One night I prayed to God that God would protect me. Then I laid down for a little while and just rested. I heard the following bible verse in my spirit: “Jesus is my strength and my shield.” After I heard that I immediately got up and went to my computer to look up the verse. The verse is Psalm 28:7, and it said, “The Lord is my strength and my shield.” The only thing that was different was God’s title. But Jesus was God on earth, He is God incarnate and He is God resurrected from the dead.
What other god sacrificed His son for people because he wants to be with them in heaven? What other god changed the world so much? What other god is continually healing and providing? What other god is constantly is creating? What other god loves you and only wants the best for you? What god gives you peace? What god calls you, his child? What other god rose from the dead after being dead for three days? I have studied a lot of different religions, and I can’t ever remember reading about any other god but God of the Christians, that calls people His children and loves them. Not in Hinduism, not in Buddhism, not in Islam, not in Greek mythology not Egyptian in mythology or any other religion. No other god loves us like God the Father
I have dealt with physical pain since I was a teenager. I started getting terrible pain in my stomach when I was fifteen years old. I did not know what was causing it. I had a test done at the hospital that consisted of drinking a white, chalky, terrible tasting liquid and getting an x-ray of my stomach. The doctor didn’t find anything wrong with me. Years later, I heard about irritable bowel syndrome, known as IBS, which is what I have. After I stopped drinking dairy milk, it helped a lot, but I still get a lot of pain in my lower intestines.
Years later in my forties, I developed excruciating pain in my thumbs, near my wrist from work. For years the doctors told me I had tendonitis but never did an x-ray. After dealing with that pain for 4 years, I was adamant about getting an x-ray. and it showed arthritis. Then my shoulder started hurting and I had a good doctor then, and she ordered an x-ray. I had arthritis in my shoulder. Then I found out recently I have arthritis in my neck. I took prescription naproxen for the pain, which is the same thing as the over-the-counter-pain reliever Aleve, but it’s stronger. I take that because I refuse to take narcotics. It doesn’t take away all the pain.
I fell down the stairs in 2021 and as a result of that I ended up with a sprained right ankle and a terrible case of sciatica on the left side of my lower back, hip, and leg. It was the worst pain I think I ever had. I had to walk on my sprained ankle. I couldn’t use crutches because I couldn’t put weight on my left leg from the pain. I was miserable. I am not mad about it now, but after months of having really bad sciatica pain, I did get mad at God and yelled at him when the pain was so bad and called Him a liar. Then I asked to be forgiven because I felt bad. There I was yelling at God, and I don’t even deserve Jesus.
I have tried everything; physical therapy, chiropractor, steroid injections, and drugs, but nothing takes the pain away completely. The only thing I have not tried is surgery but because there are no guarantees surgery will fix my problems. I know a lot of people who have had surgery, but their pain is worse after surgery than were before they had it.
Now I know better than to get mad at God and yell at Him. I take comfort in the fact Jesus understands our pain. When He was whipped and beaten and nailed to the cross it was very painful for Him. He has experienced extreme pain, and He understands how we feel.
Jesus went through everything we have gone through in our lives and worse. Some people have experienced worse things than others. He was homeless for three years. He experienced pain, hunger, depression, stress, anxiety just like everybody else. There is a medical condition that is extremely rare that people go through when they are under extreme fear or stress where their body sweats blood called, hematidrosis. Jesus sweat blood the night before He was crucified because he was so anxious and felt so much stress.
I fell down after I missed the last step when I was walking down the stairs without the light on and I didn’t have my glasses on saturday night when it was starting to get dark. I ended up landing on my hands and knees. A first my right foot hurt, so I wore my compression wrap on it, and that helped a lot. I have a big bruise on my knee, but it doesn’t hurt to walk. My Sacroiliac (S1) joint which is the joint that connects the spine to the pelvis bone. I have bilateral arthritis in it anyway and most times it does not bother me. I experience sciatica pain on the left side of my lower body most of the time. But right now, the lowest part of my back hurts the worst and it is chronic pain.
When I am in pain, I think God could be punishing me for my sins. Then sometimes I wonder if He even loves me at all. Back in 2022 when my sciatica pain was at its worst, I yelled at God and called Him a liar and I think I said to God, “you don’t love me.”
Another thing happened a month or two later in 2022. I decided to pray a prayer of protection over this home. I looked up prayers for protection over a home online, and I found a bunch of them, and I prayed them out loud. As soon as I was done praying one of the prayers, I felt the presence of Jesus. His presence was so strong and I felt so peaceful, I couldn’t have worried if I tried. That feeling stayed all afternoon and most of the night. It was so wonderful. I thought, “this has got to be what heaven feels like.”
