Faith To Not Be Healed

Elder Clayton's talk will still be there tomorrow, but on the homepage at LDS.org, there's a link to an interesting article, and I know that link won't stay there forever. The one I provide here should last longer. The article, from the current Ensign and Liahona magazines, is called The Power of Faith, but it speaks of an experience when a woman's faith, though strong, wasn't enough to guarantee that she'd be healed from a chronic ailment. She struggled with this for a long time, wondering if her faith wasn't strong enough and what else she could do to make it stronger. Eventually, she made peace with the problem and discovered an important spiritual truth: Sometimes, it's not God's will to heal us.

God sent us to earth to gain experiences that we simply couldn't get in heaven. The main difference between earth and heaven is that heaven is perfect, free from all evil, sorrow, and suffering, and earth isn't. On earth, we can have pain, get sick, and experience sin. We can be tempted and face hardship. Mortal life is full of challenges, and those challenges give us strength that we couldn't get any other way.

A quote from President Spencer W. Kimball, shared at the end of the article, asks:

Is there not wisdom in [Heavenly Father] giving us trials that we might rise above them, responsibilities that we might achieve, work to harden our muscles, sorrows to try our souls? Are we not exposed to temptations to test our strength, sickness that we might learn patience, death that we might be immortalized and glorified?

As Amber Dahl, the author of the article, succinctly said, "If Heavenly Father were to free us from our challenges simply because we asked, He would deny us the very experiences necessary for our salvation." We need our challenges because they make us stronger, better people. Our struggles help us become more like God. Without them, we could never reach our true potential. If God were to remove our challenges before we're done learning from them, He would be negating the reason we came here. It's not always the case that we need to have enough faith to be healed; Sometimes, we need to have enough faith to understand that our struggles are doing us some good and to be patient. Sometimes, it's not the faith to be healed that we need, but the faith not to be healed, and to be okay with that.

We all have challenges in life, and the reason I clicked on the link to this article is that I have a challenge that I'd like God to remove, but maybe it's God's will that I struggle with this challenge a little longer. It's entirely possible that I haven't yet gained the strength this challenge is supposed to give me. Maybe there's more wisdom I need to gain from this experience, or more Christlike attributes I need to develop. Maybe I need to gain more empathy for others who suffer. Whatever the reasons are, it seems to me that this challenge is something that I'm going to be stuck with for a while, but maybe, in the eternal scheme of things, that's a good thing. If this challenge really is making me more like God, I hope it lasts as long as I need it to (but no longer). Paraphrasing Paul and the Lord, no challenges seem to be joyous, but grievous, but I have faith that my challenges will give me experience and will be for my good (Hebrews 12:11, D&C 122:7). Amber Dahl has that kind of faith, and I hope you do too. Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to need it.