Healing for Life: An Exploration of the Successes and Failures of Spiritual Healing

'My main worry was that all the healing ministers I’d heard of ended up in some vast football stadium, shouting into microphones and commanding disabled people to leap out of their wheelchairs and run the marathon. It was not my cup of tea. I’m not an extrovert and physical stamina is not my strong point. Standing up in front of crowds doing anything at all sounded to me like a nightmare, even before being called a crank and phoney and all kinds of other names.
'Still, he was God and I wasn’t. After several sleepless nights, I ended up in the kitchen at three in the morning and gave in gracefully.
"OK, Lord, I’ll do it. If you want me to do healing rallies in a stadium, I will. Just, could you make sure I don’t faint with fright or anything?"
'I heard a distinct chuckle, then an amused voice saying, "But Clare, you’d hate it!"’

What would your first reaction be if you felt that God wanted to use you to heal people?
What would your second reaction be if you then felt God ask you to fail?

'I may have been slow on the uptake but I couldn’t see the point of praying with people in order to fail to heal them. What good would it do them to be disappointed? What would it do to their faith in God? And – let’s not be polite here, Lord – what was it going to do to me?'

Writing from personal experience, the author of 'Healing for Life' explores a range of failed as well as successful healings, and debates whether in the long-term some of those failures reveal more than the successes.

In some of the cases described, people whose symptoms were quickly removed, who returned to the life they had led before they were ill, seemed less effectively healed than those whose requests were not met but who saw their lives change in ways they would never have planned for themselves.

Some sceptics showed unexpected faith in the process of attaining health that was both spiritual and physical. Some who believed God could heal could not accept there were no guarantees he would do it the way they requested.

'It seems to me, with hindsight, that God did something amazing for each of those people who didn't get what they asked for originally. In some cases they got close to getting what they wanted, and at the moment when they could see it ahead of them they made a choice.'

Reading 'Healing for Life' may change your view of healing - or may change your life.