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Healing: Asking the Tough Questions
“God wants to do a miracle in your life! Turn to Jesus and be healed!” I
was four years old when I started watching Oral Roberts on television.
On his early morning program, he invited one person after another to
join him on stage, where he prayed with each of them for healing. I
watched in awe as he laid his hands on the person’s head, closed his
eyes, and pleaded for God to reach down and perform a miracle. I
couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Blind people began to see, deaf
people began to hear, and people in wheelchairs began to walk. Then, at
the end of each service, Oral looked straight into the camera and
invited sick and disabled television viewers to pray with him. “God
loves you,” Oral said. “God loves you and wants to do miracles for you.
All you have to do is believe, today, and God will hear your prayers and
heal your body.”
That’s what I wanted. I wanted a miracle. I wanted God to heal me the
same way he healed those people Oral prayed for on television. I
believed Oral, and when he prayed, I prayed. I was sure that God heard
my prayers and that it was only a matter of time before he completely
took away my cerebral palsy.
Oral Roberts used to have a tent ministry, and he went from one town to
another holding healing crusades. Thousands of people came to hear him
speak and see him perform the miracles for which he was famous. Soon
after I began watching his television program, he came to our area, and
Dad asked me if I wanted to see Oral in person. You must realize that
Oral Roberts seemed like God to me, and having him pray for me would be
like having Jesus himself lay his hands on me. “Yes! I want to go!” I
said. I wanted Oral to reach out his hands, touch my body, and pray for
God to heal me. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before I could
throw away my crutches, take off my braces, and walk like everyone else.
Things didn’t happen that way, however. I went to the crusade, fully
expecting God to heal me, but was kept from seeing Oral for all but the
last few minutes of the meeting. My parents and I spent most of the
night with a group of other disabled people listening to someone from
his staff talk about how we should give money to the ministry. I don’t
remember many of the details, but I imagine that the presentation
included something about how a donation could be the key to unleashing
the faith required to receive a miracle. It must have sounded so
inviting. God could do anything, and the only thing required for a
five-year-old boy to be healed of cerebral palsy was a little faith,
demonstrated by the size of his parents’ check written to the ministry.
It didn’t matter to me that we were kept segregated from everyone in
the main auditorium or that I saw Oral for only a few seconds. I was on
cloud nine that night, and before we left the parking lot, I was sure
that God had healed me. Maybe I still had a little trouble walking, but
that seemed so insignificant compared to the fact that Oral Roberts had
just prayed for me. I was certain that by the time I went to bed and
woke up again the next morning, my cerebral palsy would be gone.
Over the course of the next several days, reality set in, and that’s
when I began accepting the fact that God had not healed me. I was
disappointed and unsure of what to think. If a man like Oral Roberts
could not talk God into healing me, I felt that I had no chance of
asking God for myself.
That night was never mentioned much around our house. The only thing
that changed was that we stopped going to church. The church that we
attended closed its doors for lack of support, and after that, we just
never found anywhere else to attend.
For the next few years, I didn’t know how I felt about God. I had once
believed that God was real, but I had also believed in miracles. Maybe
the whole thing was make-believe, and God was like Santa Claus or the
Easter Bunny. Perhaps he was good enough for kids to believe in, but by
the time a person becomes an adult, he or she was better off letting go
of childhood fantasies.
My doubts about God continued until the spring of 1970. That’s when Mom
began taking us to the Avon Community Church, located just a few miles
south of the little town of Brodhead. Avon is an independent church
about the size of a one-room schoolhouse and, at the time, was heated
with an oil-burning space heater. It also had no inside plumbing, and
people either used their own bathrooms before they left home or used the
two-seater outhouse located behind the church. On a good morning, there
might be twenty people at the service, including any visitors who
happened to stop by. The church paid Ralph Wilson, an older,
semi-retired man who ran a Christian bookstore in Janesville, $35 a
week to be their pastor.
About a month after we started attending the services at Avon, I was
sitting next to Mom, waiting for church to be over, when something
happened that changed my life forever. When it came time to sing the
last hymn, instead of asking the congregation to open their hymnals,
Pastor Wilson invited us to make our way to the front of the church for
communion.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked, pausing a moment for emphasis.
At first I thought the question was rhetorical, but I soon discovered
otherwise. Pastor Wilson looked directly at me and made it pretty clear
that he expected me to answer, audibly, and in front of everyone.
“Me?” I asked sheepishly.
“Yes,” he said, nodding his head.
What did I know about God? I was eleven years old at the time and wasn’t
sure what I believed. The way I looked at the situation, I could do one
of two things. I could be honest and say that I didn’t believe in God.
Or I could lie. I figured that I would surprise a lot of people if I
told the truth. I was in church, after all, and people who went to
church were supposed to believe in God. Besides, if God really did
exist, I knew I would be in major trouble down the road if I publicly
denied him now.
I decided to play it safe. “Yes,” I told Pastor Wilson and everyone
else listening. “I believe. I believe that God is real.” Before the
words were out of my mouth, I knew that something had changed inside of
me. Every doubt I ever had left me. I might not have been able to
explain to people why I had cerebral palsy or to answer many other
questions about God’s sovereignty, but as soon as I spoke, I knew that
God existed, that he loved me, and that he wanted to be an integral part
of my life.
