Praying for healing even though it hurts: the story of sickness locked in my body

This is Part 1 in a detailed series on healing that probably won't head in the direction you'd expect.

Jul 23, 2024

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Welcome to Part 1 in a series where I grapple with the theological mechanics of healing. I have been exposed to a lot of Christian ideologies regarding healing, some of which have been helpful; some of which have been harmful. Please know that none of what I am writing in this series is meant to be prescriptive. I am not positioning myself as an authority on the topic. Rather, I am offering up a space for (what I suspect are) the large number of Christians like myself who wrestle with healing as both a general idea and a personal pain point. The remainder of this series will be reserved for my paying subscribers, enabling me to continue doing the hard work of unpacking heavy theological concepts for the purpose of bringing hope to the Body of Christ. If you have found that my writing is helping you draw closer to Jesus while you ask the deep questions (and you would like to read the rest of this series), I humbly invite you to become a paid subscriber. I’m running a special offer this month where you can subscribe for 30% off my usual subscription for one year. But hey, please know that whatever you choose, I am truly just so grateful that you’re here.

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“Have you asked God to heal you?”

The question kind of startled me. I was sitting in a lush, comfortable arm chair in my CEO’s office at my brand new job with a Christian organisation. The leafy Staffordshire countryside was bristling in the February wind out the window.

This particular CEO is a really, really good man, and he makes a point of having coffee with every single new recruit when they join the organisation – and again when (or if) they leave.

But CEOs are still busy people, so he cut to the chase pretty quickly. He asked me about myself with carefully pointed questions which got to the meat of the matter in only a few moments. It wasn’t long before I divulged my health issues, and before I knew it, this theologically murky question hung in the air between us…

The story I hold in my body

I have been living in the ebb and flow of chronic pain and fatigue since I was about 16, and I have never received a firm diagnoses. We first started to notice that things weren’t quite right when I was training for the Los Angeles Marathon in junior high, and I discovered that the agonising pain I’d experience for days after every race was not, in fact, normal. I had to drop out of the team for two seasons in a row before I finally completed the marathon in my sophomore year.

Then, as I approached senior year, I was hit with a level of fatigue that saw me sleeping through my first two classes almost every day. I was a straight-A student, so it was awkward for me AND the school staff when they legally had to call me into the head office for a reprimand. I remember sitting at the end of a long conference table with the dean, the principals of both the elementary and high school campuses (a bit excessive, I’d thought), the attendance clerk, and a few other people I didn’t even recognise. My parents were there, too.

“We’re not used to having meetings like this with… well… a student like you,” the dean said a bit sheepishly.

I nearly snorted.

“We just want to know,” the attendance clerk chimed in, “if there is anything that we can do to help you.”

I genuinely appreciated the sentiment, and I could see that these people were trying to respect me in spite of the patronising ritual we were all being put through. I’d been attending this school since I was 9-years-old. I’d been the elementary school’s class president in 6th grade, I’d worked with JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), met congressmen, and joined a team of astronomers to watch the first Mars rover landing in Pasadena when I was in junior high. I was a student cadet with JROTC in my junior and senior year, a volunteer with our local hospital programme, a member of the school’s Mock Trial team, a passionate after-school drama club student, and the winner of our Video class’ annual film festival. My paintings from art class had been hung up in the school office in 9th grade. My science teacher had once given me a 4-month extension to take a test that I’d missed while being out sick. The high school principal had once called me out of my Anatomy & Physiology class because he’d heard I love Bob Dylan and wanted to give me a copy of his collection of Dylan CDs (and a few of the Grateful Dead, just in case I was interested).1 These people knew me, and they respected me as much as one could in these teacher/student relationships. They knew that I wasn’t just fobbing off my final months of high school because I’d suddenly discovered my inner John Bender.2

“Just let me get through the year,” I said curtly, staring at my hands. “I’m not well. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m not well, and I just need to get to graduation.”

Having passed out twice on campus (once while I was in full JROTC uniform for our 9/11 ceremony where paramedics were in attendance and subsequently rushed me to the hospital), I’d hoped they knew I wasn’t exaggerating.

What I didn’t tell them was that whatever was wrong with me was being compounded by my dad’s unfolding drug addiction within the walls of our home. My days had been plagued with strangers coming in and out, loud knocks on the door at 3am, my dad’s random fits of crying and screaming and neurotic behaviours. But that’s a story for another day.

