Thinking about healing

As I have posted about giving I have been pretty careful to point out that Jesus did not ask us to do more than we can do, especially as individuals. He healed the sick, but he only instructed us to visit them.

I still can't help but think about how much more healing could happen than does.

Things like the lame being able to walk and the blind having their sight restored sound like they require miracles, but modern medicine has given us miraculous things. There are cochlear implants and prosthetics and I have seen devices that allow people with greatly diminished sight to be able to see. If the devices aren't as easily wearable as Geordi's visor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for someone who has not been able to see it is still pretty cool. Cancer is often still deadly, but great strides have been made.

There is so much that can be healed that isn't.

That sounds like it is about access to health care. It is, but it is not exclusively that either.

Pfizer recently decided to end research into new medications for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's treatments. As a business decision it is probably reasonable, assuming that they can have more success with other types of drugs, especially for chronic conditions that strike younger people.

I can get that, and I can also know that this is just one drug company and there are others out there, but it was still devastating to hear. I want a cure for Alzheimer's for than anything. That is kind of self-interest, except I also realize that even if someone found better treatments, based on the time it would take my mother would probably not benefit. Still, Knowing that other people will be affected, and that it is horrible, and knowing people who have Parkinson's and wishing better for them too, I think it's terrible.

There are ways of getting funded. Sometimes I will see people on television shows, and because someone wrote in and the story sounded good, that person gets free treatment, and maybe a nice resort stay, or something, because now we have seen them and we want good things for them. That has included new mobility devices, or surgeries, or even psychological treatment.

Sometimes you don't end up on television, but there is a crowdfunding page, and enough people with good hearts see it and it works out. That is great too, but most medical crowdfunding efforts don't meet their goal. Often the people who do the best are those who have better resources anyway.

That's not just for individual treatment, but this also comes into play for medical research. The Ice Bucket Challenge raised a lot of money for ALS, because it got a lot of attention. It may have done that in some negative ways, and there was a lot of criticism, but it went viral.

Viral. To get donations for a disease, a fundraising method needed to work like a disease: is that the best way of deciding what we care about?

For so many of those examples, we can meet the needs if we care about them and we can care about them if we see them, but as followers of Christ, shouldn't we be proactively looking? Should we be leaving decisions about who gets to be well to corporate greed and shameless grabs for attention?

Christ healed miraculously, and that is hot always in our grasp. The miracle of us turning our hearts to each other and deciding that we want good things for each other is. We can do it.

If we want to.