Ritt,

I do believe that love is the greatest healer of all. It was in my own life when I was the sickest I ever have been. I'd had a major, public, horrific nervous breakdown and wound up pacing in circles inside the padded cell of the local lockdown psych ward. It happened about halfway through my first year at the seminary something over 20 years ago now.

Judi went through that with me in the middle of the night in a crowded student apartment complex. Neither of us had a clue that the universe itself wasn't unraveling around us. It was like being attacked by great invisible sharks. Every time one roared through, it took a huge mouthful out of whatever it is that is invisible and makes us who we are apart from our bodies alone. Those sharks literally tore me to shreds until I would clearly see that two and one were exactly the same thing. I wouldn't have wished that experience on my worst enemy. In the end, Judi had to make her escape with our two toddlers while I was distracted in another room. I scared a lot of people, myself included.

When official help was summoned, I went voluntarily, but in the back of the only police car I've ever ridden anywhere in as an "honored guest". Not very pretty. Particularly for a guy who was headed for being a preacher, in charge of the lives of other people. What I had been training for for ten years was gone--perhaps for good.

That entire next year was by far the worst thing that ever happened to me. Death would have been easy by comparison. The social pain was incredible. So was not knowing even who I was at the worst of things. When the hours of pacing in circles in the lockdown padded cell finally brougth the physical back into balance the mental, I was allowed out into the larger ward. I knew my entire world had come undone. Every relationship and every dream I had ever had was in entire jeparody. I didn't even know if Judi would ever wish to see me again.

After all, the guy who had dyed his hair bright orange and with whom I shared the room with was back in for his 20+ time. A revolving door psych ward junkie. I woke up that first night with him crouching like an ape on the end of my bed. Poor guy's wife had left him the first time he was admitted. Wives do that sort of thing under those sort of circumstances.

The black big-bosomed cutie-crazy from the ladies' hall though I was Michael Jackson bleached whiter than usual. She followed me into my room on the sly, fully expecting to do the nasty with me. I never met a woman more certain of herself sexually on first approach. She only tried that once.

When the orderlies gave me my meds, my muscles seized up so that I went over backward like some Spirit-slain devotee at a Pentecostal healing ceremony. They were waiting to catch me before I hit the tiles. Apparently, that was a common first side affect of that particular medication. Nobody had warned me, of course.

Half the people who worked on the ward were helpful. They actually listened, and still saw the inmates as human. The other half were so afraid of becoming like us they were flat out cruel. They treated us like subhuman animals to be caged and despissed, just to assure themselves they could never arrive at the place where we were, I think. All my fears of horror stories connected to insane assylums swirled around like a black sucking whirlpool of sheer terror. I was afraid I would be lobotomized, electro-shocked into a drooling zombie, castrated for somebody's sheer sport. I knew I was at the entire mercy of some people who had their own best interests at heart, and that anything I ever reported would be immediately discounted as lunatic ravings. I had become one without any control over my existence, among others who were the same. It was entirely surreal. Minutes seemed like hours, and hours like weeks.

Of all my fears, my gravest concern was whether I still had a marriage. Would I ever see Judi again? If I did, would she want me back? Would I ever get out of this place? Nothing was certain, any my fears filled in the blank spaces where the unanswered questions lurked.

That's when love found me. I looked up and saw Judi walking down the hall in that locked down psych ward with loonies like me crouched in corners making strange signs with their hands and talking to people nobody else could see. She was dressed as beautifully as if she were coming on a date with a man she deeply loved and profoundly admired. When I saw her, I knew I was going to get well again. I took one look and said to myself, "No way I'm staying in here with a woman like that outside waiting for me!" Judi's love literally healed me, and that process was not instantaneous. It took years.

It wasn't just Judi's love, however. It was also the love of my parents, who took us in without question when they had themselves been reduced to near poverty by an unexpected turn in their own life. They were living in the remodeled cellar of a barn by Dad had fixed up and taking baths and flushing their toilets in muddy water drawn in buckets from the pond. A year earlier, they had been living in the largest and finest house for five miles in any direction.

But it wasn't only my wife's and parents love. It was also the compassion of the non-Christian hot-tempered farmer who hated just about everybody in the countryside, except my father--who had just become a preacher a year earlier after teaching in a girl's reform school for a couple decades. The farmer provided Judi and I and our two little boys with an empty farm house to live in rent free for six months.

There was also the love of Judi's family, who didn't raise a word against me during the most embarrassing time of my life. Even Judi's brother, who had no interest in the religion I was pursuing as my life's labor, said, "Skip is not to be blamed for this. He did nothing of which he is culpable, or should be ashamed. He simply got sick."

Then there was the love of many dear friends who came to me upon my return to campus and poured out the deepest hurts of their lives while I simply listened, and said absolutely nothing in return. How much I owe them at a time I could repay nothing, they will never know.

A little later, there was the love of the circle of seminary friends and their wives who met together at each other's houses one evening a week for Bible study and mutual life support with our varied struggles when I returned a half-year early to my seminary classes. They provided social healing, a group within which I was entirely accepted and valued, and whom Judi could call on for timely support when thing became touch and go with me several months later for a few weeks.

Yep, diet is important in maintaining and even regaining health. But it is truly love that heals. Unless people were important, their diet wouldn't matter.

In the end, it was the love of God Himself, who would unmistakably and supernaturally call someone like myself in a manner I had only read about in the Bible accounts of His calling of the prophets a year later that put the seal on my ongoing healing. That experience healed me in the deepest places of my existence and answered the question I had been too afraid to ask. "After all that, am I of any use to anyone in representing You? Or should I withdraw quietly, and spend the rest of my Christian life holding down a humble back pew in a small local church somewhere?" A minute in God's direct presence was a thousand times more potently life-changing than the entire previous hellish year had been. That's another story in itself, and one that is still in the telling.

You are correct, Ritt. Exercise is a crucial factor in health. Smokers who exercise regularly are healthier than non-smokers who do not. All those anti-oxidants in berries are a great benefit, too. The sexual restrictions in the Bible are a huge health principle. One man, with one woman, for life, raising their family, would put an end to misery that is currently wreaking havok of entire nations in some parts of the world.

The greatest of all healers, is love. That's what healed me. Without that, there's no reason to get well. There is no reason to even want to.

Thanks for making me remember.

Skip

P.S. I've been reading the gospel of John again mornings. It says, "This is love: Not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and gave His Son as a propitiation for our sins." Basically, none of us have a perfect life to offer a holy, man-loving, sin-hating God. So He offers us a perfect life instead. That is the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, which we simply accept in place of our own--knowing we need it, and that it was lived on our behalf to be counted in place of our own life in the final reckoning when we answer to God for what we've done with our existence.

All the healthly choices in the world won't keep even one of us from dying in the end. Only Someone from beyond this world coming into it and becoming one like ourselves, experiencing what we experience, facing what we fear, and suffering what we suffer, could do that. His empty tomb is our open door. We've got very good reason to look to heaven with hope. God is on our side, even when others are against us and we are against ourselves. He is for us still. If He gave us His own Son, why would He keep anything else back that we might need as well? Jesus is God's unanswerable argument, the proof that in the end, love heals anybody who will willling.

Last edited by Skip Johnson; 04/17/07 01:53 AM.