I prefer grand solutions to simple ones, don’t you? It’s funny that we claim to love the easy route, yet we tend to go to extremes when it isn’t necessary.

I was watching a little clip of a sermon by Sadie Robertson on her Instagram a few days ago, and something she said resonated with me. She talked about time, specifically referring to the saying that time heals all wounds, that only time can really make the pain go away.

After over a year of healing from past mistakes, I really did think that only time could sew up old wounds, that the pain would go away eventually and to just hold on when the going got tough. But Sadie had a different view on the issue, and so did Elisha in 2 Kings 5.

Naaman was a soldier. Just like all of us, he fought some pretty grand battles and he won them. Though the text shows Naaman as being a great man that was well respected, Naaman had little faith. He was a leper, or a man with a skin disease, and he was looking for some healing. He expected grand gestures; like many of us, he expected God’s healing to come in the form of a miracle.

Instead, Naaman was told to take a bath in dirty water.

He was baffled when Elisha, supposedly an amazing prophet, told him to go dunk himself in a river a few times and that he would be cleansed. I was baffled when Sadie Robertson told me that time wasn’t going to fix me.

But I shouldn’t have been, because relying on time is just as bad as relying on some kind of earthly works to heal our woes, just as bad as Naaman relying on some kind of other-worldly powerful force to heal his skin, and more than that, his shallow faith.

God doesn’t need time, He doesn’t need crazy miracles and He doesn’t need dirty water. He just needs us to put our faith in whatever means he uses to heal, to jump head first into gross rivers when He asks. He doesn’t want us to waste our time on healing when He has already healed us; if I were Him, I would be insulted by that.

Because just underneath that murky surface was Naaman’s healing, and all He’s asking of us is for our hands to open up in surrender and our expectations not to tend towards grand shows and miracles, but to simple grace. He’s asking us to remember Jesus, the one who healed us once and for all, and to fall out of our pain and into the comfort that comes with what He did for us.

Not to minimize pain or say that nothing is ever going to hurt you again, because I can’t offer you a painless life and neither can this world. But God can, in the form of heaven, in what is to come and what has been attained for you and for me.