This brings tears to my eyes, Jody.

Thank you for sharing it with us all ...

One of the most valuable insights that Tom brings is that of the ministry of healing being a ministry of prayer.

Prayer is not a manipulation, nor a mechanism that can be forced - and neither is healing.

I agree wholeheartedly that it is better to be sick in the arms of Christ than healed in any other Name - although I also understand Pluralists response to this as it might come across as divorced from a person's grief at being sick or the grief of those bereaved, although I don't believe that was the intention.  I imagine it is the working through of the notion that being a slave to Christ is to be free indeed.  But to give yourself to the 'freedom' of your own faulty choices and cultural mores is, in fact, to enslave yourself.

The same might be said of healing in Christ - to be sick in Christ's arms, even to the point of death, is to receive true and real healing, and to be healed in any other name is to remain truly sick.

A story of healing:

My niece fell ill with Bacterial meningitis when she was 6 months old.  It is difficult to explain the atmosphere in the family waiting room as myself, my soon to be husband, mother-in-law, brother-in-law and his wife (the parents of the little girl) and my sister-in-law (Jehovah's Witness) waited for any change in her condition.  My sister-in-law, a dispensationalist because of her religion, was inconsolable, being a pharmacist and having some medical training meant that she could see the downhill spiral of this little girl.  She was bruised, her kidneys stopped working, on dialysis and ventilation, her fingers and toes were 5c colder than her core - there was no good news.

And I quite clearly heard God prompt me to go and lay my hands on my niece and pray for healing.  Not my 'natural' habitat of Christian ministry, I waited, contemplating this idea.  Then I went into her room, filled with wires and beeping machines and one nurse, a moment of quiet as the family replenished their energies elsewhere.  I read to her Mark 16 'and these signs will accompany those who believe....they will lay hands on the sick and they will recover.' and I told her I was putting my money where my mouth was and put my hand on her to pray.

Within the hour her kidneys started to recover - I've never seen a dad so happy to see a child wee.  The story is happy, she recovered fully, now 9 years old.  Last year I wrote to her dad to tell him what had happened in that little room from my perspective.  One day he will give her the letter and she will have to decide to believe it or not.

But that isn't the only pain in that little girl's life and if she lives a full adult life, I'm sure she will suffer more.  As Tom says when he mentions John's book 'Promise and Presence', a theology of suffering and death is a much needed balance to that of healing.  My hope and prayer for my niece, also my Goddaughter, is that she will experience full, real, true and free healing, that which has been foreshadowed for her particularly in her penultimate healing.

x Jody

person1049    . Thanks.  Good to hear of this.   --yes I think its very good to sahre our spiritual experiences a lot more --and less of the doctrinal theorizing on so many a site.

Can't go too far wrong sharing our experiences and how we interpret them. (I know the two cannot effectively be divided in fact).

I wonder if healing in any other name includes that of the state and science. All healing methods come with their asumptions. Wholeness must include right relatedness to the living God. A medition which leads to an acceptance of our own insignificance and powerlessness is a very different thing if the needs it reveals are not met by the love of a creator and redeemer. Some forms of spirit healing such as Reiki seem little short of a pact with the devil.

David

Sorry --- in my last post that should, of course read, a hand tremour. 

BTW  It  was healed by a combination of 'counselling in the spirit' / sharing, with prayer for its release.

I loved the charismatic worship, singing in the spirit, the joy, glossalalia, and words of encouragement or prophecy during the unstructured worship.  I also was a member of prayer group at college and an RC charismatic group in the town.   Those were the days ! ...

Any other memories of charismatic or other joyous free prayer and  prasie ?

Brings back for me, happy memories of Whatcombe House and the Barnabus Fellowship......

my partner was healed of an embarrassing (and inconvenient ) had tremor when eating before others--especially the soup. That was thirty-one years ago, and it has never reappeared !   Another healing experience for me, was that we were snowed in there, by 20 -30 foot snow drifts and had an extra few days there, before eventually reurning slowly to Salisbury, through snow-ploughed lanes !

I disagree. Psychosomatic and placebo based cures to illnesses can take place within the context of different religions, and therefore it is not better to be sick in the arms of Christ than to be healed in any other name. That must be a nonsense, and puts ideology over personal care.

In any case healing in the context of religion is often not about looking for a magic cure. It is about having the confidence to come to terms with what you have got, supported by the beliefs and community. It can also be about creating some space in your head that allows something to break through - particularly important in Buddhism where the central technique is to cut down mind clutter and create a space of loving kindness to yourself (an acceptance) as much as to the other. And it can be about troubles in your own life, like difficult relationships and awkward events. I went forward on two occasions to ministries of healing in my Anglican Church, and on both occasions they were about events going wrong and my head trying to sort things out than being ill. But "ill health" is about wholeness and about finding some sort of peace and some sort of way through.

One thing people fear is death. A healing ministry isn't that they overcome death by living after it (in some sense I cannot understand) but coming to terms with death, and finding acceptance that life has a certain shape and then it ends. Not easy, but that is a kind of religious palliative care.

I find that the article writer is himself too full of clutter, and perhaps less said is more done.