Every morning, I slink out of bed before five o’clock and trudge through the thick hallway carpet. This morning, I walked past the boys’ rooms, all four of them bundles of potential energy.
Quiet in this house is a miracle, so I make the most of it. I settle into my reading chair, then venture into the cave of the soul. This is the inner sanctuary, the place meant for sober quiet. I’ve allowed others here, though, and this morning, I hear a faint murmur, a rustling, a whisper. There are ghosts in the cave, versions of me I’d rather drown than face, and they prod me with their accusations. But into the pain my therapist says I must go, and so I do.
In the stillness, I gather my thoughts, ask God to show me the genesis of my pain. Where did I lose faith in an abiding God? What is the source of my despair over Titus’s sickness?
I remember the sounds of summer cicadas, their songs rising like a crescendo in the evening. These are the sounds of my childhood, the first songs I remember hearing when we moved from Texas to Arkansas. In the Ozark summer, the cicadas chirp at near deafening decibels; they are the chorus that sings the sun to sleep.
The summer before my seventh birthday, we left behind the Texas mesquite groves, the cattleman’s field, and the oversized mud puddle, and our family made our way north and into the foothills of the Ozark mountains. My father had been transferred to work in the home office of a transportation company, and so it was Arkansas or bust.
These mountains, however, were not kind to my asthma. My attacks worsened in the less arid climate, and I remember the fits were like choking, like breathing through a pinched straw. We found a country doctor, a good man who would open the office at midnight to administer a breathing treatment or an adrenalin shot, but the constant attacks drove my parents to desperation. And as any parent knows, desperation will drive you to search for miracles.
In Texas, we’d attended a charismatic Baptist church that believed in signs and wonders. My parents had come to faith from their own stolid traditions—my mother having been raised Episcopalian and my father in the Church of Christ—and they rejected the notion that God could not perform miracles. And so, on a Tuesday night in the sweltering Arkansas heat, my mother and father decided it might be a good idea to take me to see a charismatic faith healer who was appearing at a local Assembly of God church.
The road to the church meeting was a country road, and we drove past grazing pastures and junkyards, windows down so as to hear the cicada songs. I do not recall whether my parents spoke or whether the radio played, but I remember the heat and the dust and the sense that we were driving toward something weighty.
We pulled into the gravel parking lot of the massive sanctuary, its steep roof like a circus big-top tent. Cars filled the lot, and the people were all abuzz, entering the sanctuary like bees into an anointed hive. We were there, the whole lot of us, to see a globe-trotting faith healer whose weapons of warfare were a ten-pound Bible, a gallon jug of olive oil, and an ensemble of hallelujah singers dressed in blue choir robes trimmed in gold.
A stringy first grader, I watched as the faith healer whipped the crowd into a frenzy of the not-for-Sunday sort. He might have preached about healing by the stripes of Jesus, or he may have spun his healing theology from the story of the hemorrhaging woman who touched Jesus’ garment hem. I don’t recall. But the Tuesday night crowd was lapping it up, ready to jump into any Pool of Bethesda they could find.
As the congregants filled the blessing lines, I asked my mother whether it was time. “Not yet, honey,” she said. “Let’s wait until the service is over.” I obliged her because I didn’t feel sick in the moment. I was breathing mighty fine. After all, didn’t Mom and Dad always make it right? Didn’t they always bring healing of a different sort, what with the inhalers and pills and the occasional breathing treatment? The way I saw it, they had this healing bit covered, but if this faith healer could deliver a more permanent solution, I was game.
We endured the prayers over the crippled, lame, blind, and deaf until the last congregant slipped down the aisle and toward the exit, his oil-smeared forehead gleaming under the house lights. We went forward, and there we stood before the lanky evangelist, tall in his gray suit. He asked what type of healing I’d come for. I said that I wanted rid of my asthma. He smiled, showing too many porcelain-white teeth, laughed, and said that nothing is too big for Jesus.
“With enough faith, all things are possible.”
He marked my forehead with an olive oil cross and prayed that my lungs would open, claimed my healing by the precious blood. “We rejoice in this boy’s healing even now. Amen,” he said.
The evangelist stooped and looked into my eyes. Did I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, he asked? I told him, “I think so,” but that was a lie, the kind a kid tells grown-ups who are doing the best they know how. The truth was I didn’t feel anything. There was no tingling, no warmth of healing, no rush of Holy Spirit ecstasy. I knew nothing had changed, and in that moment, with the weight of adult hopes and expectations hanging on the sufficiency of childlike faith, an exchange took place. I bartered my mustard seed of childhood faith for the bitter seed of doubt.
