My immune system took a hit after my last pregnancy two years ago. While I used to be known for never getting sick, now any time a virus so much as flutters by me in the grocery store, I seem to catch it and give it safe harbor in my lungs.
As I type this, I am recovering from yet another round of pneumonia, and the rest of my family is sick, too. Gnarly fevers, violent coughs, the whole gamut. My husband and I spent the entirety of last night passing our poor, sweaty toddler back and forth as we independently processed chills and sweats of our own. Memories are made of this, right? I coached myself into gratitude that I wasn’t living as a pioneer on the Oregon Trail during this ordeal. I’d probably be a gonner. Plus they had no Prednisone. Or box fans. Or Netflix.
Regardless, I’m gradually getting a bit better at asking for help when I need it, and between coughing so hard I peed my pants on the exam table at the Urgent Care and trying to tend to my sick babies who also needed me, I realized I could use some prayer. So I reached out to my Facebook peeps, and I asked for it.
As a Christian, I think God is in control of all, including our bodies. He designed us. He knows what we need. He’s the Master Physician. And I think remembering to invite Him into the equation whenever we struggle with things great or small is always the right decision. “Cast all your cares upon Him because He cares for you.” That’s what my Bible tells me, and I believe it’s true.
Well Facebook didn’t disappoint. Lots of people volunteered to pray, and I’m grateful. But as is generally the case on my posts, regardless of how benign I may imagine them to be, something of a debate broke out, this time between my charismatic Christian friends and my Reformed Christian friends. The entire debate so perfectly encapsulated my own internal wrestling match with the concept of supernatural healing.
My charismatic friends leaned toward the “name it and claim it” approach. Basically, “God wants to heal you. It says so in the Bible. Believe it, and it will come to pass, even immediately if your faith is strong enough,” they say. The belief is that the gifts of healing we saw the disciples exercising are freely available to us today, but our culture has so completely deadened our collective sensitivity to the supernatural that they largely lie dormant in a society that doesn’t even recognize they exist.
My Reformed friends found this to be dangerous theology that can inadvertently cause spiritual damage to people who pray for healing but remain sick. “God is not a genie in a bottle or a miracle vending machine you can just call on when you want a pain-free existence,” they argue. “There are countless faithful believers out there who remain unhealed this side of heaven, and it’s cruel to insist their continued infirmity suggests a deficiency of faith.”
I have spent a great deal of my adult life wrestling between the extremities of these two beliefs.
As I’ve written before, I was raised frozen chosen. Growing up, our prayers for peoples’ healing always felt so distant, anemic, and austere. “Father, if it be your will, would you please heal Susan of her bone cancer?” It felt like lofting up a hail Mary and hoping God would condescend to maybe prioritize not letting Susan die. It was completely beyond our control, and we never imagined for even a split second that we could personally function as conduits of healing beyond the words our mouths uttered in desperation. There was something in my spirit that always told me there was more than this, that I was missing out on something active, something tangible, something more powerful and less passive.
I compare the way we prayed back then to the way I’ve seen some dynamite charismatic believers pray in my current church circles, and there’s a world of difference between the two. They lay hands on people. They actively expect that their prayers will be answered in the here and now. And guys, I’ve seen some truly wild things. I’ve seen people cured of hardcore cancer after some of these prayer sessions. I’ve seen completely infertile women go on to mystify their doctors and bear children. I’ve seen demonic entities leaving peoples’ bodies. I don’t care how much of a lunatic this makes me sound. I know what I’ve seen. So I know that supernatural healing is real and that God operates in it.
And I know that it does follow faith. Faith is a magnet for the miraculous. There’s a reason some of the craziest, most mind blowing miracles seem to take place in countries like Africa where the active existence of the spiritual realm in just common knowledge and unbelief can’t get in the way of the blessing. I’m reminded of the passage in Scripture that says Jesus Himself was unable to complete many miracles in His hometown because of the lack of faith, so it stands to reason that a culture that actively wars against this belief is going to be a culture where fewer miracles happen.
But my problem has never been an unbelief that God can heal people. My struggle has been to believe that He will. Because sometimes He does, and sometimes He doesn’t, and there’s not always any obvious rhyme or reason as to why He heals the people He does while others have to struggle. As I type this, I’m reminded of a Facebook friend whose precious little girl is suffering from a brain tumor with a less than 1% survival rate. Can God heal her? God can do anything. But what if He doesn’t? I stand firmly with my Reformed friends on the side of, “Don’t you dare presume to tell these amazing parents that their problem is an absence of faith if their little girl dies.”
