What Happens When "Nothing" Happens?

Okay.

Corrie and I have wanted to be totally honest throughout the life of this blog.  We want to share the unadulterated truth of our journey, our struggles, and our beliefs even when that truth seems to run counter to what we're going after.

Namely: healing, a deeper and more real experience of the person of Jesus, the kingdom.

After going to that healing conference at Bethel, wouldn't it be a beautiful thing to be able to write to you: I'm healed!  It's done!  Maybe I didn't feel it then, but I woke up the next day, or two days later or whatever and it was gone!

At this point Corrie and I would definitely consider a gradual healing to be a miracle.

Where My Body is at Now

Today as I write, my body isn't feeling all that great.  The joints that were crooked are still crooked.  The fatigue and adrenal exhaustion are still exerting their influence.  And the general pain, though not super intense, is still there.

After the healing conference, I went through a time of feeling pretty bad.  In fact, I had to increase my daily dose of prednisone (a steroid that suppresses pain and inflammation) from 30mg to 40mg.  This issue of prednisone is one that Corrie and I would love to be rid of.  It's typically pretty toxic and can have some negative long term effects.  We really want for me to be able to get off of it completely.

And in the last couple months, we've tried.  I dropped the dose first from 40mg per day to 37.5mg.  Then after two weeks, again to 35mg per day.

But shortly after, my body showed signs of REgressing rather than PROgressing and I had to go back up to 40mg and am still working on regaining my strength.

On the positive side, I have been gaining weight, which is huge for me.  It's nice to be able to hold my own against those light spring breezes  :)

What God is Doing in Us Now

There are quite a few details to that summary of my body's state right now, some of which are quite interesting and carry flavors of the miraculous working of His kingdom.  But those details aren't actually the point of this post.

The point is: We went to a healing conference where miraculous healing was clearly happening, where Jesus was clearly leading us.  Yet, we did not and currently are not experiencing the full extent of healing that we've been pursuing.

So what in the world do we do with that?

Battling this sickness for eight years is hard enough.  It could seem like salt in the wound to come home from that conference with what seems like nothing to show for it.

Offended by Disappointment

In Matthew 11, John the Baptist is stuck in prison with no hope of escape.  He's heard about the miracles that Jesus has done and is doing.  He saw heaven open over Jesus and heard the Father's voice bless him for crying out loud.

But now, in prison, when HE needs rescuing, he doubts.  "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (vs. 3)

Basically, "Are you really who I thought you were?  Because here I am, needing saving, and you're not doing it.  So maybe I should look for another savior."

I'm going to be bold and say that I think a lot of Christians join John the Baptist in this line of thought...especially when faced with persisting sickness, or any other type of disappointment for that matter.

And I'm going to be even bolder and say that this type of thinking brings death.

I don't mean to be insensitive or cruel.  But I speak from my and Corrie's own experience.  Everything in us wants to ask the question, "WHY?  Why, God, have you not healed me?  We need you to save us, and you aren't doing it.  So now we have to make sense of this current set of circumstances."

But when we dive in to this line of thought, our minds often inadvertently start undermining one of two things, or both: who Jesus is...and...who we are.

Who Jesus Is

Maybe some start looking to something other than Jesus to save them.

But more likely for us Christians, we tend to look to another version of Jesus.

We unwittingly remake him into someone who matches our disappointing circumstances rather than hang on in faith and patience until our circumstances bow at his feet.

This is where, I think, the thoughts come in that say that he must have a higher plan.  His ways are not our ways.  He's building my character.  Maybe he wants to heal some but not others, but not me.

And before we are even aware of what's happening in our minds, we reason ourselves right out of faith and into what has felt to me like paralysis.  And instead of a Jesus who came to bring light wherever there is darkness, to heal wherever there is brokenness, to push his kingdom violently into our existence, we start to believe in a Jesus whose power was great 2000 years ago and will be great again 2000 years from now.  But in the present, he really doesn't do much.

And now the Bible, the written revelation of God, is no longer the final authority on his character.  But our reasoning, our experience has usurped its place.  All of our "if then" statements make so much sense to us.

"If I am still sick, then it must be because..."

And these conclusions SEEM right!

Proverbs 14:12: "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death."

Corrie and I have written and declared over and over and over: Jesus heals.  His name is Healer.  He can heal.  He WANTS to heal.  Even, he HAS already healed.  The Scriptures are absolutely rock solid on this.  Sickness should not stay where Jesus is present.  Therefore, in the body of a believer, sickness is a squatter.  It's illegal, and God has authorized us to evict it.

Similarly, in the body of anyone who is in the presence of a believing believer, sickness is still a squatter.  Because we believers get to bring healing to the world to show them God's overwhelming and REAL compassion.