Either way, the silence hung in the air. I just wanted to be left alone. Let me survive. Let me finish high school. At this point, I didn’t even care about finishing well. I just needed to finish. My top-of-the-class reputation was crumbling. I no longer had any college plans. It felt like my identity was drifting up into the ether with every deep sigh I’d exhale in those extended fits of late-morning sleep.

“Just let me finish High School” I said again.

None of these well-meaning adults knew what to say. I had missed so many hours of school that I was technically breaking the law for truancy, but everyone knew that none of us wanted to be sitting in that room – that this meeting was pointless.

They all nodded, reminded me that they were there to help if I needed it, and then I was dismissed. My parents then took my place, and some sort of façade was no doubt performed to conceal from these well-meaning people that our family life was falling apart at the seams – at this point, my dad was still successfully concealing his use of narcotics, so the erratic behaviour didn’t make sense, even to us.

Either way, the fact remained: I was sick, and I didn’t know why.

My life has been painted by this truth ever since.

When my boyfriend at the time watched my decline, he was convinced that my symptoms were a result of stress from my dad’s “issues.” I don’t want to undermine the role that stress plays in our wellbeing (I’ll get to this later), but at the time, his words stung. I’d grown up with extended family members who genuinely loved being ill – they didn’t know how to ask for love and attention in healthy ways, so they would exaggerate symptoms and call my mom in tears, begging her to rush them to the hospital every few weeks. I resented any assertion that my health problems were somehow “in my head” because I was terrified of a world in which people looked at me and saw another family hypochondriac.

My lack of physical fitness had already earned me labels like “Princess” at school. I remember someone laughing in my face when I said that I wanted to attend the JROTC’s cadet camp. When I finally did complete the L.A. Marathon, I was kindly reminded by my peers that I crossed the finish line hours after everyone else and had arguably the slowest time in the school. Even my coach refused to allow me to attend the end-of-year barbecue celebration (at a public park, which I still find dumb because you can’t deny someone access to a public park) because I’d technically “dropped out” from the team when I failed to complete all of the races leading up to the marathon itself.

Since high school, my cocktail of weird symptoms has grown, but moving to England did, at least, give me a clean slate. I could escape the cruel stories and labels that had been spoken over me by my peers, and I found in the UK a group of friends who looked at me and saw strength, not weakness. I am forever grateful to call this country home, but I still carry these stories of weakness in my body, and I resent them. I did not want to be sick. I still don’t.

In 2015, I started having such intense upper back pain that I couldn’t get more than an hour of sleep before I’d wake up. It hurt to turn over. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to hug someone. This went on for 2 years.

In 2017, I started feeling this intense, sharp pain in what I now know to be my sacroiliac joints. It would come and go every few months, and I’d pretty much ignore it, assuming I’d slept funny.

In 2018, I went to the opticians for a sore eye and was immediately sent to the hospital for a 6-month course of steroid eye drops because they discovered that I had spontaneous inflammation in my eye ball which, if left untreated, could lead to a build up of scar tissue and eventually blindness.

Then a year later, the sacroiliac pain came back, and it went on for months, getting steadily worse in my ignorance of how to treat it, until eventually, in December of 2019, I found myself limping to the train station after work, in so much pain that the train conductor came to find me and asked if I needed help. I got home and attempted to go up the stairs to my bedroom, but after taking one step, I yelped like a wounded animal and collapsed. It felt like someone was shoving a white hot iron straight into my joint, and the resulting shock knocked the wind out of me if I dared to move an inch.

I lay awake in bed that night, crying, waiting until morning so that my husband (then boyfriend) could take me to A&E, where I received woeful care and spent the next 2 weeks laying on the couch, hyped up on 3 different painkillers while Chris slept on the floor next to me. I needed his help just to get off the couch and up the stairs to the bathroom. I have never known such pain in my life. I finally had a doctor who tested me for everything he could think of, and my blood tests came back with off-the-chart levels of inflammation.

Ever since then, I’ve been under ongoing investigation for various auto-immune conditions, receiving MRIs every two years to check the deterioration levels of my spine, but I’ve never received a diagnoses. I live in a limbo of knowing I’m not well but having absolutely no recourse to get the world around me to understand.

