Mel White on "Healing"
Submitted by Mark on October 30 1999 at 20:13:45
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Lyla and I were both drawn to a young boy whose parents were pushing their wheelchair-bound son toward the stage for healing. The parents were weeping. The child was wide-eyed with fear and wonder. They held each other's hands and whispered urgent, desperate prayers as they waited in the line. They watched as before them a crippled man tossed away his crutches and a deaf woman praised God that she could hear again. Finally, the parents had positioned their son's wheelchair directly in front of Katherine Kuhlman. "Do you have faith?" Ms. Kuhlman asked the little boy's mother. "Oh, yes!" the woman replied, sobbing and reaching out to touch the healer's hands. "Do you have faith?" Ms. Kuhlman asked the boy's father. "Yes," he said quietly, rubbing his hand through the boy's hair and trying not to cry. "And little one," she said, leaning dramatically over the boy, "do you have faith?" The boy nodded and looked confused. Katherine Kuhlman laid her hands on the child and began to pray in tongues. With their arms in the air and their own prayers drowning out the prayers of Ms. Kuhlman, the audience surged with excitement. "Now, child," Ms. Kuhlman said firmly, "you just come here to me." The child tried to get up out of his wheelchair, but he couldn't move. His mother and father knelt beside him, urging him to take that "first step of faith." The audience prayed and wept and applauded as the boy leaned forward in his chair. But no matter how hard he tried, the boy couldn't stand. Finally, Ms. Kuhlman moved on to the next person in the line. The parents rushed the boy offstage. Lyla and I still remember the look of failure and embarrassment in the child's eyes and the anger we felt that such a thing could happen. We do the same to our gay sons and daughters when we force them to have faith that God will heal them. When, in fact, that isn't the way God works. I believe that God still heals troubled minds and broken bodies...After all, I have seen God heal me of the anger and of the guilt I felt after praying the wrong prayer for more than two decades. Now, however, when I see well-meaning parents praying for the "healing" of their homosexual children, I am certain that they are praying the wrong prayer altogether. They should be praying to understand and accept their children as God has made them. --from "Stranger at the Gate", by Mel White |