Faith, healing, and teaching. Those came out as my top three spiritual gifts, when I took a spiritual gifts inventory last week.

My first response to the results was to question them. Specifically, the one about healing. What does that even mean, that I have a gift of healing? I can’t heal anyone of anything.

But looking to the definition, and discussing this with others in the room who had also taken a spiritual gifts inventory, helped clarify my giftedness in this area. And it has renewed my awe for God, and how He knits everything together.

The definition of the gift of healing (found at umc.discipleship.org) is:

“The gift of conducting God’s healing powers into the lives of God’s people. Physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological healing are all ways that healers manifest this gift. Healers are prayerful, and they help people understand that healing is in the hands of God. Often their task is to bring about such understanding more than it is to simply erase negative symptoms. Some of the most powerful healers display some of the most heartbreaking afflictions themselves.”

Among the group of people discussing our spiritual gifts inventory results last week, there were two others with a gift of healing. Both admitted they or their loved ones had experienced significant health issues in recent years. We all had this in common.

Suffering can create distance between us and others; we can feel an otherness in the presence of people who have not experienced a similar trauma. At the same time, we can become more perceptive in recognizing people whose experiences parallel ours.

And for some of us, God gifts us with the desire and ability to meet people in these places of shared woundedness.

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.” -Adrienne Rich

We all have a need to be seen, and for those that have wept rivers of tears, to have our humanity recognized not as a sign of weakness, but as evidence of the courage and strength we draw upon as we meet the unique challenges of our lives.

While I cannot directly bring about physical healing, outside of the physical healing that can brought about from intercessory prayer (which is not to be minimized, but isn’t my focus for today’s devotion), I can be an agent of emotional and spiritual healing.

I’ve filled a notebook with my prayers, with God’s promises in scripture that have spoken to my fears and grief, with words of encouragement I have found in the voices of kindred spirits, and with my own hard-won insights. The notebook’s edges have become worn and tattered from going back to those pages again and again and again, as a balm for my own hurts, as well as an offering to others.

Meeting others in their pain has become part of my own healing, as I can see the hand of God himself in the redemptive process of my newfound purpose.

Lord Jesus, my Redeemer and Rescuer, I praise you for the longing you have placed in my heart to spend time at your feet, knowing that would bring the healing I seek, and the way forward you would want me to go. Amen.