Did thou make thy bed today?

“And Peter said unto him, Æneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole: arise, and make thy bed. And he arose immediately.” Acts 9:34

As soon as you read this verse, there comes in your mind the great similarity of Peter’s word to the word that Jesus says in Mark 2:10, “Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.” Here is Peter, an attentive student, who brings healing to a man in a way very similar to what he had seen from his Teacher. Once, the Teacher had healed a paralysed man brought to Him in a bed. Once, the Teacher had rewarded this man’s faith (or was it more his friends’ faith?) with healing and had returned onto him the ability to move. Once, the Teacher had said to the paralysed to arise and walk, making him the one who carries the bed instead of being carried by it anymore. Once, the Teacher had ordered work to the just-healed paralysed man. We are not told what happened to the bed later on, but intuition makes you think that it was thrown to the nearest trash bin, after the proper goodbyes were told. This man had now received healing, so why would he need the bed any longer?

Similarly, Peter declares to Æneas the healing that Jesus Christ was giving him and, after telling him to arise, as if to prove that now he is a moving man and not a paralysed one any longer, he goes on by asking him to make his bed. Oh, if we could understand a little the depths of this request! Here is a man who had been his bed’s prisoner for eight years, a prisoner of this bed from which he had prayed every day to part, maybe until he had surrendered and had accepted its prison as a companion to the life that was left for him to live. Here is a man who could walk after eight years, a man whose joy can only be described with the word happiness. It is easy to imagine his joyful dance while he again uses his legs that are nostalgic of the earth’s touch.

And now, immediately in the midst of joy, he has to turn his eyes on the bed where he laid, in order to make it. Peter declared healing onto him and thus it was, but for healing to be complete and sustained it cannot remain on the legs alone. After the astonishment and joy had left their place to the routine of everyday life, the healed man would turn to his room in the evenings, and there a bed of sickness would wait for him, strongly reminding him of what he had been, a paralysed man with deformed legs, until it would finally sing victory and steal his trust that those legs were now able to run, to dance, able to feel the freshness of grass while strolling. Peter knew that healing remains only physical if the healed person does not work further for the healing of the place of his sickness.

The Lord brings healing even today, for grieves and suffering like this or different, that many have lasted as long as this, longer or shorter. We all have our beds of suffering, which are not necessarily physical sicknesses, and maybe we have been languishing and are languishing in them for such a long time that now we are surrendered to accepting them as parts of life, though every writhing in these beds renews the pain as if the languish had only begun today. But the Lord, just as Peter says in this passage, heals, and He has already declared our healing when He said that He makes all things new (Revelation 21:5). What is missing is that we find the necessary obedience and trust to arise and walk, and the godly boldness to take up and make our bed.

Maybe what somebody needs is that he is so humble as to admit the indispensability of his feet being washed by his Lord. Somebody else may need the trusting vulnerability to let his friends carry his bed to the Healer. And, when we have accepted His healing, we need courage for the inevitability of making our beds, if we want healing to look like freedom. In his great mercies, the Lord might choose to respond to our prayers for the correction of some situation, but if we do not get ourselves to work in our part to bring before the Lord not only the specific situation, but all its background, its roots, branches and effects, we might simply be creating upon ourselves the danger of a clean hose that has remained empty and is now attracting bigger troubles then we had before (Matthew 12:43-45). Every healing and cleansing needs to be fundamental, if we want to create a lifestyle of sustained freedom.

Whatever the bed and no matter how long we have been languishing in it, Christ is able to declare His glory through the healing He provides (John 9:3). What is the need of a “languish souvenir” if the Lord has declared it healed? If we are healed and yet continue to carry a bed on our shoulder, in the long run it will make a bent believer. Thus, let us be committed to finding the guts to make our beds, so we may run free with our God and live like healed people, being of good comfort and rising, as He is calling us. No bed can resist His healing.