I’ve tested positive for genes that are associated with higher levels of inflammation, and my mom is almost certain that I caught a virus in high school that triggered these auto-immune symptoms. There are undoubtedly genetic pieces at play, too.

I also think that living in a culture which A) eats a lot of processed food that our bodies were never designed to eat and B) glorifies the exhaustion of hustle and normalises the stress which results from it has almost certainly increased my inflammation and pain levels all of my life (so my high school boyfriend was kind of right, but not really). It all plays into a wider picture, and so I live in this ongoing marathon of trial and error, figuring out what works for my body and what will spike another episode of pain. It’s tiring, but humans are good at adapting, and so I can honestly say that I’ve gotten used to it.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, both physically and emotionally. My relationship with my body is, like most people, complex. On top of all the medical issues, I’ve also (and I’m convinced that this is related in some way) struggled my entire life to lose weight, even when I’ve been eating like a rabbit and exercising like a horse. No matter what, I’ve maintained a distinct little bagel of fat around my middle, which I always resent when I look at my slim mom and brother, who clearly got a better deal in that section of the genetic lottery. Even looking out my window now, I catch a glimpse of our neighbour, a young girl no more than 20, who looks how I always expected to look as a teenager: slim and vibrant and healthy and strong.

I then catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, in the body that’s always been – red-face, belly swollen, back aching – and I think how I have never felt slim or vibrant or healthy or strong.

There’s a huge section of the feminist movement which would cancel me for admitting this. We are expected to somehow “overcome” our insecurities and turn them into strengths. We are expected to redefine societal expectations of beauty in favour of something more “real.”

But this is real. My body is broken, and I have never felt at home in it. The grief of that is real. And the way that this grief also complicates my relationship with my Saviour – that’s real, too.

I stared at my new CEO, looking for words that wouldn’t come. Eventually I just decided to go with the truth.

“I have asked God for healing. But I don’t do it as much anymore.”

“Why not?”

Jeez, dude. Can’t we just talk about what I’m excited for in my new role like a normal boss would? (Sarcasm, obviously. I really liked the frankness of this guy.)

“Well…” I thought about it, “I know He can heal me, but I don’t know if He will this side of Heaven. He hasn’t so far. I don’t need Him to heal me for me to trust that He is good. And I’m tired of putting myself in a position to feel like I’m being ignored or let down when there’s more to this life than whether or not I’m healed.”

The words felt weird coming out of my mouth. This was such a theological can of worms. Would he think I lacked faith? Would he think I’d become complacent about God? Would he think I was a lukewarm Christian?

In all honesty, I hadn’t put much thought into being healed. I’d asked, sure, because I maintain that we serve a God who can and does heal. But it has been much easier, over the years, to put my efforts into lifestyle changes that can ease my symptoms rather than contemplating the “if” or “why” or “why not” of God’s choice to heal (or not heal) me.

This kindly man, who I’d known for only 10 minutes, simply smiled at me. His answer was so direct: “We should never stop praying for healing. Our God is good, and He gives us the freedom to ask. So we should ask. That is all.” Then he prayed over me and he asked that God would heal my pain.

And just like that, the meeting was over.

This morning, I sat on my couch, out of breath from the pain that has been persistently throbbing in my right ovary since last October. This symptom is new to the mix, and unlike my spinal inflammation, it is a pain that happens daily. Some days are worse than others. Today has been a particularly bad day.

So I sat there before I started writing, and I prayed for healing.

It’s interesting, because I have absolutely no qualms about praying for God to heal other people, but it is a distinctly vulnerable and painful act to pray for healing for myself. It never gets easier.

And yet, I knew that what my former boss said to me four years ago was true. There was a profound simplicity to it: our God is good, and He gives us the freedom to ask. So, ask we should.

Friends, I struggle with simple truths. They always feel like they’re mocking me. Like I’m missing something. Because my immediate question after someone tells me the simple truth is… “Why?”

Why should we ask for healing? Just because we can? I can answer the door to the postman with underwear on my head if I want, but does that mean I should? (I mean, maybe, just for the laugh of seeing the postman’s face). But seriously. Let’s get real here. Why does it matter that we exercise the freedom that God gives us when it puts us in such a position of vulnerability and pain if the answer is “no” or even “not yet”?

