He put his fingers into his ears, and He spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to Heaven, He sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened’. And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” (Mark 7:31-37).
You see, I do not think that Christ really need to touch the man’s ears and tongue to heal him. After all, the haemorrhaging woman was healed by sneaking through the crowds and touching the hem of His garment. And the centurion’s daughter was not even in the same room as Christ when she was healed. And yet – Christ reached out to TOUCH that man and heal him by touching him. And I have to wonder why?
And my guess is that Christ touched the man, not because Christ needs to touch a person to heal them, but because the man needed to feel Christ’s touch… It is as simple as that.
You know, now my children can all speak fluently, and if I did not mention that they stuttered you would probably never hear anything to indicate that they ever had. And that – irrespective of all the speech therapy and work that we did when they were younger – is simply a miracle!
You see, Christ healed my children. Every time we are healed – every time something good happens – it comes from God.
And Christ healed my children in just the same way as He healed that man who was deaf and dumb. He did it by TOUCH!
For the man who was deaf and dumb, Christ laid His own physical hands on the man to heal him. But now, Christ lives on inside us. And in this way, for my children, He used the hands of the speech therapist – and the hands of me, their mother – to TOUCH them and heal them through this touch…
And the greatest marvel of my life, is that He did that for them, performing this miracle – using me (and using her) – without our even realising…
What a marvellous God He is! How awesome is He – Creator of the universe – who moves my hands to His works…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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