Healing – Paul Nordman

Testimony: A Double Healing

“I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.” — Psalm 9:1 NIV

For most of my life, prayer for healing — anyone’s healing — was conflicting for me. I believed in miraculous healing; I had witnessed some and knew of others, so I could not deny it. Yet the fact remained that, when as a seven-year-old boy I prayed for my dying father, his sudden heart attack took his life that day. Thereafter, prayers for healing stirred dissonance within. But this is changing. Here’s how.

Early last December, I awoke in the middle of the night with a frightening sensation: the bedroom seemed aslant and uncontrollably spinning counterclockwise. It was like riding the Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair, involuntarily. My doctor diagnosed vertigo and referred me for physical therapy. Over the next two months, therapists tried unsuccessfully to correct the problem through the Epley maneuver — moving my head through a pattern of positions to clear from my inner ear loops the calcium carbonate crystals that weren’t supposed to be there. One therapist said I was only the second person she could not “clear.” I thanked her for all her help, and resigned myself to living with vertigo.

“And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.” — Isaiah 30:21 ESV

One or two weeks later, I heard these words, inaudible yet as clear as any tongue could speak: “We are going to do this together — you and Me.” Now to this point only the therapists and my wife, Peggy, had guided me through the Epley maneuver (perhaps 50 times or so), but here was God, calling me to trust Him and to act with Him. My response this time was different: I’d always known God could heal, but this time I felt a surrendering closeness to Him and an inner knowledge that He would act. Then as we together put me through the maneuver one more time, I knew something was happening, that crystals were indeed moving through and out of my inner ear loops, so essential for balance. Then I waited. Minutes. Hours. Days. Now months. No crystals; no vertigo. Praise the I AM, I am healed.

Yet it seems another healing is happening, too, a healing in the soul: an acquiescence to God’s sovereignty and the forfeiture of mine; the acceptance of God’s will and the submission of mine; and the assurance of God’s love, the resting place of my own. I share this with you as a testimony of God’s love and power. He hears you. He cares for you. He will act in His time.

“LORD my God, I cried to You for help, and You healed me.”¹ You are “the Lord, [our] healer.”² To You be all glory and praise. In Christ we pray. Amen.

¹ Psalm 30:2 ESV
² Exodus 15:26 ESV

The Pharmacist and the Physician

True story. It was in a church committee meeting several years ago that we took time to seek the Spirit’s guidance on a matter through Scripture and prayer. When it came time to share our thoughts, a doctor on the committee looked at his scrawled notes and, a bit baffled, confessed, “I can’t read my own writing!” Seated next to him was one in the pharmaceutical profession. He calmly reached over, took the physician’s notepad, and said, “Here, let the pharmacist read it.” And he did! He read the doctor’s chicken scratch verbatim! Talk about perpetuating a stereotype!

The prophet Jeremiah once mused, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”¹ We know of our sin, and some of it we know all too well—it has been too painful and discouraging for us not to. Just when we think we’ve seen the worst of it, however, or that we’ve overcome the most of it, we realize otherwise. For though our hearts are our own, we can neither entirely read them nor fully comprehend them. What temptations sneak up on you, for instance, and tantalize a hidden chamber of your soul? But God can search our hearts, and He does know our minds,² and this is for our own good. Why? Because, as Paul writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, the Spirit himself intercedes for us . . . in accordance with the will of God.”³ So also, through the Word of God, the Spirit God speaks understanding into the deepest reaches of our soul “to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives; it straightens us out and helps us do what is right.”⁴ He turns a tough diagnosis into a great prognosis.

There are times when we cannot read our own hearts, and there are other times when we choose not to for fear of what we will find. But like a physician, “the Lord looks at the heart”⁵ and like the pharmacist, he reveals it to us in a way we can absorb, understand and commence with our healing. We can entrust ourselves to God entirely, for He is all about our wellbeing.

Father, You love us perfectly. Forgive us when we are oblivious to our sin or when we are afraid to face it. Jesus has paid for all of our sin, so we are perfectly safe in facing any of it, knowing You are transforming us into something unimaginably better. Lead us in this confidence and joy today. In Christ we pray. Amen.

¹ Jeremiah 17:9
² Jeremiah 17:10
³ Romans 8:26-27
⁴ 2 Timothy 3:16 TLB
⁵ 1 Samuel 16:7