Healing

I watched a healing service conducted by Kenneth Haggin at a church in Sterling Heights, MI. He spent perhaps a half hour preaching about the woman with the issue of blood. Many of his phrases sounded like he had just read MacNutt (The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance). The second half hour showed him praying for the people in need of healing in rapid fire. He explained that it worked better for him that way, when he felt he had the anointing, which presented itself as a burning in his hands, he had to use it quickly. I also found I interesting that he distinguished between the gift of healing (restoring what is already there, like bringing hearing to a damaged ear drum) and miracles (creating something that wasn’t there to begin with, like bringing hearing to someone born with out an ear drum). He had the gift of healing, he said, but he would believe with people for a miracle as well.

Many fell under the power of God as he prayed for them. I have been in these kinds of services and have no problem with people falling. I watched the people who didn’t fall when he prayed with some amusement. I watched their faces as they tried to figure out what to do next. I noticed that Hagin laid his hand on the top of their head with the heel of his palm resting on their forehead. He would push back as he proclaimed, “Receive!” I have had strong physical reactions to the Spirit as people have prayed for me, and I also know what it is like to loose your balance as a minister pushes on your head. I found myself trying to identify which ones just lost their balance and which were overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit (like the lady with the cane who started quaking before she fell.)

Even in the midst of my amusement and critical ogling, a curious thing happened. Toward the end of the video, the Spirit was working on me too! At times when he said, “Receive” my arm would have a strong reflexive twitch. It is weird I know, but that is a way my body has routinely reacted to being overcome by the Spirit. I wanted to find someone to pray for when I was done watching to see if I could share some of that “anointing.”

I have continued to experience this as well. As I read scholarly treatments of healing, the Spirit overtakes me and my shoulders quake. Tonight as Cliff was playing the part of the man born blind at our lenten service, I felt that same electric shock move through me when we described how he was healed.

That's what it is like too... just now I remembered the time that I leaned one hand on a cooler in the coffeehouse and the other hand on a display case with faulty wiring and had a nice jolt of 220 run through my arms. That same jerk reaction is what happens to me still when the Spirit is on me. Tears come to my eyes after it happens and a tenderness rests on me.

As I said this has happened several times now as I have been reading about reading, especially when I start daydreaming about God using me in that gift, strengthening the latent gift of healing I have identified might be in me. Perhaps it is the Holy Spirit dreaming along with me and encouraging me to go for it.