The Day I Argued with God: A healing #PrayerStory

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about why God heals certain people, and not others. My uncle Don passed away yesterday, and I also found out that a friend from my Bethany days — a lovely, prayerful lady who has been battling brain cancer for several years now — has had her cancer return. When I go for my uncle’s funeral next week, I hope I get a chance to hug her one more time. (Please pray for Joyce.)

It was at Bethany that God began to teach me about the reality of healing, and God’s purpose for it. Jesus healed many people over the course of his ministry … and yet all of them (even Lazarus) eventually died. So what was the point?

When I arrived on campus at Bethany I was still on crutches, recovering from a car accident I’d had the previous January. My left leg had been shattered, as was my pelvis, and a steel pin had been inserted into my leg from my knee to my hip. While I was at Bethany the pin worked its way loose, and began digging into my hip socket. It was incredibly painful to even move, and I was scheduled for surgery. I had to wait a week with that pain (I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it REALLY hurt!)

The day before surgery, a church elder and his wife came to my room on third floor of the dorm, and asked to pray for me. I’d had a bad experience with “faith healers” before (a friend’s pastor embarrassed me in front of a whole room full of people for refusing to throw away my crutches), and so when Mary’s husband told me he believed God wanted to heal me, and to stand up from my bed after he’d prayed for me, I was NOT very cooperative. He persisted, and I told myself, “I’m going to just touch my toe to the floor and scream bloody murder, and they will go away.”

Instead, something clicked in my hip, and I was able to walk without pain. They removed the pin the next day, and on the x-ray you could see how the pin had been carving a hole in my hip bone. No  wonder it hurt. But the pin had slipped back into its original place.

You’d think I’d have been grateful … but instead I got mad at God for trying to change my mind about the reality of healing. He hadn’t healed my sister of her cancer (she’d lost her leg), or my aunt of ALS (she died at 34 years old, leaving several small children behind). I knew LOTS of people who deserved to be healed – and were more desperate for healing – than I had been. But he’d picked me.

It was many years later, as a Catholic, that I began to understand God’s plan. I asked a professor at seminary if he had ever seen someone physically healed through the sacrament of anointing, and he’d had to admit that he hadn’t. “That’s not the primary purpose of the sacrament, Heidi. Remember, every person Jesus healed eventually died. The healing was a sign of something greater God wanted to do in their lives.”

And that was when the pieces began to make sense.  At least for me. And so, years later, when I encountered Fr. Ubald — who had thousands of people flock to him because of his healing gift — he always reminded them that Jesus wanted to heal not just their bodies, but their souls through the power of forgiveness. “Forgiveness makes you free,” he said over and over.

Fr. Ubald, pray for us. And please hug Uncle Don for me.