So if we get offended at not seeing healing yet, and we redefine Jesus, we start to believe that maybe he's not the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Maybe he's not Jehovah Rapha.  Maybe he did not bear our illnesses and carry our diseases (Matthew 8:17).

Or maybe my Father, instead of wanting our family to be free of sickness, which is merely the result of sin and the curse of it, wants us to endure it so that we can get stronger.

As a family that battles sickness, this version of Jesus and the Father is not one that gives me and Corrie life and hope and joy and the will to keep fighting.  Instead it has in the past led to depression and angst and being angry at God.

But if we take God at his Word, his unadulterated, plain and simple word.  Then his goodness, his power, and the sheer magnitude of everything he has made available to us...they bring life!

Who We Are

If, in our offense, we don't undermine Jesus' character, then we are left to question who we ourselves are.  If Jesus is our healer, if the Father takes no pleasure in sickness but instead wants to get rid of it, then there must be something about ME that is keeping me from being high enough on God's list of priorities to think about.


He must not love me or like me or care to invest in me as much as his other children. 

So we beg and plead for God to please come to us, to look at us.  To consider us.  And in so doing we actually accuse God of not being compassionate, of not being caring, or of just being oblivious.

And we start to believe that we aren't worth his time.

But let me just say right now, we--me, Corrie, our family, and everyone in this entire existence--we are all worth all of his time.  We are not worthless sinners saved by grace.  We are precious sons and daughters of the King who were lost but have been redeemed by the high high price of Jesus' blood.  We are worth so much because he has declared it so.  We are worth the very life and death of Jesus.

Unoffended in the Truth

Jesus answers John the Baptist by simply restating Isaiah 61, the commission of the Holy Spirit over his life.

Matthew 11: 4-6: "Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.  And blessed is the one who is not offended by me."

What he is calling out to us is this:  "I am still your Savior.  What you are experiencing right now is competing for your loyalty, your heart and mind, your faith.  But do not waver.  Do not doubt.  Do not look for salvation in your own reasoning and explanations.  If you remain in me, if you stay steady in your faith in who I am, who I've declared you to be, in my truth, you will be blessed."

Thankfully, Holy Spirit in us gives us the tenacity to fight this good fight of faith.  We have to fight to take the kingdom.  That's why just a few verses later, Jesus says,

"From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force." (vs. 12)

It is fully ours, and yet it takes a violent faith to keep pushing in to it.

That's where we are.  We are still waiting for my body to reflect the healing that Jesus already paid for.  But we are not shaken in our faith or our resolve at all.  In fact, both are stronger now than ever.  We have seen too much of God's power to stop pursuing more.  We have known too much of his heart to want to find a savior anywhere else.

So, when "nothing happens" it doesn't actually matter.  We keep holding on to the truth, immerse our minds in it, let it permeate our whole being until we're transformed from glory to glory.  But that's a topic for a later post :)

The truth is, "nothing" never happens.  In the kingdom, something always happens.  And that's exciting.

How Jesus Rocked Our World at a Healing Conference: Part 3

We woke up on day three of the healing conference, having just had a wonderful second night that really helped settle our hearts and answer some questions that we had after the first night.  As you may remember, we received powerful prayer for healing and were very blessed on that second night.

Then, the morning of day three came.  And again, like yesterday, my body was having the hardest day it had had in a couple years.  Except now, it had the previous day to compete with for the top slot on the pain scale.

What?

But Jesus, we are at a healing conference.  We prayed.  THEY prayed.  I didn't feel anything, but the people praying did.  So where's the healing?

These questions can, if we let them, suck the life right out of our countenance. And out of our faith. But they are legitimate questions to our natural minds.  If a = b and b = c, then a should equal c, right?  So what happens when c doesn't seem to show up?

This verse came to mind and is where we've landed:

Proverbs 3:5  Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

Our own understanding is where we look at the situation, the fact that my body is tanking, and think, "Jesus must not be ready to heal me yet."  Trusting in the LORD is where the situation loses all power to determine our beliefs and conclusions because the word of Jesus and his finished work of redemption stand truer.

And so, back to the story.

Day three.  A lot of pain in my body.  Corrie again was left to take care of me and the girls on her own, taking them to the store and to the hotel pool by herself while I lay in bed, hoping my body would somehow be revived.

Surrounded by God's Love

But God already had readied his people to come alongside us and carry us through.

One of my mom's good friends, who lives in Redding and goes to Bethel and who Corrie and I have actually never met, got in touch with us.  She had some extra tickets for Friday's day sessions (which had been sold out when we originally decided to come to the conference) and wanted to know if we'd like them.

