When as a child you’re held at shotgun point by the healing power of God, your view of God’s mercy, the effectiveness of prayer, and the reality of faith trembles. And what happens to that faith when the things you believed with such innocence turn out to be a ruse? What happens when childlike faith is not enough? You may begin to compensate for the sickness, may begin to fake wellness in an effort to avoid facing pain, suffering, or disillusionment. (Which is to say nothing of disappointing the hard-believing, well-meaning, faith-wielding adults.) You may dive deeper into the appearance of faith, putting on the airs of holiness. You dive headlong into knowing the ancient stories, memorizing Scripture, or explaining the workings of the world with a religious flourish. These things, in and of themselves, may not be bad, but if they are only the vestiges of false faith?
I know this false faith.
After the faith-healing incident, my parents began attending a small Baptist church that did not believe in charismatic giftings. These Baptists were a temperate bunch and seemed to believe less in the miraculous power of God and more in the practical power of personal holiness. They cautioned against sin, yes, but they also cautioned us against dangerous theologies: speaking in tongues, dreams and visions, physical manifestations of healing. These more mystical expressions of the faith are subject to human whim, we were told, and human whims pave the road to perdition. And so we were instructed in the ways of a “by your own bootstraps” kind of faith.
By your bootstraps, by God. By effort, by God.
In the school of bootstrap theology, children learn straining and striving. They learn a responsible, if not tired, faith. The sin prohibitions promote personal holiness, and personal holiness kept our Sunday best from tarnish, and in turn, it kept us from tarnishing the glory of God. After all, the Christian faith isn’t all about us; it is about God, we were told. And told. And told.
The gifts of God, the mystical ones like healing and speaking in tongues, had, for the most part, ceased. Healing was for man’s glory (perhaps his vanity), while suffering created the patina of brassy saints. Suffering, after all, produces endurance, and endurance produces hope, and hope produces character, and so on and so forth (Rom. 5:3–4).
At seven, I was learning to strive after holiness to the exclusion of healing; even then, I think, I was learning to be tired.
It might be easy to discount this now as whitewashed religion. But I admit there was good hiding behind this conservative religious practice. Our minds were trained toward reason. We were taught the Scriptures passed down from saint to saint. We were supported by parents who wanted nothing more than to keep us safe from a world full of dangers.
But the hope of healing? I was kept safe from that too. I was protected from the disappointment of my own expectations, from a God who might fail my more childish mystical hopes. And so I was never taught the doctrines of healing, whether spiritual or physical. Sure, we gave lip service to the gift. God could heal if he wanted, and so on and so forth. But God, in those days, had chosen to abstain for the most part. Healing and wonders were not part of his normal routine, and many preached that God had ceased dealing in signs and wonders. “When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass,” they said, the perfect referring to the canonized Scripture and the imperfect referring to signs and wonders.
And so we gave God the “if it be your will” way out of miraculous intervention, which seemed a workable solution, a theological counterbalance to stories of healing in the Scriptures and the palpable lack of it in our own bodies. In this, we took some measure of pious pride too. After all, isn’t physical suffering just another way to learn dependence on God?
The absence of a healing theology grew into a monster, though, and it sank its teeth into our religious practices. We were not people of healing. Like our God, we were a stingy sort and held spiritual healing just outside the grasp of sinners. What of mercy? What of leading people into the healing rest of God?
If you are not a people that believes in healing, what framework is there to reconcile a sick world?
In my teenage years, a friend—a simple ray of light, one of the rare beautiful—found herself pregnant. It was, she knew, an imperative that the child be raised under a Christian roof. And so, with no second thoughts, she and the father were engaged and approached the church to choose wedding dates. The church building was available; the preacher was not. I wonder whether the taint of sexual promiscuity was too scarlet a letter.
Unwed pregnancy was a misstep, I inferred, not even God could heal.
These days, some twenty years later, I still see my old friend around town. She did not receive the blessing of our local body in her teenage wandering, nor did she find healing or restoration in dogmatic pragmatism. Did she sense the abiding presence of a near God in her isolated wedding ceremony?
I wonder whether she’s found healing for these certain emotional wounds now. I wonder whether she found another way to wholeness.
Some have the scarlet letter of affliction tattooed on them by their community, and they hope to hide it under long sleeves. Others pin affliction on the vest, wear it like a badge of honor.
In college, I was an intern at a megachurch spectacle outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Among other things, I employed my limited musical talents as a member of the band that led the Wednesday night youth service. One particular Wednesday, in an asthmatic fit, my lungs seized and my fingernails blued. I pushed through the set and then sped to my summer home, where I found relief in my inhaler.
Prayers for healing were not in my wheelhouse—not anymore—and I suppose that in some respects, I didn’t need them to be. In the developed world, why reconcile the spiritual confluence of sickness and healing when science and medicine make easy work of maladies? Why resort to the magic of a voodoo healer when a pill or puff can bring release?
I sat with my pen that night, and in an attempt to explain away my need for healing, I theologized. Instead of asking God for healing, my theological constructs dictated that I treat the sickness as a lesson from God—God, the vindictive teacher. Sometimes sin constricts our spiritual windpipes, I told myself, but when we deal with this sin, we’re allowed to worship with freedom; we’re allowed to worship like breathing. I should be grateful, really, that God gave me this physical reminder that I so needed his grace, and that only by his grace could I worship. And then I turned this existential theologizing into a worship song.
Let me breathe in your Spirit and exhale your praise.
There are things I reckoned ego-centric, things with which a savior should not be bothered. Requests for physical relief, white weddings for jet-black sinners—these were self-centered prayers to a God who promised salvation through suffering, right? At least, I thought so then.
Sometimes I still do.
As I sit in my chair and consider the past, wounds open—the emotional kind. I am sick with misapplied understandings of Jesus. I am sick with doubt. I am sick with nihilism, with fear of confessing my doubts. I am sick with the bottle. I am sick and in need of healing.
This morning, though, for the first time, I see my sickness as an invitation to a new way forward. I’m reading these words from the gospel of Luke: “Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’” (Luke 5:31–32).
I’m sick enough to need a physician. This morning, I will ask for healing for the first time.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, and heal my sick lungs, my sick heart, and my sick son.