Healing Without Being Cured

Last night, I found an insight in the Wikipedia. On a whim, I looked up Healing, and the first paragraph of the article reads: "Healing (literally meaning to make whole) is the process of the restoration of health from an unbalanced, diseased or damaged organism. The result of healing can be a cure to a health challenge, but one can heal without being cured." I want to emphasize that last line, "one can heal without being cured," because I think that it explains a large part of the human experience and the role of the gospel within that experience.

We came to Earth mainly so we could face opposition and challenges. We are imperfect beings living in an imperfect world, and that condition will continue for as long as we live. We can't be "cured" of imperfection until there is a major change to the Earth or ourselves or both. But that's okay. The challenges and imperfections we struggle with in life serve an essential function. They help us learn and grow and become more Christlike. We have to face and experience imperfection. It is essential to our eternal progression.

However, there is some pain involved in this experience that is not essential to our eternal wellbeing. Some of the suffering we face in mortality can be cut short or avoided altogether without interfering with God's eternal plan for us. There are some afflictions of which we can be healed.

But that doesn't mean that we'll be fully healed or that we'll never have to face afflictions of that type again. Affliction is a necessary condition of mortality. We have to experience hardship. God can offer us some comfort and relief, but, for our eternal benefit, we need to endure these experiences and learn from them, no matter how painful they are.

Some say that a loving God wouldn't allow there to be any suffering, and I personally don't think that He allows there to be much more suffering than is absolutely necessary for the greater good, but some suffering is necessary, and while God can alleviate the pain of that suffering to some extent, it's in our own best interest that He not fully cure us of it. Mortality is a life-long condition that involves a fair amount of scarring and pain, but though God can't, won't, or shouldn't cure us of mortality before our time comes, He can offer us a good deal of comfort, relief, and healing even while we remain not-yet-cured.