“How Dumb Can You Be and Still Breathe?”
Fall 2016
After three long days, I’d returned home from my bicycle trek purged of my self-pity and touched by what I like to call Connie’s “Italian compassion”: “I’m keeping you alive so I can deal with you later.”
That night at dinner Connie declared, “I’ve been listening to this guy on the radio and I love his teaching. His church is fifty-eight miles away and I’m going on Sunday. You can come if you want.”
I wanted.
So that Sunday we piled into the car in the predawn darkness and drove an hour to the church of a man named Jack Hibbs, whose message that day was not only brilliant but guided me to this powerful, very appropriate scripture:
Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you. . . . And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. (Eph. 4:31–32)
Several months later, our doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon. It was a friend we had not seen for years: Cha Cha Sandoval-McMahon, a Hollywood stuntwoman and comedian whose daughter had gone to preschool and then high school with our daughter, Prima. I thought it odd that she would just show up without calling. I soon understood why.
Cha Cha had been attending Jack Hibbs’s Calvary Chapel and heard through the grapevine that we were now regular attendees. She had also fought cancer. Worse still, in the middle of her treatments, Cha Cha’s husband got sick and died. It was a heartbreaking story.
This unlikely reunion soon evolved into frequent Sunday-morning carpools to Calvary Chapel (Connie, me, and Cha Cha) and regular after-church cups of coffee where we’d talk about life and the Word and, not infrequently, our cancer journeys. One of those Sundays, after a particularly engaging conversation, Cha Cha handed us a CD.
“Hey, I think you two should listen to this guy’s teaching. His accent is a little wonky, but if you can get past that, there is some amazing teaching on here.”
Oh, terrific, another CD-website-book-DVD-meditation technique-raw-food-cancer-fighting strategy, I thought. I may have also said that out loud, which earned me a well-deserved eye roll from Connie.
Nonetheless, on the hour-long drive home, Connie shoved the CD into the car stereo. Cha Cha was right. The voice coming out of the speakers belonged to a preacher named Andrew Wommack and was reminiscent of TV’s Gomer Pyle dialed up to 11. Wommack was telling me that I had been praying incorrectly for sixty years. He was telling me there was A Better Way to Pray—the title on the CD.
With Connie behind the wheel, I lean my head against the side window for a nap. Then, half-awake, I hear this: “How dumb can you be and still breathe?”
What did he say?
“Why don’t you try using your head for more than a hat rack!”
My uncle Jake was a pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but he’d never preached like this.
Andrew Wommack says he’s “killing sacred cows,” the ones many churches have created. He sounds frustrated—even angry. He has my attention, mostly because he’s quirky and rebellious and because what he is saying is starting to make a lot of sense, eighteen months removed from my initial diagnosis and just recently on the other side of a personal and spiritual crisis.
If I bottom-line what I am hearing, it is essentially this: Wrong teaching, specifically religious doctrine, makes God’s Word ineffective. Freeing ourselves from religious traditions will reveal the simplicity of God’s Word and get me healed.
Wommack is using dozens of examples from Scripture to support this message of divine healing. He’s explaining how Jesus gave us full authority over sickness and pain. We already have it, Wommack says. We don’t have to beg God for it. I reach to raise the volume. Connie smiles. Wommack’s next salvo is like plutonium. It’s Mark 11:23. Wommack recites it slowly: “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.”
Boom. The words detonate inside me. He speaks the next verse: “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them” (v. 24).
“Get this,” Wommack says, “and you get everything.”
To someone who had been begging God for a healing, these words were, literally and figuratively, a revelation.
From the time I was a child, growing up in the Westbury Methodist Church, I was always taught that “God is a good God” but that He also acts in mysterious ways. When a young child would die, our pastor would often say that “it was God’s plan to take this child” and “God could have healed her if He wanted. But we have to accept God’s will.” We would hear that oft-used phrase “God won’t give you anything you cannot handle” (that’s not in the Bible, by the way), and naturally figure that whatever hardship we were facing was there for a reason. It was somehow a test that God had put before us.
I was also taught that the only way to get God to do something for you was by bombarding Him with prayer. I had done that a lot, in fact, throughout my life. There were the desperate nights in my attic bedroom as a boy, begging Him to intercede on behalf of my sisters as my dad directed his ire at them. There were the long nights pleading from my pup tent after I had been thrown out of school. That’s certainly how I approached my cancer, even as a sixty-three-year-old man, beseeching God from my hospital bed for deliverance from this deadly disease that I was sure He’d allowed to happen to teach me perseverance.
Not knowing what God had on His mind, and recalling plenty of reasons why He had cause to teach me a lesson, manifested terror in me. I found this spiritual healing lottery to be chilling. But as we drove home from Jack Hibbs’s church, I was becoming convinced that prayer is not trying to twist God’s arm to make Him do something. It is becoming settled in my heart that God wants me healthy and well. That He wants me to prosper in all things. And that it has always been this way. That’s why Jesus went to the cross. He took our sins. He took our sicknesses.
“By whose stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).