stories on Healing

[Saint] Valentine was a priest in Rome when Emperor Claudius II began his hostile reign. Valentine was arrested for performing Christian weddings. While imprisoned, Valentine befriended the jailer’s d...

Josephine Bakhita’s life is a testament of God’s faithfulness in the darkest circumstances. She was born in Darfur, Sudan, among the Daju people. Her first years were happy, but at age eight she was k...

Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...

Some time ago, I read about the work of a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the at...

David (Yonggi) Cho would go on to lead what is recognized as the largest church in the world (the Yoido Full Gospel Church), but his spiritual journey began far from Christianity. Raised as a Buddhist...

There’s a story (probably apocryphal) about a small dog that had been hit by a car and left injured by the side of the road. A passing nurse noticed the wounded animal, saw it was still alive, and sto...

In the early days of my experiments in listening to the Lord, I sensed a distinct word to call a friend, a chaplain at a local college, and see how he was doing. The word carried with it the marks of ...

My husband, Doug, is an athlete whose body is protesting. He has had numerous knee injuries and torn his Achilles tendon twice. Doctors have operated on him, put casts on him and sent him home, thereb...

Agnes Sanford relates how, as the young wife of an Episcopal minister, her child came down with a serious ear infection. It lasted for six weeks while she prayed fearfully and fruitlessly. Then a ne...

My friend Ray McMillan introduced me to the Liberty Bell as a perfect object lesson for America’s racial divide. In addressing why “the bell won’t ring,” Ray describes the crack as a perfect illustrat...

The story is told (as in, it’s made up!) of a small dog that had been struck by a car and lay wounded by the side of the road. A doctor driving by noticed the dog was still alive, stopped his car, pic...

In the story of Jesus and the demon-possessed man in Mark 5:14-20, Jesus gives new life to that man. When the townspeople saw the result of Jesus’ healing – an entirely new man, almost unrecognizable ...

R. C. Sproul recounts an unusual healing by Jesus. In Mark 8, when Jesus visits Bethsaida, a blind man is brought to him to be healed. Jesus leads him out of the village, puts saliva on his eyes, and ...

James Loder, in his book The Logic of the Spirit, talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of reje...

At university, I knew a guy called Captain Scarlet (nicknamed after the lead puppet in a cult TV series to which he bore a striking resemblance). The Captain was the only nineteen-year-old I’ve ever k...

In his book The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of rejec...

In her book The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp shares a beautiful exchange between her and her husband (The farmer). His encouragement is for all of us: that God uses the broken things in this world for good...

Walker Percy wrote six novels in which he made us insiders to the spiritual disease of alienation that he found pervasive in American culture. His name for the condition is “lost in the cosmos.” We do...

A Chinese Christian who heard me speak once asked me if I would write a tract about suffering for his fellow believers in the Orient. I told him I would think about it. But when I did, I realized that...

Right before my freshman year of high school, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that landed me in the intensive care unit. It was one of a dozen such hospitalizations during my younger yea...

As a young pastor, I wanted to pray for Jean, who had been sick in bed for about a week. So I took Mike, a fellow leader in the church, with me to her home. Her husband, Jim, greeted us at the door an...

I know a woman who, after her diagnosis of cancer, prayed twice every day for God to heal her. A year later, as she entered her third round of chemotherapy, she said, “Well, it looks like once again, ...

Brenda Peterson is an author whose work crosses multiple genres, including fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. In an essay entitled In Praise of Skin, Peterson shares a true story from her own ...

The bad news was that a friend’s leg was severed in a gruesome automobile accident. The good news was that it was surgically reattached. A few months later she asked if I wanted to see her scar. I swa...

I can’t help but recall here a scene from The West Wing. White House chief of staff Leo McGarry reaches out to his deputy, Josh Lyman, who is struggling with PTSD. Leo tells him a parable: This guy’...

I saw a live podcast a few weeks ago, and the host, actor Dax Shepherd, gave the audience a couple minutes to ask questions. One young woman in the front row asked him, “How do you get through the har...

The renowned scholar and musician Albert Schweitzer’s life was turned upside down one summer morning in 1896 while reading his Bible. He came upon Matthew 16:25: “For whosoever will save his life shal...