Redeemer, Christ, Command Thy Double Healing

Nor has He left Himself without witnesses.

Mimosa’s village is well known to the police. The District Superintendent of Police once told us that there was more crime there and round about that village than anywhere else in the district. He told us stories such as only such men can tell, stories that would make weird books if anyone had time to write them. And in the thick of this lived Mimosa and her children. But in the Clan, thus notorious for every kind of daredevilry, was that gentle cousin, who had read Star’s letter to Mimosa. No one had ever heard him say a rough word, and round about him there was a little quiet place always.

And it was he who, time and again, was a witness to the universal love of God whose poor children had forgotten Him and were becoming so terribly like the gods that they had fashioned.

One day Mimosa, who had been slowly failing for some time, became very ill. Somehow she struggled through the cooking of a kind of food that would keep good for nearly three days. She

had hardly got it made when she collapsed, and for three days she lay helpless. No one knew, and no one came to see her. Her frightened little boys kept close to their poor mother, not understanding what was the matter, and, when meal-times came, they took the food she had prepared before she was too ill to move. But she had nothing. She could not eat.

And she could not rise and spread her savz to the Lord; but that was her spiritual attitude. Her soul knelt.

“Send help, I ask You, Father. I am sure You know how things are with me. And You know how I should get up and look after my children. But see, I cannot get up. The pain holds me down. Kindly allay it, Father. This is what I ask You to do, that I may rise and look after my children and the house.”

On the third day a neighbour looked in and gave the alarm. Mimosa seemed to her eyes to be dying. She had the dreaded death-delirium. “She is dying, she is dying!” she cried, rushing out into the street.

And her cousin, the man of quietness, heard. Quickly he ran for a vessel of oil and, going straight to her where she lay, began to anoint her with it, rubbing her gently in the Indian way. And to the amazement of the people who by this time had gathered for the last scene, she sat up.

Then her cousin went for food and fed her children, who had just begun to be hungry, and to her he gave the rice-water given in illness; but she was soon ready for proper food, for “healing had come, even health. I had no pain and soon was strong again.”

And she told how astonished the people were; but to her sweet and simple faith it was not wonderful so much as kind.

When she came to us — for that joy is only a few chapters ahead, she lighted upon a time of new experiences with us, of healings given in answer to prayer, such as we had not had before in the same definite and public way.

A hymn sung at these meetings has a chorus which runs thus:

“Touch them, O Lord,
Touch them, O Lord,
We kneel and pray Thee, touch them,
Oh, touch them, Lord.”

And it goes on:

“Redeemer, Christ, command Thy double
healing:

For soul and body in Thy sight are dear.”

At a time of preparation for one of these meetings Mimosa sat with her calm, fixed gaze on the

speaker. There was such a look of comprehension in her face that it was as if she had been

through it all before. And this though she was only just beginning to learn what our five-year-old children “had known ever since they were quite little,’ as one of them remarked. “She cannot even say the twenty-third psalm off by heart,” said another, astonished. It was true. She had lingered for days brooding over the first two verses, which seemed to her so beautiful that she could not hurry to go past them. And yet, veriest babe as she was in knowledge of the letter of Scripture, she seemed to have drunk very deep of its spirit, and here she was meeting us more than halfway in this, as in everything else. So the one who was speaking asked her if she would some time tell what she knew of our Lord Jesus Christ as Healer.

She smiled, and the smile that filled her grave eyes was like a glint of light on a mountain pool. And, sitting by the well the next evening while the children washed their sais, she told me the story just written down, feeling it would make it easier to tell it “in the great congregation” if she told it first alone in the quiet like this.

But the joy of her heart was not only, or chiefly, in the healing of the body experienced in her village home, or seen now. It lay, it lies, in the blessed truth that the Lord, coming thus near to a company of His children, does, in a way impossible to describe to those who have not known it, convey a new, fresh sense of His presence and

His love and His power to those thus brought into contact with Him. Mimosa had heard her son, him on whose brow Siva’s ashes were rubbed, ask her: “And is it really true? Will He heal my soul as He has healed these children’s bodies?” He had seen the one done; he was awakened to believe in the other.

It was this that filled his mother’s eyes that evening with a light that cannot be expressed in terms of earth’s poor lights. It was starlight, moonlight, dawn, all in one; it was heaven’s light we saw in her dark eyes then.