We got back to her, letting her know that my body was far too sick that day for us to go anywhere before the evening session.  Rather than let that be the end of it, she instead got us in touch with one of Bethel's pastors who himself had been miraculously healed of stage 4 cancer several years prior.  He and his wife dropped everything and came to our hotel room to pray with us.

And what a blessing.  Even though we were in a strange town, far away from friends, Jesus was covering us with people we didn't even know, who loved us.

They prayed more faith-filled prayers against sickness, prayed prophetic words and promises over our marriage, and really built us up in the presence of Jesus.  Again, I didn't feel anything in my body, but they felt God's presence as they were praying.

Corrie and I felt his presence as well, not physically, but definitely in our spirits.  We were given new joy and laughter in the midst of my terrible pain.  We were given hope that God is indeed breaking this sickness.  And we were humbled by the prophetic words about our marriage and God's power working through us together.

After they left, we slowly got ready to go to the third and final session of the conference.  But this time, thanks to my mom's friend, we had seats reserved for us on the ground level.  We had been in the balcony on the previous nights, but this friend did everything she could to make sure that there was space for us on the more mellow, more comfortable, and just all around better lower level.  We shouldn't have been able to sit there, since it was reserved for people who paid for the whole conference.  But they didn't care.

To them, we mattered more than the rules.

Like Jesus healing on the Sabbath.  Or forgiving the adulterous woman.

And when we arrived that night, there were people we had never met waiting to help us in.  My mom's friend was out of town and wasn't even there, but she had called in reinforcements to help us unload the girls from the car, carry our baby stuff, show us to our seats, and make sure we had everything we needed. We were covered.

Surrounded on all sides by these people who loved us, we were ready for the incredible third session.

The Third and Last Session

Just before it started, another man who I hadn't met stopped and prayed for me.  He stayed very calm and not worked up during his prayer.  And suddenly he asked me, "Are you hot in here?"

No.

"Wow.  Crazy.  God is doing something right now, 'cause I'm burning up."  I looked up at him and sure enough, he was taking off his sweater as beads of sweat started forming on his face.

Yet another until-now-strange supernatural occurrence.

The session started with more worship led by Jeremy Riddle (which was fun because Corrie and I loved his song "Sweetly Broken" when it came out back in college).  Rebecca again was on her feet with her hands high praising Jesus.

After giving a mediumly brief message on healing, Randy Clark outlined how the rest of the evening would go.  They were going to play several videos, each of which would have several different healing testimonies.  They were interviews conducted with people who had been healed at similar gatherings.

Randy said that, if any of the testimonies were the same as or similar to what we were dealing with, we were to stand up after the video.  We would treat these testimonies as words of knowledge, meaning that a video showing someone healed of cancer would be similar to Randy saying from the front, "If you have cancer, I think that I am hearing God say he's healing you tonight."

So the lights dimmed and the first video played.  And the first girl on the video said, "I was just healed of...LYME DISEASE."

What?!

My heart beat like 30 times in 2 seconds and tears came to my eyes.  Corrie was taking care of Darcy, walking her in the back, but she also had a similar reaction.

"Jesus, is this for real?  This can't be real.  I'm not actually about to be free of this thing once and for all, am I?"

Then, I matched up with several other testimonies on that same video.  People talking about joints that couldn't bend all the way or that were just totally locked, pain in different parts of their body.

It was basically a checklist for a bunch of the things that are wrong in my body.

"Oh please Jesus."

So the video ended, and I stood up along with quite a few others sprinkled about the auditorium.  And at that point, it didn't matter to Corrie how fussy Darcy was.  She rushed back to be by my side.  And the people close to us gathered even closer to lay hands on us and pray.

And as we stood, me in a lot of pain, I kept checking different joints to see if they were loosening (particularly my right elbow, which is almost completely frozen).  They kept praying.  Nothing was changing.

Randy asked from the front who was getting healed, and all over the auditorium people were waving their hands.

Not me.

After a couple minutes, everyone sat down and the next video played.  When it was over, Randy asked the new group of people, plus anyone who hadn't been healed yet from the first video to stand back up.

So everyone gathered back around again to pray.  There was no supernatural evidence happening at this point, like prophetic words or strange sensations.  But again, we could just feel everyone's love.  And again, people weren't just praying for me but for Corrie as well.

(Note from Corrie: Several women gathered around me and actually wept with me for my pain, for all the days that I have had - like that day - to carry an unnatural amount of weight to keep our family going. And I just want to say that this was not worked up weeping. It was an honest sharing in the deep pain that I don't always display. I really believe that Jesus would  have done the same if He were sitting there with me.)

