Sita has been busy again. Read her very good news here!

I was asked the question above (very politely) by a friend I was talking to at the school gates last week. I really had been healed of a nasty headache the day before. I’d had it on and off for weeks, and when my housemate SarahJane put her hands on my head and prayed for me, it dissolved in a couple of seconds. I was a bit full of this and all the healings that have been happening at church, but my friend’s question kind of stopped me in my tracks.

I have an idea of an answer – partial maybe – but if it makes any sense as I put it into writing here, I might be brave enough to show it to my friend. If you think it’s wrong or right or somewhere in between, please leave a comment to say so…

When the tsunami hit on Boxing Day 2004, it got to me in a way not many disasters have before. It was the extent of it, the viciousness, and the heart-breaking stories, like the baby snatched from its mother’s arms and drowned. As the news unfolded, I got more and more perturbed and finally I couldn’t pray about anything else –all I could say to God was, ‘How could you?’

It was one of those times that to my surprise I finished praying with a sense of having been answered, of being satisfied. The scripture that came to mind was from Matthew 24: ..'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but do not be alarmed. Such things must happen...There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginnings of birth pains.' A scenario unfolded in my mind, based on that verse and my understanding of the kingdom of God. It was of our world, divorced as it is from the God who made it, and behaving in all our relationships and actions as if he doesn’t exist, being like a ship damaged beyond repair and slowly letting in water. Because of our broken relationship with God, sickness and death and terrible events like the Boxing Day tsunami have crept in and become part of our world. None of these things should come as a surprise – perhaps the surprise should be that we stay afloat at all.

Into all this has come God’s solution, which is not to patch up the sinking ship and let us wreck it all over again, but to build a new world order right under our noses, one in which people are right with God and each other and in themselves, one which will eventually displace the current distorted world order and last forever. Jesus has been made the captain of that new ship and we board it through an oath of loyalty to him.

I see the healings that are happening around us – trivial ones like my headache, and significant ones like a severely damaged liver being totally restored – as signals, signs pointing to the new world order that Jesus heads up. They are small victories of the new over the old, or a taste of what is to come when ‘death is swallowed up' by life. (1 Corinthians 15:54) I hope that even in the midst of the Rwandan massacre there were signs of God’s love and mercy despite people's evil actions, perhaps through believers who were there helping the victims.

(Isn't that where we should be, wading into the awful disasters of this world – small and large – and holding out the hope of the new; confronting the power of death with the greater power of life? It could mean offering prayer for a headache or offering relief to a war-torn country.)

With that perspective, perhaps tragedies can look like birth pains – not the end but a sign of the beginning. They should spur us on to invite people to the lasting safety we've found in Jesus.

Does that make any sense?