Although I’ve been back in Michigan for a week now, a piece of my heart stayed behind with my Florida grandchildren. What they said and did will be on my mind for quite a while. For example, one day I was complimenting Skylar on a stick figure she’d drawn when she said, “Both of his legs are broken, Midgee.”

“Oh dear,” I said.

“But they’re fixed now,” she said.

“Oh, that’s good,” I said. “So, he went to the hospital?”

“Oh no! Jesus fixed ‘em. Jesus fixes everything.”

It’s wonderful that Skylar credits Jesus with being the Great Fixer of all things, but from an adult perspective we might think, “Does he really fix everything? Not in my experience. My spouse is ill. Or my job was eliminated, my teen is rebelling, my 401K is shrinking, my parents are infirm.”

Since Skylar and I were already into a theological discussion, I asked for her opinion on that dilemma.  “What if the man’s legs stayed broken? What if Jesus decided not to fix them?”

Without even looking up from her crayon work, she shrugged and said, “Well, he would just fix ’em later.”

I’ve thought about that statement since being home and whether or not adults can trust Jesus to come through as readily as Skylar does. But of course there’s one big problem she didn’t address: the lame man’s point of view.

If a lame man’s legs don’t get healed when he expects they will, how is he supposed to cope during that frustrating time between no-not-now and for-sure-later? What if that period spans his whole life and healing doesn’t occur until heaven? How can he handle it?

Although broken legs do eventually mend, we’ve all known people who became ill and stayed that way for many years, despite our intense prayers for healing. Some have even prayed for God to let them die. Why does God often allow people to suffer long-term like that? What benefit could there be? If he’s not going to heal them on this earth, then why not pluck them from their agony sooner rather than later?

Here are 4 possibilities:

• Soul-work might need to occur. Putting people in hospital beds is an effective way to arrest their attention and get the work done.
• God might want to teach a person to graciously accept charity, uncomfortable for most of us since it involves a self-humbling process.
• Maybe he wants to develop an attitude of servanthood in healthy people toward those who are ailing, giving them an opportunity to help for the long haul.
• And of course those who are sick can teach the rest of us a great deal about how to manage suffering, by their example.

When God answers our prayers for healing with “no” or “maybe later,” just like Skylar we should remain confident he’ll say “yes” eventually, even if, as she says, it’s much later. But while we wait, we can be certain God is delaying for some very compelling reasons.

“Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, ‘Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.’” (Mark 9:35)