Even when the next video played, people didn't stop praying.  I sat back down, mostly because of my pain and tiredness, but people didn't leave for their seats like before.  They wanted to stay with us, to keep battling on our behalf.

Miracle #1

As waves of prayer for us kept coming.  We were able to witness what Jesus was doing for other people in the room.  Three people in particular really stood out.

At one point during the evening, we could hear a sudden uproar of excitement and commotion about six rows behind us.  We could see a group of people all standing around this twenty-something girl with their phones out recording, taking pictures, yelling, "WHOA!  Oh my goodness!!"

This girl had a metal plate in her forearm that you could see under her skin.  Well, she USED to have it.  But these people, her friends, were all watching as it disappeared in front of their eyes.  The bulge under the skin just shrank to nothing.

She had apparently been healed of AIDS and gotten saved a few years prior at the Healing Room ministry in Santa Maria.  But Jesus' grace and compassion don't ever stop...so he wasn't done healing her.

Miracle #2

Then, about 4 rows in front of us, in the very front row next to the stage, a woman fell to the floor sobbing, quite loudly actually.  Randy walked over to her with the mic to ask what was going on, but she couldn't pull herself together to answer yet.  Her husband, who was standing with his own tears coming down his face, said, "She knew she'd be healed tonight.  God said to her, 'If you go tonight I'll heal you.'"

Randy gave the woman some time to compose herself before coming back to find out what had happened.  She got up on the stage and plugged in her iPhone so that it could project some pictures that she had of her foot.  It actually looked a lot like my right ankle which is unnaturally turned out from the arthritis that has damaged the joint.

She then took off her shoe to show everyone her completely straight ankle with full range of motion and no pain.

Miracle #3

Another lady got up on the stage and shared her story.  She had suffered from Lyme Disease for 37 years.  Yes, THIRTY-SEVEN years.  When the video played, she too felt the same excitement that we had felt, and, whether it was during the video or after I don't know, Jesus completely took away every one of her symptoms right then and there.


But here's what really amazed us.  Everyone's hearts were so oriented toward compassion and love, toward not letting anyone leave without being fought for.  The ministry team immediately sent her straight from the stage to where we were sitting so that she could take up arms against the Lyme Disease in my body.

And she was the kindest most compassionate lady.  She sat, probably feeling bad that she was healed and I was still not feeling anything, and prayed for me for most of the rest of the night.

As We Were Leaving

After all of this and (we found out later) about 160 other healings that night, it got late and we needed to leave to get our girls to bed.  Corrie had already gone out to the foyer, sad to leave my side, but needing to settle and care for our two very tired girls.

I still felt no different than when the evening began.

But on my way out to meet Corrie and the girls in the foyer, I was stopped by a woman telling me, "There's a man who really really wants to pray for you."

At this point, I was tired, a bit discouraged, in pain, and just wanting to take care of my wife who had been so heroically taking care of our daughters while I was receiving prayer.  So I said, "Well, I can't stay right now.  My family is waiting for me and my daughters are melting down.  If he really wants, he can come out and meet us while we pack up our stuff."

She said, "Great," and left, presumably to go get him.  Again, as I was on my way to Corrie, a kind man, Zack, came alongside and asked if he could pray for me.  Getting a bit MORE tired now, I said, "Sure, but wait until I get to my family."  I figured this was the guy that the lady had gone to get.

So we got to Corrie and the girls, and he was about to start praying with ANOTHER guy came up and said his name was Ben.  He seemed to have some kind of authority around there, because it seemed like people knew who he was.  And somehow he did look familiar.

He was the guy who "really really" wanted to pray for me before I left.  He said that he saw me in the auditorium from his seat and that I appeared to be glowing white hot.  He felt the Holy Spirit moving him to pray for me.

Ben and Zack prayed.  Power-filled, faith-filled, authority-filled prayers against this sickness.  Prophetic words about our lives and God's vision for us. 

And with that, we were blessed and loved and had met God again.  My body felt no different, but our spirits were a thousand times strengthened and infused with the love of Jesus for our family.

I want tell you where I'm at now, physically, and how Corrie and I have processed through everything that we experienced there.  But telling the story of day three has already made for a long post.  Thank you for sticking through to the end! I'm going to sign off for now and save the rest for the next post.  So stay tuned!

By the way, it turns out that Ben is a pastor at Bethel, and that we had seen him in the movie Sons of God.  A great movie really worth watching.  It's free online, by the way!

Also, I looked him up on Facebook and found that he's leading the Awakening Europe conference this summer along with another preacher Corrie and I love to listen to, Todd White.  All of it is definitely worth checking out.

To read the other parts of our Healing Conference series:
Part One
Part Two
Darcy's Interlude