Hope despite suffering: mining my "failed" faith healing for a deeper perspective and connection

For 8 long years, I have been battling increasingly frequent and intense gut pain. My symptoms are often referred to collectively as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) or Leaky Gut. For chronic sufferers, we have been shown to experience from the same level of causal discomfort a higher intensity of suffering than someone who doesn't regularly suffer. When I suffer from it badly, I can't socialise, I am moody and very self-pitiful. Added to the horridness of the situation is not really knowing how to manage it - all diets have let me down and medical reports have sent me conflicting reports that have left me thoroughly confused.

Image taken from the wonderful Kettle & Fire website

Ah yes, confusion. I have been very confused recently! If you add to the mix that I am a confessing Christian, you know, the kind who actually believes in the power of a good God to interact on our behalf, then that confusion can actually get worse. Many people who believe in God and his power to heal will swear (or promise) that the effect of simply praying was real and long-lasting, bringing them much relief and happiness. Great for them! I am certain, however, that this is not everyone's experience. A lot of people pray for healing for themselves or loved ones in terrible situations and see no physical change whatsoever or even a worsening. Fortunately, there are some excellent books and responses to this from within evangelicalism (Philip Yancey has written a bunch). However, even this more reflective and realistic category of Christian experience no longer adequately caters for my current mental process.

I had gotten to a point where I knew I still needed to believe in the power of God and prayer, but that his most significant and humble way of intervening was through the love and kindness of other humans. My kinda church had kinda missed the memo was maybe how I'd started to see it, and that helped me cope with my disappointment and physical pain, even motivate me a bit to do good. But it's limited and can't factor in what happened next, about a month ago as I write this.

So, I got back from a church weekend away and felt a fresh sense of hope and bond with church and with Jesus. When I got home, I watched Derren Brown, an atheist illusionist, perform convincing miracles on stage on Netflix. It was just out of curiosity I guess, and bizarrely enough, after witnessing Brown's challenging secular perspective, I actually felt strangely compelled to find a real life testimony of gut pain healing. I really, truly wanted to believe for myself the healing power of Jesus in a way I think I had steadily been giving up for months, probably years, and the Brown show did absolutely nothing to stop that process. Overnight I chose to start praying for deliverance from my own gut issues - first time in ages. I even wanted to stop all my medication completely (I have more issues than the gut alone) and decided that even if I couldn't sleep, this would just mean more opportunities to pray!

The next day I had already decided that suddenly stopping my antidepressants and sleeping meds might not be entirely wise, but I held on tightly to the idea that I could now eat dairy and other previously impossible foods. And it worked! My parents have been praying for this quite a bit and were so joyful at seeing me healed! I was definitely not getting reactions to dairy and was able to reduce my fruit and veg intake to something less ridiculous too. And I began to confidently release the news around me, keen to give the apparent miraculous healing the credit and appreciation due! Fortunately, I had held off announcing it at church, as a few weeks down the road the suffering has returned, intermittently. So where does that leave someone who had started to seriously question his own faith, took a leap and realised that my healing wasn't "for real"?

Mining for Meaning

Very practically:

• It has helped me draw my focus and anxiety away from food, eating out, being invited. Grateful.
  

• It has underlined the weird significance of hydration for me (even the first week after my "healing", ooh I don't like putting that in quotes, I was getting stomach cramps from dehydration). Grateful, I think.

• It has enabled me to reconsider the "psychosomatic" possibilities: that my gut is manifesting psychological anxiety. Grateful. Wait! Why be grateful for the possibility that medicine can't help me? I'll get there in a minute! I'm trying to keep it snappy and practical for the moment.

• I didn't cancel my next appointments with gut experts. Gratitude.

So what did I mean by gratitude to the psychosomatic possibility? I have just found (and been shown) a fresh insight that allows me to not readily vent my frustration at God, not fall too quickly into doubting him again and reconcile myself and my future with the Christian faith I have known since a child. How's that then?

Firstly, if psychosomatic disorders are a real thing, then if we have a loving Maker, He knows about this thing we do and the brokenness connected to it, and if he is good then his rescue needs to encompass this. That's reassuring.

Secondly, it is more than possible that psychosomatic illness includes a corrupted and deep desire not to he forgotten. Typically, there are two bad ways to get yourself noticed: "Hey! I'm a hero here!" Or "Hey, I'm a victim here!" I was in the second category.

By allowing me to see that I have possibly been seeking victim status, I can now see my psychosomatic liberation as a strangely generous act. I have been shown the freedom of eating without worrying about precisely what I put in my mouth for the first time in many, many months, even though I still have the disappointment of ongoing real physical discomfort in my gut. But do you see how my deepest existential issues could well have been left undealt with via a "shallow" miracle? What if, God, has given me a glimpse of the joy of stomach calm and is giving me a resolve to remove myself from the centre of my own life, my harmful cravings to get noticed, to live the crappy victim life?

Okay, I just sank to saying "crappy", so I'm going to keep going! I want to be super clear what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that there has to be purpose automatically crouching behind the crap. Random rubbish stuff happens to folk, and sometimes, like with me, it can cumulate suddenly out of chance (think about it, how statistically likely would it be for you to experience all your life's misfortune in a perfectly evenly-spaced way?!), but we do owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to look for purpose and avoid victimitus. In a nourishing God-tradition and faith community, I know which way I need to turn for that purpose.

One of the extra crappy things that can happen is this psychosomatic crap: science has got pretty solid evidence of this strong mind-body connection that our environment and our reactions reinforce. Psychosomatic crap is obviously more self-generated than the purely externally-sourced crap, but not uniquely so. If my brain was generatin psychosomatic responses to dairy products, and I'm open to that possibility, then I can take some responsibility, but the results of my 2016 blood test really did tell me I had a terrible reaction to dairy products (even though my lactose breath test, the more widely acknowledged method, said the opposite). I was looking for answers and I believed it. But there is real freedom from this mess!

(BTW I do not think it was in any way "psychosomatic" that I fell and smashed my collarbone while on my bike crossing some tram tracks last Autumn. It probably amounts to one of the biggest of the many mistakes I have made, but it was a pure accident.)

So what does this new type of freedom leave me, still fringed with discomfort and disappointment? Somehow, we have to steer ourselves to a grateful response. Unless we want to be bitter, of course.

Action

So I'm:

• Allowing first my family, and then a widening circle of others occupy my centre. Ultimately this includes the ultimate and perfect other of God himself. Jesus is said to have done this in a somewhat mystic passage of the Bible in Philippians 2; it is known as kenosis.
• Praying for freedom for people I know from their traps and even for myself.
• Worrying (a bit) less.

So it has been a very strange journey over the last weeks on the stomach front and opened me up to a deeper understanding of some of our normal human experience of suffering. Please let me know if this has helped you or could help anyone you know, especially someone who thought they were healed but weren't.

Thank you.