When my sister was in elementary school, she came home with a math assignment that sent her into an absolute panic. The teacher had filled a piece of paper with one long equation—one number plus another number multiplied by another number and so on for eight-and-a-half-by-eleven long inches. My sister was overwhelmed, until she noticed one little detail that changed everything—the notation "times zero" at the end of the page, right before the equal sign. It was then that my sister understood the point of the exercise. No matter how daunting the equation, if it's multiplied by zero, the answer is always zero.
I've loved thinking about this story in relation to healing because, as I've seen over and over again in my own life, nothing is always nothing—no matter how daunting it may seem. If it doesn't express the goodness, beauty, and perfection of something that God would make, then God didn't make it, and that means it was never made. Rather than feel overwhelmed by appearances, I can remind myself that if there's a "times zero" at the end of the equation, the answer is always zero.
That's the approach I took several years ago after being informed that my son had gotten his finger slammed in a door during a play-date at a friend's house, that he was being taken to the hospital, and that part of the finger was missing. No, I thought, as I hung up the phone and headed to my car. No. God didn't cause that to happen. He would never cause such a thing to happen. And if He didn't cause it, it didn't occur. It was perfectly clear to me that it didn't matter how things looked. What mattered was how God saw things. And anything He didn't see was nothing. Zero. By the time my son arrived at the hospital a few minutes later, every part of his finger was present and accounted for—and it has been normal and fully functional ever since.
