A Testimony of Healing and Grace

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith"

Rooted in John 14:6 · Ephesians 2:8-10 · Romans 10:9 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Titus 3:5 · John 14:23 · Romans 8:11, 6:4 · 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 · Galatians 2:20 · 1 John 4:8 · 1 Peter 2:9 · Colossians 3:1-2

A Note Before We Begin

What follows is a true story. It happened in an ordinary body, in an ordinary life, and it is offered here not so that any reader would think highly of the man it happened to, but so that every reader would see clearly what God can do, and is still doing, for anyone who cries out to Him. The scriptures placed throughout are not decoration. They are the reason the story means anything at all. Take away the God of these verses, and this is simply a story about surgery. Leave Him in it, exactly where He was, and it becomes a story about a Father who heals, who saves, and who moves into the very body and life of the one He redeems.

The Body Broken, and the God Who Heals

The disease was Crohn's. It took three and a half years just to get a diagnosis, and every one of those days, I was in pain. Once they finally knew what it was, it was another three years before the first surgery, because by then it was so badly distended, so twisted and infected in places, that what was supposed to be laparoscopic, a couple of small one-inch incisions, turned into something much bigger. They had to open me from my chest down to my groin, take my intestines completely out of my body, cut out the infected parts, the distended parts, the twisted spots, sew everything that was left back together, and then put it all back inside me and close me up.

The reason for so much of that pain was simple and constant: an intestine's job is to keep moving food along, and every time food reached one of those blocked, twisted, or distended spots, it had nowhere to go. The intestine would keep contracting, keep trying to push the food through, and I would get severe cramps every single time I ate. Those blockages were exactly what had to be cut out.

What amazes me even now is what my body did on its own at those blockage points. God made us so complex that at each one of those spots, the body actually formed its own smaller passageways, fissures, working their way around the blockage so that something could still get through. There were multiple spots like that. But because those fissures were so much narrower than an intestine is supposed to be, they caused their own share of the pain too. Even in the middle of a disease that was breaking my body down, God had built into that same body a way to keep working around the damage. I didn't understand any of that at the time. I just know now, looking back, how well He made us, even down to that.

That was the first surgery. Doctor Greenstein took five feet of small intestine out that time. It wasn't long, within about three months, before it came back again, and I was back into it, the medications, the anti-inflammatories, the steroids, and worse than before. For the next three to three and a half years, I was in and out of the hospital every three to six months for intravenous feeding. It wasn't that I couldn't eat at all, it was that every time I did eat, the cramping was so massive that I wasn't getting enough nutrition from it. I was skin and bones.

Anyone who has lived with a disease like that knows the particular exhaustion of it. It isn't only the pain, though the pain alone would be enough. It's the way it keeps coming back after you thought it was handled. It's watching your own body become something you're fighting instead of something you live inside of, year after year, hospital stay after hospital stay, for the better part of a decade. I want to be honest about the length of it, because the healing that came afterward only means what it means against the backdrop of how long and how relentless that disease actually was.

Doctor Greenstein performed a second surgery, five more feet of intestine, ten feet total between the two operations. And it returned again. After that second surgery, after everything medicine could do had already been done twice and the disease came back anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and cried out to the Lord for healing, because the doctors couldn't do it, and I believed He could. I believed it in that moment. And He did.

I believed He could heal me because He's God, and I truly believed it in that moment. Scripture is direct about why that belief mattered.

It isn't only a matter of knowing who God is. It's earnestly, diligently seeking Him, and that's not a once-a-week, one-hour kind of relationship, the kind where you show up to a church service and never actually build anything with Him beyond that hour. It's a daily diligence, getting to know Him, building an actual relationship with the Lord, developing the kind of faith that believes He can do exactly what He says He can do. By the time I was on that floor, that relationship was already there. I wasn't reaching out to a stranger. I was crying out to a Father I had already spent time earnestly seeking.

I believe that's part of why He met me the way He did. But I believe there was more to it than that too. I believe He knew I would be faithful to share that miraculous healing as part of my testimony of who He is and what He can do. Not that He heals everyone all the time, in the way He healed me. Sometimes what looks like Him not healing is actually Him calling someone home to be with Him instead, and that's not a lesser answer. It just helped me see healing itself differently.

Healing the body is a physical healing. It matters, and I'm grateful for mine every day. But healing our soul spiritually is a permanent healing. We only die once physically, and then we go absent from the body, present with the Lord. We're spiritual beings, and we're going to live forever somewhere. What matters most is knowing we'll spend that forever with a God who loves us and only wants what's best for us. I don't even want to think about life apart from Him, or what that might actually mean. Knowing what God has done, that would be a horrendous way to spend eternity. That's the real weight behind this testimony, not just that He healed my body once, but that He has secured where I'll be forever.

All of that rests on who Jesus actually is. He isn't only the one who healed me. He's the Word Himself, present with the Father from before anything existed at all.

Since that moment, more than thirty years ago now, I have not had one cramp, one pain, anything associated with that disease again in my life. Losing that much intestine changes things. I don't absorb nutrients as well as I used to, because there isn't as much left to absorb with. But praise God, everything is doing great. That healing wasn't gradual and it wasn't partial. It was instant, and it has held for over three decades.