I know people with conditions far worse than mine who were encouraged, again and again, to respond to altar calls and lay their deepest pain bare for congregations of strangers to pray over them, all to be told that their lack of healing is almost certainly down to some hidden, unrepented sin in their lives, or a lack of faith on their part.3 (Btw, if that is a theology to which you hold, you probably won’t like me or my writing, and that’s okay. I pray blessings upon you, but I also encourage you to gracefully bow out before these next few paragraphs get you all riled up).

Once you get past the affronting insult of such a horrible theological dismissal of your pain, once you take hold of the truth that your condition is not a form of sadistic punishment from an almighty, cruel deity, the fact of the matter remains: you took the brave, heartbreaking step to ask, yet again, for a God who CAN heal you TO heal you, and still you lay in pain.

It’s not unfair to ask the question “What is the point?”

When you or someone you love experiences pain or sickness, it can be one of the singularly most challenging times to hold fast to the belief that God is both sovereign and good.

Pain has this weird ability to simultaneously crystallise some truths in our lives while obscuring others. It makes you think really hard about what you believe and why you believe it. It also draws all of our focus away from any realities existing outside of our bodies in exchange for acute focus on what’s going on within. Sometimes, eternal truths appear to be in conflict with the truths we harbour inside of us. And yet, our finite existence matters. The things we experience matter – not only to us (obviously) but to God. So what do we do in that tension?

I can’t and won’t offer you platitudes on the subject. Platitudes aren’t helpful. And what’s more, they’re lazy. But I do want to address a few ideas that have been offered to me about healing over the years and explain why, in isolation, I don’t think they tell us the whole story.

1) “Your lack of healing is your own fault.”

I think it’s lazy theology to automatically assume that someone hasn’t been healed because of some unrepented sin in their lives or because they simply haven’t had enough faith.4 I’m not saying that sin doesn’t have consequences which can lead to ailment – if you’re a drug addict and your drug abuse causes kidney failure, then it’s fair to say that this is a natural, earthly outcome of a sinful behaviour; but this is not the same thing as saying that someone has not been healed of their blindness because of some hidden sin in their lives of which they themselves aren’t even aware.

There are some deeper spiritual warfare standpoints which I will aim to unpack later in this series, but what I will say is that God is not here to trick us. He’s not waiting for you to keep pressing repentance buttons until you find the right one that unlocks your healing.

That said, we DO have a role to play in our own healing, and it’s the balance between our role and God’s role that I hope to dig into throughout this entire series. Because gosh is that whole idea tricky. But let me be clear here: repentance does bring healing in that it restores our souls to the wholeness that God originally intended for us (and sometimes, that healing looks like a physical restoration, too), but it isn’t a dangling carrot that God is holding just out of your reach, waiting for you to jump high enough to catch it. That’s sick and sadistic and honestly doesn’t make sense. God wants us to live in the restored wholeness that He originally planned for us. You think He gets a kick out of watching us inflict suffering upon ourselves? No! He spends most of the Old Testament begging His people to stop hurting themselves. To stop sinning. And this is why I firmly believe that God is not here to trick us. He doesn’t hide what He wants for His people. He sends prophets. He sends His Spirit. He lays out a clear road map for repentance and healing.

God is not. here. to. trick. us.

2. “Maybe God isn’t actually powerful enough to heal you.”

I also think it’s lazy theology to assume that God doesn’t heal because He’s secretly not as all-powerful as we thought. I have heard this line of thinking, and it’s a comforting idea in that it allows us to believe that God really does love us, He’s just simply not capable of healing us, and that’s why we continue to suffer. Friends, if you subscribe to orthodox theology, Scripture does not support this idea.5

3. “God is trying to teach you something.”

So there’s also this idea that God intentionally gives us ailments to test our faith. I do understand how Scripture defends this idea6, though it has never particularly sat well with me in terms of how it’s applied in the modern church. God has undeniably allowed His people to go through seasons of suffering in order to sanctify them. I literally can’t dispute that. Jesus himself asked God to “take the cup” from him, but God didn’t (and we can all agree that Jesus wasn’t being “punished” for a “sin problem,” am I right?). So for whatever reason, suffering plays a role in our sanctification (this entire Substack is pretty much dedicated to wrestling with this fact, so we’ll leave it there for now), but I do not think that this relationship between suffering and sanctification should give us permission to automatically assume that God uses illness and pain as a default parenting tool to “teach us” something.

