by Eric Metaxas
John realized he couldn’t continue. He stopped everything and did something he had never done before. In fact, he never deviated from the plan at all, but he now felt something welling up inside him that he couldn’t ignore. So instead of what was scripted, he simply said, “Folks, you know Michael. Your program says he’s supposed to lead us in song this morning. But he can’t. He’s got a pinched nerve in his neck. It’s causing him a lot of pain. It actually cost him patients on Friday. You know what? Let’s just pray for him right now.”
John asked Michael to come out of his pew and step forward to where John was standing in front of the congregation. John placed his hand on Michael’s “good” shoulder and then prayed spontaneously:
“God, thank you so much for Michael and his servant’s heart. You know what a rough year he’s had with the death of his father. And you know how much pain he’s in right now—inside and out. God, I don’t believe this is your best for him. I don’t believe you like seeing Michael suffer like this. The pain of grief never goes away in an instant, but the pain in his arm could. You could do that. We’d all love it if you would. But if you don’t, continue to make Michael brave and strong—and help us to know how to be better friends and neighbors to Michael and to others around us. I pray all this in Jesus’s name. Amen.”
Michael was visibly moved. John was too. With that, Michael returned to his seat, and they moved back into the planned schedule of the service, which at this point consisted of more worship.
Then, about ten minutes later—right in the middle of one of the songs—the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Michael literally started jumping up and down. Over and over. He then came sprinting to the front, waving his previously “bad” arm all over the place like a wild man.
“He did it, John!” Michael said. “He really did it!”
Michael was never exuberant, but he now actually grabbed the microphone from one of the singers up front and said, “Folks, I don’t know how to explain this, but as I was sitting there during worship just now my arm started feeling really warm and then it felt like it just kind of breathed a sigh of relief. And now look at this!” He waved the arm all over again. The congregation wasn’t at all used to this sort of thing happening on Sunday mornings in their church, but neither were they skeptical that something extraordinary had indeed just happened. They knew Michael well enough to understand this was a bona fide miracle, and they all spontaneously began clapping and shouting.
After things calmed down and Michael went back to his pew, John proceeded to preach his sermon. But how do you follow something like that? Who could think of anything except what had just happened? John now says he probably should have skipped the sermon and just had everyone continue praising and worshiping and then all go home. As far as he was concerned, the miracle of Michael’s arm was all the sermon anyone needed that morning.
Today John and Michael live in different cities, but on those rare occasions when they bump into each other, Michael tells anyone in earshot about “the time John healed my arm.” And every time he says it, John corrects him, saying that it was “the time God healed Michael’s arm and I just happened to be standing there.”
ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING
I met my friend Lucy Schafer in the midnineties through mutual friends at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Lucy was at the time working long hours as an associate producer for a major news program.
It was a gorgeous summer evening about fifteen years ago over dinner that Lucy Schafer told us all this story. In all these years I have never forgotten it.
Lucy grew up in Manhattan, New York City, in a Jewish family on the Upper East Side. They were religiously observant Jews but “culturally assimilated,” as Lucy put it. Her father graduated from Columbia in the early forties and then attended Yale Law. Her mother attended Barnard. Lucy explained that education—specifically Ivy League education—was absolutely essential to her parents’ plans for her, so much so that she said at age five she knew she would not only be attending an Ivy League school for college but that she would go to an Ivy League school for graduate work. Those were the expectations. As it happened, she did, ending up at Dartmouth as an undergraduate and then at Yale Law School in the mideighties.
During her last year of college and into her first year of law school, Lucy started to experience unusual fatigue and would get sick frequently. Then, in the summer after her first year at Yale she began to experience tremendous allergic reactions. Her allergies to typical things like pollen and dogs and cats had already begun to intensify during college, but suddenly now she became tremendously ill and reacted badly to a host of new things: the smell of perfume and shampoo, the smell of pesticides, and auto exhaust. Almost anything with chemicals in it. It got to where even the print on newspapers would make her face swell up. She got so sick that she had to take a medical leave of absence from law school. She had been experiencing extraordinary fatigue and bruising for no apparent reason and although she was already thin, she dropped ten pounds nearly overnight, although she was eating everything she could. Her search for help took her to Massachusetts General, where she saw the head of immunology, and then to Yale Medical School and to many other prestigious hospitals in the Northeast. But for all her persistence, she couldn’t get a good diagnosis, much less any kind of help.
In her desperation, she began speaking to other people who suffered from similar things and eventually heard about an immunologist in San Francisco at UCSF, who was having some success with a few patients. So she booked a ticket to San Francisco and flew there to see him. There was nothing to keep her in the Northeast. She was much too weak to continue her studies and the man she had been dating for seven years and whom she was planning to marry had left her, unable to deal with what she was going through. “I love you,” he said, “but you’re allergic to my life.” The doctor in San Francisco thought he could help Lucy and began treating her. Eventually he and an endocrinologist he was working with came up with a diagnosis. Lucy learned that she had two autoimmune diseases—one that affected her thyroid and the other, her ovaries. These seemed to account for the mysterious bruising and fatigue she had been experiencing. The doctors were able to control the thyroid disease with extremely high doses of thyroid medication. But there was nothing they could do about the autoimmune disease affecting her ovaries. And the allergies continued to get worse.