I don't think about it every day anymore. It's been too long for that, and God in His kindness has let it become something I don't have to carry constantly. But every so often it crosses my mind where I would be without Him, ten years of a decade like that, three and a half years just to be diagnosed, ten feet of my own body cut away twice, and then complete and permanent healing the moment I finally had nowhere left to turn but Him.

I work with such awesome doctors, and both of those surgeries mattered, they kept me alive long enough to get to that moment on my knees. I'm not telling this story to diminish the medicine or the skill of the people God used along the way. But that's how good God is, that even after two major surgeries and a decade of relapse, He's the one who finishes what medicine could not. Doctor Greenstein could remove what was diseased, twice. Only God could reach into what remained and make it whole in a way that has never once returned.

The Truth Behind It All

That's why we need to share His love with people, because He is the truth. That's what Jesus literally is. He's the way, the truth, and the life.

A healing like mine could be told as a private miracle and nothing more, a good thing that happened to one man on one night, kept to himself. But that isn't what it is. It's evidence. It's a small, personal proof of a much larger truth, that the God who spoke and the world came into being, who sent His Son to die and rise again, is still active, still listening, still able. My knees on that floor were no different than anyone else's knees would be. What made the difference was who I was crying out to.

Saved by Grace, Not by Works

I love the fact of Ephesians 2:8-9, that we're saved by grace through faith, not by works. It's nothing we can do, it's all God's part. But the result of that is that we're so elated, so thankful, so changed by the fact that we've gone from death to life.

We had a mortal body that's been dying since the day we took our first breath, the day we were born into this world, and we get born again spiritually so that we'll live forever in eternity with our Creator, because He's the one who died on the cross for us, which boggles the mind right there. He goes above and beyond more than it seems even practical in our limited minds.

Ephesians 2:10 says God prepared in advance for us to do good works, as a result of what was done on our behalf, that now we've gone from death to life.

Romans says if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved. That's what gives us this elation, this sense, this ecstasy, living in a state of euphoria because we're so thankful, and now we see the big picture, we have the plan the way it was going to be.

He Made His Home in Me

Once we accept Him into our life, confess with the mouth that He's Lord and believe in our heart, He also gives us the Holy Spirit, that if we love Him and keep His word, the Father will come and live with us and make their home with us.

God did the next best thing, because we're not with Him now, we can't see Him in the physical sense, but He's within us.

That verse is not abstract to me. My body carries ten feet of missing intestine and not one symptom of the disease that took it. I know something about what it means for God's Spirit to give life to a mortal body that had every reason to keep failing.

Giving Him the Glory

Our response, our role, is to give God the glory. That's the whole thing that completes the circle. God is the giver of life, we lost that life in the garden, God's given it back to us if we believe now, and it completes the circle. But we've got to give Him the glory because He's the one who sustains us, gives us breath, created us.

God is all about love. He is love.

Ephesians 2:10 says we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared in advance for us to do. Part of what He prepared in advance for me was this very thing: to proclaim what Jesus did, by faith and not by works, because we could never earn it ourselves. We're so appreciative of what He's done for us that we want to share the story, tell the truth, share our testimony. I've tried to be faithful to that, to keep telling this healing story wherever I go.

The Healing That Mattered Most

But the healing of my body was never actually the main thing. What changed me for good was the spiritual healing, the being born again. Jesus told a man named Nicodemus about this directly, and Nicodemus didn't understand it any better than most of us do at first.

We are all born once, into this world, into these bodies that are dying from the day we take our first breath. But there is a second birth, a spiritual one, and it changes what this whole life actually is. Once that happens, the truth settles into you that when our time on earth is done, we leave to go join our Creator in heaven, absent from the body, present with the Lord.

This earth isn't our home. It's a temporary place. Our home is in heaven with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that is what gives the real peace, not the healing of the disease, but the healing of the soul. Even if Jesus had never chosen to heal my body, even if I had been sent home to be with Him instead, I would still have had peace, because of who God is in my life and what He means to me. The eternal salvation, the new creation in Christ, the old gone and the new here, that's the part that transcends everything else in this story.

Why I Tell This Story

I don't tell this story so anyone would look at me. I tell it because I know what it is to be desperate on a floor, out of options, watched over by good doctors who had already done everything medicine could do, and to have God still be enough. If He did that for me, an ordinary man with nothing special to offer Him, He will do it for anyone who calls on Him in the same way, with the same honesty, the same emptied hands.

That is the whole of the gospel in miniature: grace that isn't earned, a Spirit who moves in, a life that keeps being made new long after the moment of salvation itself. What happened in my body is a picture of what happens in every believer's soul, dead ground made to live again, not because of anything we did, but because of who He is.

He can do that for everybody, everyone who comes to Him and builds that faith. He will give each person their own personal story of resurrection, their own life changed by Christ. He gives you that personal testimony so you can share it with others. Mine is Crohn's disease and ten feet of intestine and a night on my knees. Someone else's will look completely different. But it's all the same story underneath, told a thousand different ways in a thousand different bodies and lives, intricately woven together with Him and in Him, in the unity and oneness of the Holy Spirit, God who is limitless.

A Closing Word

Lord, thank You for hearing me on my knees when I had nowhere else to turn.

Thank You for the mercy that saved me and the grace that keeps me.

Thank You for making Your home in me, and for a body and a life made new.

Let every word of this testimony point to You, and to You alone.

Amen.