There are many stripes of Christianity and the flavor I grew up with was Pentecostal. The kind with people speaking in tongues in a hot, sweaty gymnasium on Wednesday night. It’s when there was no Sunday school for kids, so you amuse yourself with coloring in all the o’s in on an old Sunday bulletin while your ADHD sibling crawls under the chairs and no one scolds. The musicians play for as long as the Spirit leads and people come to cry and have hands laid on them. Sometimes people got healed and sometimes they got slain in the spirit. 

I can’t say it didn’t ever work, because some people really did turn their lives around. We knew people who were empowered to walk away from drugs and alcohol, improving their daily living situations. Other times people just came back again and again, living out each week the same as the week before. 

We were mostly of the second type, not drugs, but other difficulties. My parents struggled to hold down jobs, often scraping by paycheck to paycheck. Money was usually tight and many family members suffered from an undiagnosed, inherited condition that expressed itself in painful and bizarre symptoms. It’s not like we were avoiding doctors on purpose. Late 20th century medicine was not great at figuring out what was wrong with everyone either. 

I had terrible hay fever while living in a valley that produced the most grass seed in the world.  I took a lot of Benadryl that made me sleepy, Seldane that made my heart race and prayers that didn’t do much for my daily symptoms. I also tried homeopathic tinctures, bee pollen, and signed up for an experimental European study that I had to drop out of when my lips swelled up like a trophy wife on botox. What certainly did not help was church people suggesting that you did not have enough faith to see the cure. Likewise, non-church people mocked us for believing. If you’re sick, either way, it’s probably your fault. It’s nobody’s fault and I still buy tissues in bulk.

As for miracles, we occasionally received checks in the mail, but we also lost my Dad to an aortic aneurysm. It was not until six years later that genetic testing was able to give us a name for what ailed him. Unfortunately, having a name for disease alone does not heal it. 

Now, I am a grown up person trying to navigate my life with a family. I am praying for family members who have had strokes and cancer, and going to all the hospitals. Doctors are more expensive and cures more illusive than ever. I go to church, pray with friends and family and read a lot. Between work calls, I scour the internet and the scriptures looking for help anywhere I find it.  I promise, if I locate the answer, you will be the first to know.