She found a place to live in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district, on the ocean, hoping that the clean air would help, but her sensitivities to everything only increased. It got to the point that she could tolerate only a handful of foods and could drink only bottled water. To clean herself she could use only a special soap made of kelp. But eventually even the old paint smell in her apartment began to affect her, so she lined the walls with foil. Lucy tried to get work by doing freelance writing, but it was insufficient to pay for her high medical bills, and she went through all of her savings. She was finally reduced to going on food stamps and welfare. She had come a long way from Yale Law School.
But as bad as things were, Lucy did not give up hope. She was absolutely determined to get well, so she kept searching and trying new things. This led her into all manner of “alternative” medical cures. Most were very expensive, and none of them helped. She says that some of them actually made her sicker than before. Lucy tried acupuncture and even alternative “electro” acupuncture. She tried “positive thinking,” homeopathy, and “alternative” homeopathy. She took vitamins intravenously. At one point, she went to the dramatic length of having her blood taken out and treated, in case her problem was caused by a fungal infection. She was desperate to try anything.
But through it all she knew that she must get back to Yale Law School. She was determined to have a real life again, notwithstanding the fact that years had now gone by. But eventually the San Francisco doctor said he had done all he could do. He advised her to move to the desert.
So Lucy moved to the desert in Texas. During this period she actually lived in a tent on an abandoned cattle ranch. The people who owned the place gave her a machete to combat the rattlesnakes. (She never used it. The only time she saw a snake, she turned and ran.) During this time Lucy continued to try every doctor possible and every type of treatment, including a number of whom she now describes as genuine quacks, if there can be such a thing. It was during this time in Texas that Lucy met a woman who had had something similar and who said she had been completely healed of it by God—and not just God, but Jesus. Lucy realized at that point that she had not once in the four years she had been dealing with this met a single soul who had been healed of these things, not by a doctor or by any alternative treatments. The woman came out to visit Lucy and told her story.
As it happened, the woman was herself Jewish and just a few years before had been healed of something very similar to what Lucy had. She explained that at that time she could eat only a few foods. In her desperation for a cure, she had visited a tarot card reader, whom she saw for a time. But eventually even the fortune-teller told her there was nothing she could do for her, and she actually suggested that the woman should go to a church. So she did. The people at the church prayed over her numerous times, and in the course of about a year she was completely healed. When Lucy met her, the woman was completely healthy: in graduate school, working full-time, and engaged to be married.
Lucy says that despite hearing all of this, she was hostile to the woman. She absolutely didn’t want to hear about Jesus. Lucy’s family had been Jewish for many centuries. Her mother’s family could trace its roots all the way back to Aaron. Furthermore, the very idea of Christianity repulsed her. The Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker televangelism scandals were very much in the public eye at that time. The woman realized this and told Lucy that she understood it wasn’t something Lucy was interested in, but if that ever changed, she gave her the phone number of a man who had studied at Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, who had a degree in Old Testament studies, and who she thought would be able to help. Lucy didn’t throw away the number, but neither was she expecting to call it. But her encounter with the woman made her willing at least to think more about God. In her desperation she began reading the Bible. In her own way, she had prayed a number of times over the years for healing and was somewhat angry at God for not doing so.
Over the course of the next few years, Lucy met six or seven other people who said they had been healed by Jesus of something similar to what she had. She said she got to a point where she couldn’t ignore the evidence. It was startling. Almost no one she had met with this problem—and she had met a tremendous number—had been completely healed by a doctor or an alternative medicine practitioner of any kind. But six or seven people claimed to have been healed of it by Jesus. This thought haunted her, so at some point she called the man whose number she had. The number still reached him. After speaking with him she agreed to study the Bible with him over the phone, although getting to a phone from her remote location was itself a great difficulty. But over the course of the next two years she studied the Masoretic text of the Old Testament. She read little of the New Testament, but she surprised herself by eventually coming to believe that it was indeed quite possible—probable—that Jesus was the Messiah to the Jews. But she knew she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She was adamantly opposed to “accepting him” or “receiving him,” or whatever it was Christians would say she should do.
During these years Lucy’s health continued to deteriorate. She was now living in a foil-lined trailer in the Arizona desert. Her illness and sensitivities had become so severe that even if someone who had been near pesticides or other things came onto her land she would have a reaction. By necessity she therefore lived in almost total isolation from other people. But when the motor in the well on her property broke, she had to have someone come out to fix it. So a man came, but when he did the job he resealed the stainless-steel pipes with “pipe dope,” which contains trace amounts of fungicide. Lucy didn’t know this, but when she showered, she got extremely sick, much sicker than she had been up to that time. “Could it get worse?” she wondered. Now that water itself was making her ill, she began to wonder whether she was going to survive. She simply couldn’t imagine what might be next.
