Christmas - another reason to celebrate

December is month of rejoicing for Christians due to the fact that Jesus was born, and it has always been a month of celebration. That was always the reason why I celebrated Christmas until this year. Now I have another reason to rejoice and thank God.

Before December of last year – 2006, I considered my body to be a ‘bag of maladies.’ I will admit that at the early age of 29 I was already reaping the fruits of my abuse to my body combined with the unavoidable effects of the combination of the genes of my parents. At that age I was stricken with Gout, which is a crippling disease brought about by the abnormal accumulation and deposit of uric acid crystals in the joints and connective tissue spaces.

I also had chronic gastritis which had a tendency to bleed every now and then. Later I developed hypertension with my blood pressure shooting up to 160 over 110 with a posterior ischemia, and then came prostate hypertrophy and urinary bladder stones, which together obstructed the flow of my urine. Hepatitis and Cholangitis visited me twice. I also had occasional attacks of migraine and before I forget I also have a bad case of a herniated nucleus polposus [slipped disk].

Whew, a walking example of the textbook in Pathology. Yeah, and I had to spend a lot for the monthly maintenance of these diseases running for many years. But that was before December 2006.

Seventh-day Adventists by nature do not have a keen interest in miracles. We look at the Pentecostals who have miracle crusades and “praying over” sessions of healings as weird and bizarre. When one of us has an unusual healing we count it a miracle but we don’t make a fuss about it.

2006 was the year that I was officially terminated [excommunicated] by the SDA church as I became a Pentecostal. It was also the year that I read about the “Heavenly Man” in the person of Brother Yun. This Chinese Christian is one man whom God poured out miracle after miracle for him and for others.

Brother Yun’s world tours brought him to our city [Davao] and on that December night I found myself seated in a jam-packed hall listening to him. He was telling us that modern man in developed countries have less miracles because we tend to trust our medical insurance, physicians and medicines for healing. We only come to God when all these fail, which sadly places God as a last resort. He also stressed the point that faith in God and not obedience to the law is what places us in line for miracles from God (Gal3:5).

After his talk those who wanted healing came around him and he prayed, in Chinese of course, with an American interpreter. I was situated in a line just in front of him, and he was walking through the lines as he prayed. I really cannot describe the exact feeling when I got my healing because I was not asking exactly that I be healed. What I wanted at that moment was that God would put the gift of glossolalia on my lips and that I would speak in tongues like the lady next to me.

You could imagine that I was crying unashamedly like most of the people present, and I left that hall with a new bounce in my step. My body was unusually lighter and nimble. The following day I noticed that the symptoms that I used to have were gone and so I stopped taking my medicines.

A year has passed now and I have not taken a single pill for my maladies, which haven’t reappeared – praise God. I enjoy Thai food which is really spicy and my gastritis hasn’t flared up, not a bit, which is really unusual [I used to take antacids like they were candy]. The bladder stones simply flow out when I void and the obstruction is something of the past.

December indeed has a new and added meaning to me. God chose to heal me in the month that we rejoice over our salvation. Hallelujah!