God redeems everything. He is in the business of redemption. But it’s extremely important that we aren’t constantly changing a redemption narrative into a punishment/instructive parenting narrative – because if we default to this theological standpoint, we grossly ignore other nuances at play, like the fact that God honours the freewill of humanity and therefore doesn’t constantly intervene in the natural world to cause constant miracles of healing.7 I hate to be the bearer of mediocre news, but I’m going to state the obvious: sometimes we’re sick because we live in a broken world, and God doesn’t constantly intervene and thereby rob this world of its human agency. Sometimes, if I can be so blunt, sh*t just happens, and it kills us not to be able to attach a deeper meaning to it, so we reach for paper thin theologies that help us regain control of the uncontrollable mystery of the pain held deep inside our bodies.

By leaning on this theological band-aid, we also ignore the uniqueness of people’s stories and relationships with God. Literally the only being who is qualified to search the heart, know the mind, and determine whether someone will be best “instructed” by the experience of suffering is the Holy Spirit. We don’t get to decide what God is doing in someone else’s spirit. Let’s not be like Job’s friends.8

Where does that leave us?

Okay, at this point you might be thinking “Nice soap box, Christina, but can you get to the point?” If all this is true, it leaves us with what, exactly? Well, so far, it leaves us with a theology around healing which tells us that A) God is powerful enough to miraculously heal, but sometimes He doesn’t; B) we live in a world where there are natural and spiritual consequences to sinful choices (and also, sometimes things just suck because this world is broken), but that doesn’t mean we are automatically sick as a direct result of a specific sin or “lack of faith”; and C) (this is something I haven’t mentioned yet) we are invited into a relationship with God, as my CEO reminded me, where we get to partner with Him to build our lives9, and that looks like taking part in our own journey of healing.

This last idea is where I’d like to linger for a while.

I always come back to this concept of dignity. In the entire Bible story, I see a God who dignifies our lives by giving us freedom to choose how (or if) we want a relationship with Him.

Friends, it’s pretty flippin’ weird when you think about it. There’s this all-powerful being who has the ability to speak the earth into existence with a word, and yet He CHOOSES to give US freedom: freedom to talk to Him or not, listen to Him or not, ask Him for things or not. We have direct access to the Maker of the entire universe. It’s weird. It just is. And it’s also deeply profound.

Because we can choose to pray for healing OR NOT. And Scripture tells us that He genuinely seems to care about whether we want to be healed.10

So this leads me to conclude only one thing: while humanity attempts to create a black and white, clear formula to the theology of healing so that we can all sit comfortably in certainty, the truths hidden in these theological mysteries are far more compelling, far more beautiful (if not confusing) than we have lead ourselves to believe.

This mystery is what I’ll be looking at over the remainder of this series because I sense that there is a lot to be learned in the process of partnering with God to navigate our own healing journey – even when part of that journey looks like offering ourselves up, bare, exposed, vulnerable, in pain, to ask for healing that may or may not come.

I’m not saying this from a comfortable place; I’m saying this very much in the heat of the battle. This post has taken me twice the normal amount of time to write because I am carrying that “not yet healed” story in my body. My right ovary is throbbing. I’ve had more dizzy spells than I can count today. I had to pause and take a nap because I was so fatigued. I am struggling to string a verbal sentence together due to brain fog. And all this happened after I sat on the couch and prayed for healing that didn’t come.

But even as I sit here, feeling like a defective prototype of the creature God intended to create, I don’t regret my prayer. I am not going to give up on my body which is a story of “not-yet-healed.” I know that God can miraculously heal because I know people who have been miraculously healed (not some televangelism healing gimmick, friends – I know of true stories of insane physical and mental healing).

And even though miraculous healing hasn’t been my story (yet), I don’t regret taking up the profound invitation to access the Almighty, to partner with God in my healing, in making my desires known to Him, in refusing the platitudes and continuing to boldly declare that I want to be healed AND I believe in that mysterious truth that He’s good and He loves me despite my not-healed-ness.

This is relationship. This is partnership. And I think that the very act of engaging in the mystery, despite the pain, despite the unanswered questions, is just the beginning. What if healing is, in fact, a whole lot bigger, and brighter, and more beautiful than we ever imagined – even on this painful side of Heaven.