Moving Beyond Coping... To Healing

There’s coping with a crisis... and then there’s healing it. And there’s a world of difference between the two. Healing is about transformation and renewal. Coping is about making do, staying put… just dealing with it.

Here’s an example. A good friend’s daughter made an award winning documentary about 9/11 called, “New York Says Thank You”. I hope you’ll take the time to watch it, because it documents the process of a huge collective healing. It shows how we can go beyond just dealing with it to healing it. It shows real lives being transformed, lifted out of crisis mode and healed.

As I was watching “New York Says Thank You” it made me think of other examples of the difference between coping and healing. For instance, our national health care system, at the center of such rancorous political debate right now, needs to move beyond the ruinously expensive business of managing or coping with disease to healing it. How can this happen?

Ten years ago at this time, in the wake of the 9/11 disaster, churches were overflowing. Attendance at churches, synagogues and mosques was peaking.

Hollywood and pro sports were on hold.

We all “got religion” so to speak. And healing began immediately. Nobody wanted to linger in the ashes of shock and grief. We immediately rallied as a nation. Our love for each other poured out and into Lower Manhattan. The healing process began immediately… and has continued for over a decade now.

Can we move our health care crisis beyond coping to healing? And can our collective response to 9/11 serve as a model? I think so. A collective, focused, prayerful response has immense power, as we saw in the weeks and years following 9/11. There are ways to move forward and innovations that can take shape as the result of prayer.

An Oct. 14, 2008 editorial in the The Christian Science Monitor told us that “Paradigm-shattering innovation is clearly needed in healthcare reform.” The article, “Keep Choice in Health Care”, offers some valuable insights about moving together, as a nation, beyond coping with our health crisis to healing it.

We know how to move beyond the static state of coping to the dynamic power of healing. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.