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Notes from a Faith Healing Meeting
I went to a healing meeting with my wife and it was as atrocious as I expected. Nevertheless, I was happy to be there because it beat sitting home alone on a Friday night with a wide-open internet.
I don’t have a particular dog in the fight around the theology of healing. I’ve heard the stories of the near-death woman over whom the church gathered for intercession and there she is now singing in the choir. And I’ve heard stories that went the other way. I can’t argue with someone’s experience.
Further, I would never fault a person for grasping at any kind of hope in times of distress and uncertainty. Recently a young boy had a dreadful accident and was near death. I received frantic emails and texts that it was now time for the church to rally and pray in order to see a miracle. A special service at a local faith-healing church was quickly organized.
“Prayer has two dimensions, one mysterious, the other not. There are simply too many cases of prayers being answered for us to deny that it makes a difference to our fate. It does. I once heard the following story. A man in a Nazi concentration camp lost the will to live—and in the death camps, if you lost the will to live, you died. That night he poured out his heart in prayer. The next morning, he was transferred to work in the camp kitchen. There he was able, when the guards were not looking, to steal potato peelings. It was these peelings that kept him alive. I heard this story from his son.” — Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
It has been a very difficult few days for me. My usual stoicism finally failed me yesterday morning and I spent a longer than expected amount of time laying face down on the floor of my office, weeping in anguish … a deep grief expressed … crying out to God for help. The last time I allowed myself such an emotional outburst was in the weeks before the election as stories of voting shenanigans began showing up in the news. We were sitting at the dinner table, the entire family, and a wave came over me. I put my hands on my face with elbows on the table, and the tremors began … groanings too deep for words.
I didn’t sleep much last night, which isn’t very different from every other night, but last night I had something new on my mind. Images of my mother’s ravaged body after decades of experimental drugs administered by heinous injections intended to treat her RA, which they did, but they also slowly killed her off in so many other ways.
The whole neighborhood is home and the grills are going. I sniff the air like Yogi Bear and start pulling things out of the freezer to grill for the week. My cousin from Vegas called to check on us. She is 10 years older and, if there was a liberal chart, she would fall off. We have been closer in touch since the passing of her sister, my other cousin, 15 years older, a couple of years ago. We don’t breach politics. We skirted the issue when she revealed her “psychotic event” when Trump was elected – sigh. So we keep it light. I love the sound of her melodic voice that reminds me of childhood.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida 
Mrs. iWe’s son #2 and his bride.