There can be a dangerous kind of denialism in some of the charismatic thinking in these spaces. I remember when a college friend was diagnosed with testicular cancer. “I’m just so excited about this, Kaeley,” he bluffed. “I can’t wait to see how God uses it.”
I promise I’m not trying to be a judgmental wench, but I called BS. He was NOT excited. No man is excited by the prospect of losing one of his family jewels. This is not a thing. What I was watching my friend do was hyper-spiritualize his language in a way that registered as completely false because he had been trained that a toxic degree of positivity and denialism was the route to healing—like he believed that candidly naming the existence of the problem was somehow giving it permission to linger or something. It’s just super wonky theology that doesn’t lead anywhere good, in my opinion.
In the Bible, we don’t see sick people presenting before Jesus and behaving that way. Instead, we see them honestly naming the agony of their condition and begging for His touch. Think about the woman who was bleeding for for fully 18 years. Her life pre-Jesus was miserable, and she said so. She didn’t put on a front as a way to trick Jesus into responding to her. It was her desperation, not her bravado that pulled on His power.
After my son Tristan was diagnosed with epilepsy and autism, I prayed long and hard for a cure. I went to prayer session after prayer session, eager to repent and confess of whatever lingering sin I was holding onto that might possibly block my miracle. Nothing was off limits. I drove myself a bit crazy conducting my own witch hunt against myself. But after enough prayer sessions, it did begin to dawn on me that sometimes God does use the struggle to teach us things we might not otherwise learn. Sometimes it’s the process and the pleading and the grappling with the goodness of the Lord in the midst of difficult circumstances that molds us into the people we need to be. Sometimes we need to go through the fire to emerge as the people we’re meant to become. Sometimes God gives us instant miracles, and other times, He walks us down longer roads. Neither one is more holy than the other. And Tristan is exactly the person God created Him to be, regardless of, actually probably because of, his struggles.
And listen, I don’t want this to become a cop-out that leaves me permanently on the shoreline when I need to be stepping out on the waves of faith. I know people who land here, too, and it’s not a good thing. Their entire lives become defined by their illnesses to the degree that they wouldn’t actually accept a cure if one became available. They get irritated when people suggest any remedies. They refuse to let people pray for them. “Nope. This is just what God has for us.” I think that’s a garbage response, too. I’m not in the habit of rejecting prayer when it’s offered. Prayer moves both the heart and hand of God. What harm could it do to let someone pray?
There’s a reason Jesus asked the crippled man if He wanted to be made ell before He healed him. Health comes with responsibility. It means you have to abandon your identity as an invalid and rediscover your purpose. Some people would much rather slay hope, and that’s not good either. One thing I know for darn sure is that if you don’t believe God will heal you miraculously, He probably won’t. “You have not, because you ask not,” is the verse that comes immediately to mind.
Ten times out of ten, I want to err on the side of believing in God for the audacious and the impossible. That’s the very definition of faith. I want to land there whenever I can. I want to lay hands on the sick and believe that God will use me as a conduit of His healing. But even if I pray and nothing visible happens and no visible change is made, no prayer is wasted, and we have no idea what ground we’ve taken in the heavenlies when we step out on faith. Prayer is always a good idea. Faith is, too.
But in the process, I also think it’s important to caution against inadvertently shaming or blaming people who aren’t miraculously healed as a result of our prayers. It doesn’t automatically mean there’s some sin issue in play or that they’ve done anything wrong, and this cannot be overstated. God moves in a mysterious way. Our job is to show up and create an atmosphere that ushers in His presence, not to control the way He works or judge those whose road is the process instead of the instafix.
Our prayers are never wasted, but neither is our suffering. It’s all valuable in God’s economy. And it’s okay to wrestle with the uncertainty of all of this. We don’t have to pretend we’ve got it all figured out. We just have to trust ourselves to the goodness of the One who does.
Kaeley, those who would say someone's lack of faith is why they aren't healed are being legalistic. It's impossible for us to "earn" God's mercy - it's only freely given. We live in a fallen world and we shouldn't be surprised when evil happens. And, what you said is right on, "Sometimes it’s the process and the pleading and the grappling with the goodness of the Lord in the midst of difficult circumstances that molds us into the people we need to be." God's not a giant slot machine with which we can get lucky and win a jackpot if we just play enough nickels. He is in control, not us...
P.S. Get well soon!
Yes! That's it exactly.