One Breath At A Time

If you’ve read the Healing School blog before, you may have wondered about my personal experiences with healing. My stories reflect the variety of ways in which God heals us, one breath at a time.

I remember one night spent at my Grandma’s, an old farmhouse in eastern Georgia
similar to this one,

surrounded by fields and red dirt roads. Cracks let in windblown dust, and my Grandma’s asthma did not allow her energy to keep the place as clean as I’m sure she would have liked. Or perhaps it was the feather pillow that made it difficult for me to breathe. I awoke in the night, gasping, coughing, unable to draw air deeply into my lungs. My mother prayed. Every parent will recognize the fear that tried to come upon us that night, particularly since my mother had watched her own mother fight this battle. I do not remember how long the attack lasted, or how much sleep anyone got, but it passed. I was nearly six years old.

I missed about half my first and second grade school days due to illness – pneumonia, whooping cough, chronic bronchitis. At one point my father took me to the doctor for an injection before school every morning. I hated baring my derriere for those shots. In school I got a reputation as a teacher’s pet - bright, compliant, able to converse with adults and answer questions by our family’s Japan booth at church missions conferences. But around my peers – when I was there - I was hopelessly shy, uncoordinated, the last one picked for sports teams. If I was up to bat, or if a boy spoke to me, I would go into paralysis.

“Just try to hit the ball,” they would yell in frustration as I stood, frozen, while the slow pitches drifted over home plate like snowflakes, one after another.

Inside I would think, “I am trying. This is me, trying. I just can’t make my arms move.”

In other games, I could run fast enough, or play dodgeball, but too much effort and I would begin to wheeze. Not at all the healthy, strong childhood God intended.

And then my family met two septuagenarians, God’s healing ambassadors to me.

Friends told us about Dr. Denmark, a Georgia legend and quite possibly the world’s oldest pediatrician. Today she is 108 and semi-retired but still gives phone consultations from home. When I was seven, she was treating second and third-generation patients.

She made no appointments and had no receptionist, just saw patients in the order of arrival. While waiting our turn, I watched squirrels play in the rhododendrons. Once I saw her husband walking in the driveway of their home next door, and wondered what it was like for him, being married to the awe-inspiring Dr. Denmark. I remember the cool dry touch of her hand, the grey hair in a bun above her stark white labcoat, her no-nonsense manner.

“Forget the injections,” she told my parents. “Give her hamburger and black-eyed peas for breakfast.” Although they thankfully did not follow that specific regimen, they took her advice and focused on wellness, strengthening my body’s immunity with common sense nutrition and exercise instead of treating me like the invalid I had very nearly become. Riding a bike up and down our driveway and climbing our magnolia tree became my daily pleasures.

“Never let anyone tell this child she’s sick,” Dr. Denmark said, out of my hearing. My mother now tells me that guests would visit our home, ask me how I felt, and I would wheeze, “I – feel – fine.” And over time, I did.

Gradually, I became a normal child, able to attend school every day with only an occasional illness. In third grade, I made my first real friend at that school, defined as one who would not beg me to reveal the name of the boy I liked, then immediately write it in the fogged-up bus window for all to see. Life became good.

Dr. Leila Denmark wrote a book, Every Child Deserves a Chance, and she helped give me mine. Around the same time, God used a second septuagenarian to minister healing to me. I’ve asked my mother to tell you that story in her own words, someday soon.

Rediscovering Our Awesome God

I have invited several people to Guest Post here from time to time. I am delighted to share the following from Pastor Denny, with whom I’ve enjoyed dialoguing on the topic of healing.

After discovering the Healing School Blog and getting involved with several of the discussions it renewed in me the desire to search once again for the truth about something I once had no doubt about, and that was God’s ability and desire to heal us of our afflictions. As a new believer with little to no knowledge of the bible I had enough faith to pray and fast for the healing of a little boy who would eventually become my son. His mother and I had only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks when she invited me to dinner one evening and during preparation her 1 ½ year old son Nathan was burned after tipping a pitcher of scalding water onto himself due to his curiosity. I showed up for dinner only to be told what happened and went to the hospital to see how he was doing. There I learned that he had 3rd degree burns on his upper arm and was fighting a high fever. I went home and started to fast and pray for three days I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing but on the third day when I was planning to break my fast his fever left him and he began to improve immediately. That simple act did more to prove to me there was a God than any preaching I had heard up to that time and set in motion a practice of praying over my children anytime an illness came upon them and God was always faithful. Not that we didn’t use doctors and medicine but that I always turned to God first for he is the healer.

I don’t know what happened in the years that followed but somehow I just abandoned the habit of praying to God for healing. I think maybe I got too sophisticated in my thinking and turned more to theology and learning instead of knowing and trusting. Also, I think I was turned away by some of the so called faith healers and charlatans who give Christianity a bad name with their questionable practices. But, that is not a good excuse for ignoring a fundamental aspect of our faith and the nature of our God and his promises to us his children. I have for some time believed that God in creating us put within our bodies the ability to take care of itself or in other words healing potential. The way our bodies work and regulate themselves is a miracle in itself and any doctor with any integrity will tell you he can do nothing to cause healing, he can only do the labor involved in patch and repair but he cannot make the body heal. That is something God designed in us from the beginning. I believe that many other ancient cultures discovered this long before the western world. The Chinese had a unique understanding of the human body and how to manipulate it to heal. Having no knowledge of the one true God they made many of their own assumptions in the spiritual sense but I think they saw God’s handy work in action better than the west with it’s science and need for human explanation. We in the west and modern society attribute and lot of thanks to God for our medical care and health but our trust is in science and its ability to come up with the next cure rather than God who is the source of all cures.

Now I am involved in ministry that involves not only the need for God’s power for healing but for deliverance as well. In Jesus ministry these two divine actions always worked in conjunction with one another to reveal the power of God to a lost and dying world. Maybe that is why the Church struggles so much with being relevant to our world today, we don’t bring them anything more than what they are already used to, we don’t bring them the awesome power of the almighty God; The God who sets the captives free.