A Hockey Model Of Healing

A lot of healing-related questions recently came up in my life and started to really perplex me. Of course, I took them to God and began asking Him about them. It took a few weeks before He answered me, but when He did, God used a hockey game (of all things) to answer my questions. Before I explain the answer, let me share what some of the questions were.

The first question had to do with why a friend of mine with lung cancer was not getting healed. We had prayed for her and seen a noticeable improvement in her condition. I took that as a demonstration of God's desire to heal her. But a few days later she had a relapse and ended in the hospital. The doctors were able to stabilize her and send her home. But since then she has been in and out of the hospital multiple times and her condition is slowly getting worse instead of better. I believe God has already demonstrated His willingness and desire to heal her and I was very perplexed as to why He wasn't completing the healing and allowing her condition to get worse.

Another friend's husband had a bad accident where his leg was seriously injured. He had to have a skin graft from his stomach as part of the surgery to restore the leg. Unfortunately, the surgery was not very successful. He ended up on crutches and could hardly walk with those. He attended a service a healing evangelist from Argentina prayed for him and his leg was miraculously healed. He could walk without his crutch, the pain was greatly reduced and he got back almost his full range of motion. But shortly after the healing in his leg, his stomach began to develop complications from the skin graft. He has been in and out of the hospital with infections and he has had one surgery after another he keeps getting worse instead of better. That has been really bothering me--why would God heal his leg and then allow those problems to surface on his stomach?

Then there is the dilemma of inconsistencies in my own healing ministry. There are times when I pray for the sick and everyone in the meeting is healed. There are other times when I pray for people and hardly anyone is healed. Those times when few are healed really frustrate me. I have seen God do all sorts of amazing things that have grown my faith--growing back missing body parts, opening blind eyes, opening deaf ears, crippled people walking, people healed of cancer, etc. So I feel like my faith has grown so that I truly expect to see God heal when He tells me to pray for the sick. But those healings don't always come.

I spoke at a retreat a few days after Christmas, and there were a lot of healing needs there. The Lord instructed me to schedule a special meeting during an afternoon break to pray for the sick. Many came for prayer and some came to help pray. Hardly anyone was healed, even though had God told me to schedule this special prayer time, which was a big disappointment for me. In fact, one of the people who wasn't healed had the flu, and when I prayed for her, I caught that flu and was very sick for two weeks.

Another question was related to why I get sick so frequently after having a healing meeting where others are healed. I have come home very sick from most of my missions trips and from some of my in-country speaking engagements. Often when I pray for the sick, I get counter attacked in the area of health where there have been the most healings. Over the past few years, my own personal health has not been that great. That is a dilemma for me--how come God will heal others through me but then not guard my own health?

Then there was one more question that may sound like a trivial thing, but it was a biggie to me. I had been suffering from what is called "old eyes" where the lens continues to grow and after a certain age it becomes harder to focus on certain things. I was at the point where I needed reading glasses to read small-to-medium print. The power of God came on me in a Todd Bentley meeting in July of 2003 and my vision was completely restored. I could read fine without glasses--but it only lasted about a month or two and then my vision began to deteriorate again. In fact, it is so bad now that in dimmer light, I have to put on reading glasses to read just about anything. And I need them for an alarming number of things in bright light as well. Why would the power of God come on me for healing two and a half years ago and then only last for a few months? Why wouldn't the healing have a lasting effect? Not everyone my age needs reading glasses--my husband is 4 years older than me and his reading vision is still perfect. Why would God heal me only to let me get worse again?

These questions were perplexing me. Perhaps some similar ones have perplexed you as well from time to time.

I knew the "standard" explanations, but they did not seem to suffice or to cover the situation. I knew that when you cast out a demon, it will usually try to come back and the healed person may need to command it to leave again. I knew that things like unforgiveness or un-repented sin or willful disobedience can short-circuit a healing. I knew that we need to change certain behaviors that made us sick in the first place because we will just get sick again if we keep doing the things that made us sick in the first place.

I also knew that some things are harder to heal than others. I remembered the passage from Matthew 17:14-21, when Jesus came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and discovered His disciples could not heal the boy with epileptic seizures. The disciples had asked Jesus why they could not heal the boy and Jesus had answered (verse 21), "This kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting." In other words some demons (and their related diseases) are harder to get rid of than others.

But that information did not satisfy me. I was starting to feel discouraged and I wondered if I really belonged in ministry praying for the sick. I brought my discouragement and my questions to God and I began asking Him what was going on.

God is an amazingly faithful God. He has this incredible way of meeting us when we are down and encouraging our faith. I suspect you have experienced His hand of encouragement in your own life from time to time. He starts doing a string of "neat things" in your life. Any one of them might be a "coincidence," but He strings far too many of them together to be random chance. Then your spirit begins to realize that God is working on your behalf and you begin to feel encouraged. That is what God did with me over a three or four day period. Then He brought it all together one evening when I was watching a hockey game on television with my husband.

It was a very exciting game where our team was playing on of the top ranking teams in the NHL, and both teams were playing very well. It was fast paced and action packed game, and it was very exciting to watch. It was also a low scoring game with excellent scoring chances and outstanding goal tending by both teams. The game was pretty close. My team was in the lead but the other team was famous for end-of-game comebacks.

When there was only 53 seconds left in the game, the phone rang. It was all call from Hong Kong, so I took the call and missed the end of the game.

One of the things we talked about in the call was a lady who I prayed for when I was in Hong Kong 4 months earlier. She had lung cancer. She attended a different church but she had come to my service for prayer-- God healed her. That healing made a big impact on the people in the service. It has been almost four months since that healing and the lady is still doing quite well.

I had forgotten about that healing until the pastor from Hong Kong mentioned it. (Funny how we can tend to forget the victories in healing and focus on the apparent failures...) I had been so caught up in my other friend's lack of healing that I had started to think that maybe I did not have authority to pray for lung cancer. It really helped and encouraged me to be reminding of that healing in Hong Kong and to hear that the lady was still doing very well. I had a sense of God saying "See, I told you so!" in my spirit, and I knew that I am called to keep on praying for the sick.

When I got off the phone, the game was over. I wanted to know what happened in the game I had been watching so I asked my husband about it. Did our team win? (Yes they did.)