i watched God heal everyone but me

I was lying on the floor at my friend Sam’s house with a handful of women praying over me, and out of nowhere she started digging her hands into my ribcage. Hard.

Which is exactly what I had told her never to do.

A few weeks before that I had booked a session with her and said it plainly. You can work on me, but you cannot touch my ribcage. I had been hurt by therapists before and I was not doing that again. She agreed.

So when she went straight for my ribs, I stayed quiet. I remember thinking, I told her not to do that. If she’s doing it anyway, she must have heard from God.

Afterward she told me she had argued with Him about it. He told me to release the fascia, and I said, Lord, she told me not to touch her ribs, she is going to kill me. But I had to obey.

Let me back up, becuase that moment is the end of a very long road.

I was in chronic pain for seventeen years. Not the kind you push through. The kind that took two years of my life to a bed. And nobody could tell me what it was. Torn cartilage, they said. The physical therapy did nothing.

So I did the only thing I had left. I went on a five day fast and asked God to heal me. Which is a little funny looking back, becuase I had never once seen God heal anybody. I grew up Lutheran. I sat in Bible churches and nondenominational churches. Not one time did I see it. I just figured, surely He can, even if I have never watched Him do it.

I did not get healed on that fast.

What I got instead was two things I was not asking for. I stumbled onto a video from a man I had never heard of, Dr. Randy Clark, where people were being healed right there on the screen. And I sat there and thought, okay. You did it for them. You can do it for me. That video is the reason I got on a plane to Colorado for my first Global Awakening conference, where I had an encounter with the Holy Spirit that wrecked me for months. My husband of fourteen years eventually sat me down and asked what had happened to me, because I was different and he could see it.

And during that same fast, after seventeen years of no answers, I found the words for my pain. Slipping Rib Syndrome. I read the description and knew. That was it. Before the fast was over I had also found a surgeon in West Virginia who operates on it. I flew there. I had the surgery.

For about a year, I was good. Really good. Riding my bike, lifting weights, praying for other people and watching God heal them.

Then I went to a conference in Orlando, standing up front during worship, and the old pain came roaring back through my rib cage out of nowhere. Pain I had not felt in over a year. And right there in that moment I agreed with it. The pain is back. I am in bondage to my body again.

That agreement cost me the next year. Electric shocks through my rib cage. Random surges with no warning. My surgeon put me on the schedule for a second surgery and told me this one carried a real risk of hernias.

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Here is the part that I think is actually the story.

The whole time I was in that, I was praying for other people and watching them get healed.

I would lay hands on a stranger and watch pain leave a body that was not mine. I would fly home and lie awake with my own ribs stabbing me from the inside. Another year bedridden, watching God heal other people through my hands while my own body screamed.

The first person I ever prayed for was a man named Kenny, at a conference in Texas. He had neuropathy in his hands. He told me that when he lifted them in worship he could not feel them, and then he said, I feel like you are supposed to be the person to pray for me. I actually looked behind me. Wait. Me? You sure?

I had zero faith he would be healed. None. I had no track record and no business praying for anybody’s body. But I had just sat under teaching on how to do it, so I said okay, let’s pray. After the first prayer I asked what he felt. My hands feel really hot. So we prayed again. And Kenny was completely healed, standing there with his hands in the air, both of us crying.

In Brazil I was praying for a deaf woman and felt the Lord say, she needs to sing. Which made no sense, which is usually how I know it is Him. So she sang. The power of God hit her and she went down and lay there with the biggest smile on her face, and when she sat up she could hear. She told me afterward she used to sing worship at her church before a disease took both her voice and her hearing. He gave her back both.

Just a few weeks ago a woman on the prayer team at my own church had back pain, a ten out of ten. We prayed. She took off running across the room. I am not exaggerating that. From a ten to running.

So I know He does it instantly. I have watched it with my own eyes more times than I can count.

He just did not do it that way for me.

He did it through Sam. Week after week after week, for months, releasing connective tissue that had been bound up for years. The pain left slowly. Slow enough that I cannot point to a single moment and call it the miracle. I cancelled the second surgery. And a year after that I was stronger than I had been since I was a Division I athlete. Lifting heavy. Feeling like a beast in the gym.

God healed me. He just did not do it the way I asked, or on the
timeline I would have picked, or through the hands I expected.

I keep coming back to the blind man in Mark 8. Jesus prays for him once and asks what he sees, and the man says people look like trees walking around. Half healed. Blurry. So Jesus puts His hands on him a second time, and then he sees clearly.

"He looked up and said, 'I see people; they look like trees walking
around.' Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his
eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything
clearly." (Mark 8:24-25)

That is in the Bible on purpose. Jesus put mud on one man’s eyes. He spit on another. He prayed for this one twice. None of that is in anybody’s five step healing model.

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So if you are the one still waiting, I want to say this carefully, because I have been where you are and I know how much cheap encouragement stings.

A slow healing is not a lesser healing. A healing that came through a therapist’s hands over eight months is not a downgrade from one that came in a worship service in nine seconds. And the wait is not evidence that He passed over you. I prayed for strangers and watched them get up while I stayed down, and I want you to hear from someone who actually lived that stretch that it was not God withholding. It was God routing it through a person I had not met yet.

And notice what He needed from me in the meantime. Not big faith. I had none the day Kenny got healed. He just needed me to say yes while I was still waiting on my own answer.

If you are in the waiting right now, or if you have a healing story of your own that never got to be told out loud, hit reply and tell me. One line is enough. I read every one, and I will pray over what you send me.

With you,
Rachel

rachelngom.com

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