I know what it says in the bible about God loving us. I know Jesus would have gone through the torture he endured and the crucifixion just for me, but there are times I doubt.
Jesus gave me a gift when He let me feel his presence of peace so strong. I can remember that presence, and I need to cling to it. When He was being whipped, beaten, and crucified, His pain was a lot worse than what I am going through. But He understands our pain and I take comfort in that.
One of my Christian friends who lives in a different state had an MRI in August to see if she would be a candidate for back surgery. She has terrible pain in her back and chronic sciatica, along with fibromyalgia and arthritis. I feel so bad for her because she suffers so much.
After the MRI, the doctor called her and said the MRI showed something. One of the ducts on her pancreas was enlarged so he told her he could not do surgery on her S1 Joint. She was upset. Then she saw her regular doctor who told her she needed to get a CAT scan and to make an appointment with a specialist right away.
She went in for her CAT scan, and that showed multiple very small tumors on her liver and a 14centimeter tumor on the outer wall of her bladder. When she went in to see the specialist, he said the tumors on her liver were harmless, but he wanted to do surgery right away on her bladder and do a biopsy to test for cancer. She was scared it might be cancer.
The Monday before her surgery on Wednesday I fasted but didn’t just have bread and water because I have health issues that affect my digestion. I fasted and prayed for her to be healed of her tumor. I had never done a serious fast for an answer to prayer. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be at first. I think the key to fasting with health issues is eating protein for each small meal if you have. I didn’t eat any meat or fish. I had a veggie burger for breakfast for my big meal, for lunch I had raw almonds and almond milk, then for supper I had pretzels and almond milk which was a big mistake. I think there might be 1 gram of protein in pretzels which isn’t enough to stay with you. By the end of the night, I was extremely tired and felt weak, so I went to bed early.
I prayed the week before her surgery and Monday, Tuesday; and Wednesday the day of her surgery. I asked Jesus to heal my friend and make the tumor disappear.
My friend didn’t tell many people about her tumor because she didn’t want to talk about it. She called her church a couple days before her surgery, and they put her on the prayer chain.
Her surgery on Wednesday was at noon, and I knew they were going use some type of anesthesia for her outpatient surgery. I texted her about 4pm to ask if she was awake and if she was in a lot of pain and I didn’t hear anything back, so I assumed she was sleeping. Then around 5pm she called me and said she had texted me, but I never got the text. She told me the surgeon couldn’t find anything. The tumor had disappeared! It was a miracle!
When I was fifteen years old, I hung out with the kids who liked to party a lot, and the other kids called us freaks. I was smoking cigarettes, drinking, and doing drugs. I hated school because none of the teachers were nice to me except one, my English teacher. She was the only one who cared about me. This teacher inspired me to write after she introduced the class to poetry. I loved her class, but all my classmate’s made fun of her behind her back. I didn’t like that at all.
I had been overweight as a child, and I was very self-conscious about it. All my family was thin and had dark hair, and then there was me: blonde and overweight. My brother used to tease me and say your adopted because you are only who is fat and blonde. I would run to my mom and ask if I was adopted, and the answer was always no. I am sure my brother got into trouble for saying it.
Fast forward to the summer when I was fifteen, and I decided to go on a diet. I watched how much I ate and rode my bike and exercised. I lost weight, grew my hair longer and got contact lenses.
When I went back to school in the fall, people weren’t sure who I was. Some guessed, and some didn’t know me. I looked different, but I didn’t feel different. I still felt overweight. It was hard to be on a diet all the time, so one day I became bulimic. The reason why is because of an article I had read in a magazine about food. There was an interview with a restaurant critic, and they asked how he could review so many restaurants each day. His answer was if I eat too much I just simply purge. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s when you make yourself throw up after eating, and it is an eating disorder.
At first, I thought being bulimic was great. I thought I could eat whatever I wanted to and wouldn’t gain weight. But it wasn’t the case. That was because I would skip breakfast and lunch. I would starve myself all day at school then eat when I got home.
