Harmony of Grace

This past weekend I had the most incredible experience. But let me start at the beginning... A couple of months ago, my friend and mentor since 2007, Darrel Hofland, told me that he was planning on moving to the UK in October this year. I knew that we would need to plan a meet-up before he left as it might be a while before we had the opportunity to see each other again. Darrel has been living in Somerset West so I decided to try and visit him there. I tried to book tickets to fly there from Pietermaritzburg, but none of our available weekends linked up. We then found out that we would both be in Knysna at the same time in July and planned to meet-up there. Unfortunately, my ouma passed away that week and we had to postpone our trip. He told me that he would be coming to Durban the week before he left for the UK which is closer to us, but I had already fully booked myself and had no way to get down to Durbs in time. We realized that we only had one last chance to meet u...

Image Source:  Rawpixel In Mark 7, we encounter a strange story of Jesus healing a deaf man with a speech impediment. You can read the full story in Mark 7:31-37, but here is a brief summary: A deaf and mute man is brought to Jesus for healing. Jesus first takes this man aside in private, away from the crowd, and then proceeds to stick his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. Strange right? Jesus then looks up to heaven and with a big sigh, says to the man: “Ephphatha,” which means “be opened” and the man’s eyes were opened and he began to speak plainly. One could argue that if Jesus indeed had the ability to heal the sick, surely he could have just clicked his fingers and it would have been done? So why then do we read countless stories in scripture of Jesus healing people in a variety of different ways? Here are a couple of other examples where Jesus uniquely healed people: In Mark 1, Jesus shouts at a man to drive out an impure s...