A Supernatural Healing for the Glory of God

Hello Crossway family! I wanted to write an update about something God did for me recently, something that testifies to His glory in a unique way. As many of you know, the past few years for me have been marked by major chronic illness. I began to lose foods that I could eat around 2019, but it was manageable. Then, interestingly, about a week before our public launch on Easter as a church in spring of 2024, my health began to crater. A strange mental fog settled on me before I had to preach on Easter Sunday, and I rapidly began losing the ability to eat all sorts of different foods. It is not lost on me that this happened basically right as our church launched publicly; it smelled like spiritual warfare. As the months passed, it got substantially worse. My energy fell out of the floor, and my overall cognitive function dropped about 20%, which made things like communicating, preaching, writing, and counseling excruciatingly difficult. I lost memory and the general ability to be tactful and self-aware. All the joy in preaching evaporated as I entered survival mode. I had to limit my diet severely as more and more foods would cause such severe reactions as to make me bedridden. During this time, I lost all dairy, eggs, gluten, coffee, everything spicy, and countless other things. I lived off rice, meat, and fruits and vegetables, but even that wasn’t fully predictable. Work and life became so difficult in the worst moments of the season that I contemplated taking disability. What’s worse, I had never experienced depression before, but found myself in such low lows that there were days I just wished life would be over. That was a place I had never been. By God’s grace, my co-pastors, wife, and church family held me up as I treaded water. 

As I walked with God through the agony, I felt the opposite of abandoned. In fact, the frequency with which I was hearing God’s voice increased dramatically as I clung to him every morning. He would often speak to me through His word and prayer about suffering, my pride, waiting on the Lord, the discipline God brings upon his beloved sons and daughters, and much more. Also, dare I say, I became convinced He was telling me He would heal me as I sought Him. I would ask Him “when” all the time. I’ll never forget one day when he gave me Acts 1:7, “it is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” At one point, God gave me a divine appointment on an airplane ride, which led me to trying a very specific supplement that gave me substantial energy relief. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. I continued to lose the ability to eat more foods and watched my testosterone drop with successive blood tests. By the end of 2025 it got so low my mood was swinging wildly, and I struggled to muster the energy for much. I told my wife, “If it keeps going like this, I don’t think I can do this job much longer than another year, maybe 18 months.” She understood, and we held onto hope.

I was also preparing for and panicking over our third child due in February. How could I support my wife the way she needed while I was this unstable and ill? I had limited myself to asking God about my illness to once a month. Asking more often than that at this stage felt impatient and faithless before the almighty God. Surprisingly, in November, I felt Him indicate that I was nearing the end. How? What did this mean? Not sixty days later, I had my answer. A friend at the church reached out and said that while praying for me, she believed the Lord spoke to her about my healing. She and her husband wanted to gather some people to pray and fast. Even though we had done this before, I was happy to oblige. About a dozen people prayed and fasted. Everyone also got the chance to pray over me at Life Group on Wednesday, January 14^th. They prayed over some very specific things from my life that they felt were connected to the illness based on God’s leading. 

While I didn’t feel anything different during the prayer (other than loved by our people!), at the end, one of them encouraged me to test some foods the next day. I balked, knowing the price I would pay if I wasn’t healed would be extremely high. Nonetheless, I did. The next day, during our annual retreat, my wife and I prayed over and planned for the coming year. I thought to myself, well if I’m going to try, I might as well go down in glory. I ordered calamari, pizza, and wine. Historically, I would know within twenty minutes if I ate something major off my diet, let alone something this egregious. I ate dinner and felt nothing. Hours passed, still nothing. I didn’t believe it. How could it be? It had almost been two years of major illness, longer if you counted when I first started losing foods. Was this really the end? I wept the rest of the night because I was in such emotional shock. My wife didn’t know what to do, it was hard for her to let her guard down and be convinced. Was I healed? In the next few days, my mind cleared substantially, and my gut normalized. My energy level exploded. The Lord Jesus had reached down and touched my body that Wednesday night, healing me. He returned all foods to me. My Lord listened to my agonized cries and the prayers of his people and bent reality for me. Jesus did what $6,000 in medical expenses couldn’t do. 

As the days have passed, the vast majority of my symptoms have evaporated even as a few remain. Joanie was finally convinced after a few weeks and stopped asking, “Do you feel the same today though?” I’m not immortal and still need to eat like a reasonable human that isn’t in middle school, but I fully expect the Lord’s healing to be complete this year as we continue to pray. How coincidental that this happened right before we as a church did a three-part series on spiritual gifts. It smells like God’s providence! The Lord has also begun to bind up my wounded soul. At the bottom of the suffering, I was deeply ashamed of how I talked to God, and how I felt towards Him, how I questioned Him. Pastors shouldn’t do that right? He is healing that as well. For those of you still in various forms of suffering and illness, I want to encourage you. It is only in seasons of suffering, perhaps even prolonged suffering, where we can become convinced of the goodness of God in any and every circumstance. The worship of those who still call on God’s name in the pit of agony is a unique glory to Him. In my darkest moments of doubt, Psalm 118:6-7 said something very simple that I clung to, “the Lord is on my side”. For those in deep suffering, I would seek to persuade you, the Lord is still in fact on your side. The riches of the gospel are still yours, and the Lord Jesus still walks with & loves his sons & daughters in the valley of the shadow of death. 

“Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”

Hosea 6:1-3