“The good physician treats the disease: the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” – William Osler, co-founding professor of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
In Dr. Cloud’s seminar, Restoring Your Brokenness, he reminds us that we are made in the image of God. Say this out loud, “I have the image of God in me!” If I have His image, that means my “design” is perfect. Yet, when sin entered the world, our design started to malfunction. Dr. Cloud equates this to a computer. A computer starts with a perfect design, but if something is wrong with the design, it begins to have problems. To fix the problem, we often need to call in an expert to repair what went wrong.
Too often we focus on our physical bodies and the way our fallen world causes us to have malfunctioning bodies, but this also affects our mental world. When we suffer symptoms such as depression, sadness, anxiety, etc., the problem lies in the reality that our system is somehow experiencing a malfunction. To experience healing, we need to begin fixing our equipment. We need to start taking steps back toward the design that is in us, which is the image of God.