After going through most of grade school feeling cut off from my
classmates, the realization that Christ was seeking an intimate
relationship with me was absolutely overwhelming. I had gone from being
disliked by some and ignored by others to being loved by the living God.
There is no way for me to adequately describe the acceptance I felt from
this God who loves me despite my disability. I didn’t have to prove
myself to God. His love is total and complete, and isn’t something I had
to earn. He loves me, Steve Chance, cerebral palsy and all. Let me tell
you, that level of acceptance after years and years of rejection from
classmates was incredibly refreshing.
It wasn’t until several years later, after joining Youth for Christ,
that I began to understand the significance of that morning. What
started out as a safe answer had turned into an open acknowledgment of
my belief in Jesus Christ. I had become a Christian. And by attending
Youth for Christ club meetings and Bible studies during high school, my
commitment to Jesus Christ grew.
The flip side to all of this is that along with my new faith in Christ
came a renewed interest in healing. You might think that, after what had
occurred at the Oral Roberts crusade years earlier, I would have learned
my lesson. Yet, I desperately wanted to believe the things that some of
my high school friends were telling me. “God is alive,” they concluded.
“If Christ did miracles 2000 years ago, he can do them today. All you
have to do is ask.” I believed what they said. For the second time in my
life, I asked God to give me a body that did not shake with cerebral
palsy.
What would my life really be like without cerebral palsy? I don’t know.
Some of the benefits would be obvious, such as being able to hold a
glass of water without spilling any of it or eating a complete meal
without making a mess. Yet cerebral palsy is so much a part of who I am
that I can’t imagine what life would be like without it. I was more than
willing to find out, though.
Some people might wonder why I again asked God to heal me. I have asked
myself that same question over and over again, and I always return to
the same two answers. The first is that I wanted so much to be seen as
just another person that I clung to any hope at all that one day I might
not have to deal with cerebral palsy. When all is said and done, life
would simply be much easier without a disability.
The second reason I so desperately wanted to be healed was because I
thought that was the way God could best use me. Imagine, a lifetime of
cerebral palsy swept away with one prayer. What a testimony! No one
could deny the reality of a God who does miracles. That’s what I
wanted—to be a living, breathing, and walking testimony for the God who
takes away cerebral palsy.
Life did not work out that way, though, and after some time had passed,
I found myself asking some pretty hard questions about why I wasn’t
being healed. I thought that I must have somehow failed. Perhaps I had
neglected to confess some hidden sin in my life or failed to find the
right formula to unleash God’s supernatural power. Either way, I saw
myself as an embarrassment to the church, especially to churchgoers who
had encouraged me to continue praying for healing.
Looking back, I realize that I had caused a bit of theological confusion
among some of my well-meaning Christian friends. They thought they had
God all figured out and were convinced that if I prayed hard enough and
believed long enough, God was bound to answer my prayers. But God didn’t
answer, at least not in the way my friends intended. Instead, for
whatever reason, God chose to remain silent. And with that silence came
a host of questions accompanied by the guilt and shame of once again not
measuring up to other people’s expectations.
I have heard many sermons on the subject of healing since becoming an
adult, and most pastors are somewhere on a continuum between two
extremes. On one end, some deny God’s willingness to heal. They are
convinced that the age of miracles ended with the death of the apostles,
and they frown on any mention of supernatural healing. Any attempt to
pray for physical healing is considered by them a waste of time and
something that should be discouraged.
Though this approach might sound reasonable to some people, it seems a
little too unyielding for me. I can’t bring myself to say that God never
heals, because I believe that he does. On the other hand, I’m equally
uncomfortable with pastors at the other end of the spectrum who believe
that God always answers the prayers of the faithful in the way that they
demand. They insist that sickness is never God’s will, that the Bible
says as much, and that God will wait until you can muster up enough
faith to unleash his healing power.
From my perspective, both extremes are dangerous because they both
undermine the working of God. The first fails to acknowledge any divine
intervention that falls outside the realm of nature, and the second
denies the reality that God can and will work through persons who
suffer. Unfortunately, it’s the second extreme that has caused me the
most heartache.
Although I’ve come to terms with the fact that God has not answered my
plea for a miracle, some in the Christian community are still intent on
seeing me healed. I was in a drugstore recently, buying a newspaper and
a couple of batteries, when a man wearing a huge metallic cross
approached me. He tried to engage me in a conversation about God being a
healing God and, when I wouldn’t bite, proceeded to pray for me right
there in front of the other customers. Granted, most Christians are not
this extreme or radical in demonstrating their beliefs. But this example
does illustrate how disabled people are often viewed as broken objects
needing to be fixed, instead of as people capable of entering into
meaningful relationships.
I want to be careful not to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that
God cannot or will not heal. Nor am I suggesting that we not ask God to
heal our physical bodies. My concern has more to do with well-meaning
Christians who focus on my disability to the exclusion of me as a
person. That was not the ministry of Jesus Christ, and that should not
be the ministry of the church today. What should we tell people who have
prayed all of their lives for God to bring healing to their bodies? That
they don’t have enough faith? That there is sin in their lives? Or
should we assure them that God is faithful and hasn’t abandoned
them—that where they hurt, God hurts, and in that hurt God stands ready
to meet them?
I wish someone had given me that message when I was in high school, or
in college, or at any other time in my life when I needed to hear that I
did not have to prove myself to God. As it was, God’s faithfulness and
grace are concepts that I had to figure out for myself.
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