As a child, my mother told me stories about going to church with her grandmother. My great-grandmother belonged to a Pentecostal church that believed in divine healing. My mother remembered entering the sanctuary as a little girl and seeing wheelchairs and crutches lined up against the wall. People had left them behind because they no longer needed them. They had been healed.
In those stories, healing was more than recovery from illness. It was evidence of God’s power made visible in the lives of the poor and faithful. Healing signaled God’s nearness and activity in a believing community where doctors were often unaffordable and medical care was denied by the color of one’s skin. As I grew up with those stories, a part of me became convinced that true faith would be unmistakable and tangible. I would know God through dramatic encounters, through healing, emotion, or unmistakable signs and wonders. Salvation, in my imagination, meant God healing the soul instantly and completely, once and for all.
Over time, my understanding of healing has matured. In her book What It Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill offers a definition that resonates deeply with my Reformed faith. She describes healing not as a destination but as an orientation toward living. Healing, she writes, “is a commitment to mending and developing emotional awareness and integrity.” It is a lifelong process of reconnecting to dignity that trauma has disrupted or taken away.
That understanding raises an important question for leaders and communities of faith: What does it look like when we lead from a place of health, and what happens when we lead from unresolved pain? Leadership shaped by healing tends to reflect confidence, respect, and dignity. Leadership rooted in unexamined trauma often reveals itself through insecurity, defensiveness, and mistrust. Most of us live somewhere between those two realities. The pressures of work, ministry, and life constantly pull us one way or the other.
Here is the grace in this reframing: healing does not demand perfection. If healing is a process, then none of us arrives fully healed, and none of us leads without wounds. Perhaps faith invites us to stop expecting wholeness from one another and instead practice patience, humility, and compassion. We lead as people still being healed, trusting that God is at work in the slow, faithful mending of our souls. And over time, by grace, that healing becomes visible, not in wheelchairs left behind, but in lives marked by dignity, courage, and love.