Being bulimic was like an addiction. I would eat, then throw up meals at home. I never did it when I was away from home. It was a vicious cycle, and I couldn’t stop. At first, I didn’t even try to stop but later on in my eating disorder I really wished it would end. After I started praying to God at age seventeen, I asked Him to heal me of bulimia. I begged and pleaded, and I didn’t stop praying. I said the Lord’s prayer every day and begged God to heal me. I didn’t believe Jesus had much power, and I loved Jesus but thought the fact He had been crucified was a waste. I believed in God the Father and prayed to Him, but I wasn’t sure about Jesus. I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer when I was eighteen years old and really wanted to believe in Jesus. The 700 Club invited people to give their lives to Jesus and I prayed along one day. I felt so guilty being bulimic because there were people starving to death in other countries and I was wasting food by eating and making myself throw up. I didnt know I had been healed in 1984.
I had been going to a technical college for cooking. The reason I chose cooking is because I love to cook. Another reason I chose it was because I thought I would always have a job because everyone needs to eat.
My vision happened as I was walking through a shopping mall the first night of Christmas break. I glanced at a guy who worked at a photo shop who was behind the counter looking out the window and my eyes met his and his eyes were brown. All of the sudden I couldn’t see him anymore. All I could see was blue and a pair of blue eyes. I kept walking and didn’t really think about it at the time. The vision reminded me of a dream I had.
When I was about eighteen years old , I had a dream about being at a what reminded me of a high school or grade school office with yellow walls. There was a man there who I thought was a famous rock musician but couldn’t see his face. Suddenly in the dream he said to me, “you don’t like my music!” Then he shot me in the head, and everything turned black, then I everything turned gold and I saw a pair of golden eyes. In my dream I died, and I saw what I thought were God’s eyes while I was dreaming. The eyes I saw in my vision looked just like my dream, but the color was blue.
It took me a while to realize I didn’t have bulimia anymore. One day about a week later I realized I wasn’t making myself throw up after I ate. I was also eating three meals a day and not snacking, and I stayed the same weight for years. Once I was older in my late fifties, I did put on some weight. I have had no desire to become bulimic again and never have since I was healed.
At the time I had been healed I had been working at a shopping mall at a frozen yogurt shop while going to cooking school and had noticed the man at the photo shop. I had noticed him before because I thought he was really handsome. I found out his name was Matthew. The name Matthew means gift of God. God had given me a gift because He healed me of bulimia.
God let me know how much he loves me one night when I was nineteen or twenty. I was sleeping and a had strange dream and when I woke up in the middle of the night, I didn’t want to open my eyes, because I thought I was dead. I felt so loved and so peaceful. It was almost like God was giving me hug and making me feel the love he had for me. There is nothing like that love! That is the presence of God. God’s very being is love.
I was hearing the still, small voice of God’s Holy Spirit speaking to me saying “open your eyes.” I didn’t want to but when finally did, I was in my bedroom and alive and well. The voice wasn’t audible, it was more of an inner knowing voice that I was hearing in my spirit. It wasn’t my conscious because it seemed like the voice was male. It’s hard to describe the voice, but once you hear it you know it.
I didn’t want to move because I didn’t want the feeling of unconditional love to go away. It is hard to describe God’s love for us. In fact, I can’t because it’s indescribable. You need to experience it for yourself to be able to understand it. One thing I can say is no one loves you that much in this world. No One. If you would take the love of a mother for her child and multiply it by a million, it still wouldn’t compare.
God loves us so much. There is nothing he wouldn’t do to let us know. Jesus loves us so much that he died for us! In the beginning when God created man and woman and they were tempted by satan and gave into that temptation and committed the first sin. That separated them from the close relationship they had with God. To get that relationship back with God, God sent Jesus to earth to show people how much He loves them. Jesus showed them the way to get close to Him again so they wouldn’t be separated anymore.
Jesus died a brutal death and shed his blood, for no reason other than the fact that He loves us. He sacrificed himself willingly. He shed his blood for us. He did nothing to deserve death. He only helped people while on earth by healing and doing miracles and taught the way to God the Father. After Jesus died and was dead for three days, He came back to life like He had foretold, and many people saw Him and ate with Him. After he died, he spent forty days on earth then He ascended into the sky and He’s in heaven today and will return some day in the same way and at the same place He left.
You can know Jesus as a close friend, someone closer than brother. You can experience His love and peace. All you have to do is ask him to come into your life and forgive you for all the wrongs you have done throughout your life and all the sin you have committed against God and tell him you are sorry for them. No matter what you have done, God won’t reject you.
It’s not an easy road to be living a life of sin, I know I have committed many sins. Jesus promised us that his way is the better way. That road might be difficult at times, but Jesus said, come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
MKR Prodigal Daughter Christian Perspectives from a Prodigal 