Wednesday, August 30, 2017

DIVINE HEALING: Asthma, bronchitis, rosacea

Is this the end?
By Ada Brownell
I rushed to the doctor’s office almost in panic. Bronchitis had me by the chest and I’d had a lung-ripping cough for nearly three months. In the middle of that siege, I came down with an antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection that flared with an invading army of bacteria. While I battled that, my face bloomed red and Rosacea pimples formed from my scalp to my neck, one of the worst cases my dermatologist had seen.
A urologist warned me years ago some day antibiotics wouldn’t clear up the resistant infections for me.
 For these simultaneous illnesses I’d tried two different antibiotics and they didn’t work.

After a CT scan, a lung doctor diagnosed the bronchitis problem as pneumonia, emphysema and asthma and prescribed an inhaler that cost $200 a month, as well as a rescue inhaler to make breathing easier. Those two prescriptions alone would quickly devour my yearly insurance provision, and he insisted I take them the remainder of my life.
I’d nearly emptied similar inhalers my primary care doctor prescribed and the bronchitis was worse.
“Have you had your flu shot?” the pulmonologist (lung doc) asked. “If you get the flu, you’ll be in the hospital.”
 I got the shot.
I’d made two or three trips to Urgent Care, then to my primary care doctor, and then to the kidney physician (nephrologist) who has done wonders for my blood pressure and also is great for infections. Nothing helped.
At first I stayed home because of the Rosacea, but then I ventured out. People stared. “Does it hurt?” more than one person asked. Being stared at gave me empathy for the handicapped.
I know God heals because we’ve had miracles in our churches and family. Yet, I always think of James’ teaching in the Bible that tells us faith without works is dead (James 2:17), so I usually follow a physician’s instructions. But nothing worked.
 Because they weren’t helping, I quit the inhalers and coughed less, wheezed less, and breathed easier.
But it was the dangerous UTI infection that propelled me to the prayer line at church. An unchecked infection sometimes can go throughout the body and kill you. I went forward once. I went twice. I went three times.
My faith wound around James 5:14: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for elders of the church, and let him pray over him, anointing him with in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” Yet I know God is sovereign and the Word says, “This is the confidence we have in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears. And if we know he hears us, we know we have the petition we desire of him” (1 John 5:14).
 I believe God wants us to be in health. Jesus not only healed when He walked the earth, He took the beating before He was crucified for our healing: “By His stripes we are healed” (1 Peter 2:24 and Isaiah 53:5). He knows what it is to hurt.
Healing and miracles depend on my faith, too, and fear isn’t faith. Yet, God confirmed His word with signs following.
The day I went into a panic, I told the kidney doctor, “I’m willing to try one from the family of drugs I was allergic to thirty years ago and I’d had welts all over me.”
He prescribed the drug. I took it and no reaction occurred. The UTI pain disappeared. I was on the road to recovery!
He’d tested the bacteria to see what kind of medication would help, and discovered another drug also would kill the infection. Praise the Lord! Now I have at least two antibiotics that work. Perhaps when I need them, others will work also.
The bronchitis and Rosacea gradually disappeared, too.
It’s been three years and I have no symptoms of emphysema or asthma and two of my physicians told me not to return to the lung doctor.
God still cares when we’re sick, and he tells us how to believe for healing, what to do, including going to physicians that He has poured His wisdom into. Yet, we also know the Lord is there when we aren’t healed. He loves us just as much, comforting and sending other people to love on us.
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