My church occasionally holds a special time of healing prayer in which our pastor anoints with oil those who are sick or in pain and asks God to relieve them of their afflictions. Last spring, at the most recent of these services, a friend of mine who had recently developed chronic pain in multiple places—at first in her feet and more recently in her hip—walked up to the front of the church.
“I’m afraid it didn’t work,” she said when I asked her about the anointing later that week. She was still suffering and wasn’t holding out much hope for a delayed effect. “I didn’t have enough faith,” she concluded.
I knew exactly what she meant. I’d also gone forward to be anointed that past Sunday, for the fifth time in as many years. I developed chronic migraine disorder—a condition which involves, among other things, having a headache for 15 or more days a month—in 2019 while working as a software engineer at Facebook. Ever since, I’d been disabled by frequent, long-lasting migraine attacks, spending an average of 28 days out of every month with a headache that sometimes felt like being stabbed in the eye, other times felt like a wider, more crushing pain throughout my skull, neck, and face. I also developed a litany of other symptoms: I was constantly sensitive to light and smells, for example, plus I was frequently dizzy, fatigued, or inexplicably panicked.
I’d been told by doctors that chronic migraine is an incurable disease—a prognosis that grew bleaker as I ran out of options for managing my pain. I’d been hospitalized four times, tried every medication regardless of side effects, and even traveled across the country in search of second opinions. I avoided a mile-long list of suspected “trigger” foods, including gluten, tomatoes, dairy, bananas, bacon, onions, olive oil—even leftovers. Barring a miracle, I soon realized I was likely to be disabled by pain for the rest of my life.
The first time I got anointed—or was it the second?—was not at church but in my living room. My pastor made a house call because I’d been struggling to make it to church, with its ultrabright track lighting that was sure to aggravate my symptoms. Also, I was embarrassed and didn’t want to be anointed in front of the congregation.
Before anointing me, he recited from James 5:14–16:
Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.
Alongside these specific instructions to believers, the Bible records many stories of miraculous healing. One of these, described by three different biblical authors, is that of the woman who had been menstruating for 12 years. Believing Jesus could heal her, she pushed her way through the crowd surrounding him and touched the edge of his robe. Jesus turned to her and said, “Daughter, your faith has healed you” (Luke 8:48).
The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. Your faith has made you well. As a software engineer with an analytical mind, I interpreted these statements as a type of equation: In exchange for my belief that God would heal me, God would grant miraculous healing. Even then, I knew this to be a fickle formula, similar to what Jesus said about faith being able to move mountains into the sea (Matt. 17:20). I’d never seen a mountain move like that, just as I’d never known a Christian who had been miraculously healed of a physical disease. This mismatch between the promises of God and my experience was uncomfortable, but it was a discomfort I’d been able to ignore. Until now.
That night in my living room, the mysterious connection between faith and healing filled my fogged-over mind as my pastor sat on my ottoman, asked me to confess my sins, then dipped two fingers in the oil. As he drew the shape of a cross on my forehead, I realized there was something I hadn’t confessed: my faithlessness. I didn’t believe God would heal me. I believed he could, but could isn’t the same as would. I, by faithlessness, failed to satisfy the only criteria I knew for getting better.
As the oil trickled into my eyebrows, I still waited in anticipation of some sense of otherworldly peace, the relief of the pain that was catching my breath in my throat. Neither came. I got up the next morning feeling worse than ever.
Did I really ruin the whole thing by not believing this process would work? There was no way to fake genuine faith, of course. But what did this mean for “Your faith has healed you”? Was my inability to muster faith keeping me sick? Was my unbelief staying God’s healing hand?
And if so, what was I supposed to do about that?
I asked myself these questions often over the next six years while taking every opportunity to be anointed that came my way. Each time, I tried my best to believe God would heal me, often asking that he would give me the faith I lacked. But my faith never amounted to much, my symptoms worsened, and I eventually exhausted all of the pharmaceutical and alternative treatments for my condition. I grew angry at God for not providing the faith I thought he required.
Eventually, I hit rock bottom. My migraines worsened to the point that nothing helped them except opioids, and other aspects of my life were simultaneously thrown into crisis. My mental health took a nosedive, and in my despair I ran from God. I gave up on praying or reading the Bible and, despite being a leader within my church community, stopped showing up consistently on Sundays. I still believed in God and considered myself a Christian, but in reality, I was in name only. In constant agony, I struggled to want to worship Christ. After six years of asking God for healing and receiving what felt like the complete opposite, my faith withered away into nothing.
It was in this season of utter faithlessness and deep despair that God began disproving my formulas.