This seed grew in shadow for years. Even after the healing service, there were asthma attacks so severe that I was taken to the emergency room. There were adrenalin shots and breathing treatments. There were years of steroids. I was never healed.
The continuing sickness suffocated my faith. The sickness grew to mock me. Oh death, where is your sting?
Yesterday I rode my bike in the breaking weather of the turning fall. The air was cool, and as I rode by the mucky pond with the solitary cypress tree, allergens pricked my lungs like a hundred needles. My bronchial passages began closing; the shrieking wheeze set in. A common bike ride served as a reminder: I have never been healed. Since the earliest days of my childhood, my faith has never been good enough—not really.
So I reach for things other than faith: the medicine; science and surety.
On my bike ride, I reached for the inhaler in the back pocket of my cycling shirt, pressed the canister and breathed deep. Science is my healer. It opens my air passages and allows my legs to pump harder, faster. Science can be a savior. Yes, that’s it.
My hope has been built on nothing less than these kinds of modern marvels. I do not believe in a healing, present God. It is no wonder, then, that I have little faith for Titus outside of modern medicine.
Oh death, where is your sting?
In my memory, the sting is crouching behind my lingering doubts, behind the undoing of a childlike faith. I can hear the faith-healer preacher all these years later in the interior soul-spaces. Our histories never really evaporate, do they? He is here in the cave that is supposed to be my refuge, charcoal suit camouflaging him against the blackness. He is a floating head, a disembodied smile. He spits prooftexts at me like arrows in the dark.
“Faith like a child, like a mustard seed,” he says. He smiles, anoints my head. Not with oil. Seeing with adult eyes, I know better. He anoints me with fire-hot doubt that sears my forehead like a branding iron. I can feel his thumb pushing into the forehead of my memory. He is leaving his mark, and I know it.
I consider him and am again a stick-thin child, standing gape mouthed and wide eyed. There is the preacher, kneeling and looking into my eyes. He sighs and, hand on my shoulder, pronounces, “Faith like a child? Pretend if you will, but you’ve never had it. You’ve always been marked by the doubts of a man.”
These are voices that haunt from my history. These are the voices on a vicious, repetitious loop.
Oh death, where is your sting?
The sting is here, in the cave of my own soul, and because I’ve never confronted it, it has been bleeding my faith dry. My disbelief in a present healer did not start with Titus. It has been lurking here for years, hidden behind my various and sundry coping mechanisms, behind my adult rationalizations, dependence upon science, and various theological constructs. Yes, healing is both miraculous and rare. So rare that I’ve never seen it. And if God is no longer a present healer, is he present at all? Has he ever been?
Is God with us?
If faith starts as a mustard seed, maybe doubt does too.
Perhaps you know the feeling of fraudulent faith, of adult disbelief? Perhaps it is rooted in your childhood too?
The son who was molested; the daughter who lost her daddy when she was just a girl; the wife whose husband is a disengaged, overachieving, road warrior of a salesman; the husband whose wife has been in an affair for all these years. There are some who have been used and discarded by the church, others who do not believe their worth, their beauty, that they are loved—much less liked—by God. There are those who have been beaten, those who are poor, those who are ever and always on the lesser side of advantage.
Anyone who’s been one of these, who’s felt the sting of unanswered prayer, shares the same searing question.
Where did our God go?
I have found God ineffective in answering healing prayers—or rather unwilling to remove disease from me or my family, anyway. Why hasn’t God healed my asthma? Why won’t he heal Titus? These questions are a real and present thorn in my flesh, the thorn that gives rise to the sting of doubt. The sting brings the fire of nerves unraveling, leads me to believe that I am a fraud. I proclaim the power of a risen Jesus while harboring private doubts about the very same power. These fired-up nerves beg for relief that no amount of gin could ever quench. I could try other coping mechanisms, I suppose: women, work, the pursuit of money or power, pornography, exercise, eating too little, eating too much, accolades and applause and Instagram likes. There are too many coping mechanisms to list. You know this. Right?
The bottle is not the thing. The addiction is not the thing. The pain is the thing.
The jig is up. My cover-up is threadbare. I can hide no longer. Not even from myself.
So, dear God, let’s begin the process of removing the thorns of unbelief. Let’s begin the process of dismantling every coping mechanism, of setting them out in the rain to rust.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. I do believe. Help my unbelief.