One day the effects of the water in the shower caused Lucy to feel so ill that she left the trailer with the shower running. The trailer flooded. It remained flooded long enough that it became ruined and uninhabitable, so she had to find another place to live. She had just recently met a woman who was selling a similar kind of trailer—in which she had herself recovered from a similar illness—so Lucy got in her foil-lined Toyota pickup and drove out to visit her.
It turned out that the trailer wasn’t adequate for what Lucy needed, but in the course of conversation with the woman the woman told her that she had been healed of essentially the same disease as Lucy. She said Christ had healed her, through prayers for “healing and deliverance.” She then asked Lucy whether Lucy realized that the illness was “demonic.” Lucy says that any time in the six years previous she wouldn’t have been able to hear this or take it at all seriously, but she had dealt with so many quack doctors and had considered so many bizarre alternative paths to healing that at this point it didn’t sound so strange. It seemed less strange than having the irises of her eyes “read” to determine which vitamins she needed to take or having her blood removed and treated, as she had done. She was at this point utterly desperate and open to hearing anything. She was even open to having this woman pray for her.
After the day she heard this woman’s story, Lucy relented and began to read the New Testament. It was then, she said, that the Bible became alive for her. It wasn’t just a text to be dissected. And she began to believe that God really could heal. Then, with some trepidation, she couldn’t remember precisely when, Lucy said, “Okay, God, if Jesus is the Messiah to the Jews, then I accept him. If not, please forgive me.”
The woman and her husband and some others from a local church began to pray for Lucy, and there was over time undoubtedly a positive change, albeit a very slight one. Lucy said it was the first time in six and a half years that things had improved at all. But that little bit was enough to encourage them, and they continued to meet and pray for the next few months. Lucy’s health improved, but she still had a long way to go.
The woman who had been healed recommended Lucy pray with a woman who was an expert in praying for healing and deliverance. Lucy was open to this too, so the woman came and prayed with Lucy. They prayed together the whole day. Whatever was happening in Lucy’s heart during this time is impossible to say, but despite the fact that nothing happened that first day, they prayed another full day and then another. Finally, at the end of the five days of prayer, something happened. It was clear to both of them that something was different. “I felt lighter and there was enormous peace,” Lucy said. “The woman I was praying with confirmed it. She said, ‘It’s over,’ and I said, ‘I know.’”
There was no question about it: Lucy was healed. The whole thing was, of course, amazing and dramatic. Lucy’s life changed utterly. She found that she could do anything she liked. She could take showers. She could go to any restaurant she liked. She could wear makeup. For years she had worn only prewashed cotton clothing and used only kelp-based soap, and now she could go to any store to buy clothing, regular soap, and food. It was a complete turnaround from what she had experienced before.
During all of these years, Lucy was on massive amounts of thyroid medicine and other drugs, including transfer factor and intravenous immunoglobulins, to try to stimulate her immune system. Now that she was better she decided she wanted to go off all these medications. She called one of her doctors in San Francisco who had been prescribing them and explained to him that she had been healed. When he asked how that had happened, she told him flatly that people had prayed for her. “Well, prayer
works,” he said, as though it were the most normal thing. Lucy was stunned to hear him say that.
Another of Lucy’s doctors explained that going off these medicines, in particular the large doses of hormones that she was taking, would put her body through terrible withdrawals, so if she really was serious about going off them she would need to exercise. He also cautioned that he thought Lucy would fall ill again without the medication. Lucy decided she would swim while going off the medication. At first she was too weak to swim a single lap in a pool. But within three months she was swimming a mile a day. By then she was completely off the medication and as healthy as she had ever been in her life. In the meantime she had begun wondering what she would do next. Her credits at Yale had by now expired, so she would have had to reapply for admission there and start all over at the beginning. The man she had been planning to marry had himself gotten married and now had children, and because of the expenses from her medications she was now in deep debt. There was simply nothing for her to go back to.
So one day she asked God what she should do. She got a clear sense as she was praying that she should get her résumé together, move to Washington, DC, and get a job there. She had never heard from God in any way before, but the urging to do this that day was strong and clear. A friend asked her what kind of job she thought she would like to do. During this period Lucy had gotten into the habit of watching nightly news programs, and she liked them so much she had gotten practically addicted to them. She would have loved to work for a news program. And that’s just what happened; it was the beginning of her career in network news. That was twenty-three years ago.
GRANDFATHER IS HEALED
My friends Jeff and Christine live on Long Island, New York, where they run a technology consulting business. Both are Chinese, and Christine came to this country from Taiwan. She is a fifth-generation Christian, which is something extraordinarily rare for someone of Asian descent.