It started with an email from an acquaintance of an acquaintance named Rachel. We’d been connected through an alumna of my MFA program because we were both writers with chronic migraine disorder—though in her email, oddly, Rachel claimed she didn’t have it anymore. A neuroscientist in Utah, after researching chronic migraine for years, had recently made a monumental discovery: This was, in many cases, a curable disease. Rachel’s email went on to say that she, being one of the first people to benefit from this doctor’s research, had been in remission for six months.
This was a wild claim, scientifically speaking, especially because at that time the research Rachel told me about hadn’t been published. And yet I found myself believing her story enough to investigate. If God wasn’t going to heal me, I could at least make another attempt to heal myself.
The days that followed were shocking. I met with the doctor Rachel recommended, who found that I had the same reversible metabolic disorder that had caused her chronic migraines. Three months of an extreme keto diet, he claimed, was all that was needed to reset my metabolism and free me from what I’d been told was a lifelong disease.
By now, the only reason I still attended small group was because my husband led it and it was hosted in our home. But nevertheless, as I pondered whether to try the diet, a close friend came to me during one of those group evenings with a prophetic word. God loved me very much, he said. Also, this treatment would be the end of the road.
As a member of a not-at-all-charismatic church in the Reformed tradition, I’d had very few encounters with the gift of prophecy, and I’d always been a little skeptical of its use. When it came to my illness, I’d learned early on to use similar skepticism as a shield against disappointment. I’d lost track of how many times a doctor had said a treatment would help, only for it to do nothing at all. One doctor even told me, flat out, that he could cure me—in exchange for thousands of dollars.
Yet I couldn’t deny that this prophecy was difficult to ignore. It came through a friend who knew what my illness had done to my life and had walked beside my husband and me through many treatments that hadn’t panned out. Receiving a prophecy from a perfect stranger is one thing. But receiving a prophecy from someone who knows full well the emotional and physical consequences of their words? He was, in no small way, putting our friendship on the line that night—a fact he seemed fully aware of, given the fear in his voice. The whole situation made me wonder if, after nearly six years of silence and my walking away, God still had skin in this game.
I decided to get anointed one more time.
That anointing service was last spring—and it was the same one my friend with chronic pain attended. Though it was performed by the same pastor who had anointed me in my living room six years earlier, it was altogether different in that I, for the very first time, believed it was going to work. Ever since my friend shared the words of prophecy, God had been doing something new in my heart, fostering a faith that felt more like knowing than any I’d ever before experienced.
The next day, I started the three-month diet. A month later, my migraines stopped being chronic. My many sensitivities went away, as did my once-frequent bouts of extreme depression and anxiety. When the three months ended, I transitioned back to a medium-carb but otherwise-normal diet and remained in remission. Today, I’m approaching a major milestone: one full year without chronic migraines.
Was I healed by miracle or medicine? I think both, and I choose to credit God regardless, as he is the one who reveals medical knowledge. But what I do not, and certainly cannot, credit in this process is my faith. On the contrary, God appears to have healed me in spite of my faithlessness.
The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. Your faith has made you well. What am I to make of these statements now? How did I, while running from God, manage to be healed by him?
As someone who has no seminary degree and whose mind often wanders in sermons, I won’t hazard answers to these questions. But I will say this: I clearly had the wrong formula, because in God’s logic system, we’re never in total control of the outcome. If we were, there would be no way for God to surprise us with his infinite love—the same love that, 2,000 years ago, became flesh to confound all the formulas for salvation.
Looking back, I’m not all that concerned with correcting my math. Maybe one day, I will understand how faith relates to healing. But for now, I’m too caught up in a relationship with a God who is entirely unlike the one I thought I knew before. The God I know now is not a heartless despot who withholds favor from all but the most faithful of his subjects. (He does withhold things sometimes, and he does say no sometimes, and in those moments, I’m sure most of us would prefer he didn’t.)
He is, instead, the God whose eye is on the sparrow, who can and does attend to the suffering of his children when he has literally an entire universe of reasons to ignore their cries. He is also the God who turns his face to those who say, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24, ESV), whether through their words or through their actions—actions such as getting anointed over and over again, desiring each time to believe healing is still possible despite the mounting evidence to the contrary.
As for my friend—shortly after she was anointed, her pain improved. Then, a few months later, it returned. I wish I knew why, but even more so, I wish that God would heal her as he did me, and I often tell him so.
I’m also trying to trust in his timing, to believe that his ways are higher than my own, and to be a source of comfort for my friend as she walks the same dark, lonely path I’ve trodden. Whether we feel it or not, God walks alongside us. And to him, the darkness is as light.
Natalie Mead is currently pursuing an MFA while writing a memoir about chronic pain, relationships, and faith. Read more of her writing at nataliemead.com.
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