Fibromyalgia Healed

I am so glad I get to tell you about my Sarah. Mostly because I love her a lot but deep down because in telling you about my Sarah, I am telling you about my God.

Sarah is my sixteen-year-old sister. When I describe her as ‘really cool’, you can take that to mean that she loves fiercely, relates warmly, judges mercifully, works diligently, and looks nice even after playing twelve softball games in one weekend. Sarah knows God in a particularly permanent way because He healed her of fibromyalgia.

To give you the whole play-by-play would hardly be feasible in this context, but I will give you the game stats so the next time you are one strike away from winning or losing the World Series, you will have the courage to swing the bat.

Fibromyalgia is an incurable, life-long syndrome characterized by incessant, intense pain and fatigue. There is no scientific explanation for its onset and no medical treatment for its relief. Basically, for no physically discernable reason, Sarah’s body amplified each physical sensation way beyond its due until her threshold of pain quit functioning as a threshold altogether.

She had to quit playing sports because even sliding into second would wrack her body with aches for days. She had to start taking prescription sleep medication just to sleep through her body’s natural tossing and turnings. And we her family had to invent new ways of communication our comfort and love because each hug, pat, or back rub send Sarah’s sense reeling in pain.

And, of course, we prayed.

We prayed for a full recovery and for full restoration. Do you know what I discovered? God always desires us to be healed. Always. He has destined our bodies to spend eternity glorified in fullness of health and beauty. And freedom from infirmity, physical death, is inextricably coupled with the freedom from sin, eternal death. He clearly broke the backs of both powers of death at the Cross. He always and forever desires to heal you. So we doggedly asked Him for just that in Sarah’s body.

We also prepared her to receive it by responsibly employing means available to us for managing her syndrome: a strict schedule, sleeping medication, Aleve, anointing her with oil, regular exercise, etc.

Another thing I discovered: God’s redemption. He encountered Sarah in her intimate place of constant pain. He gave her grace to get up out of bed every morning. Grace to go to school and sit in desks that made her hips throb for hours. Grace to be patient until the hour of healing arrived. Grace to face friends that accused her of lying about her condition. He redeemed her years of affliction by using them to extend deep roots into the soil of His love. The creative God did not waste anything: He used every means to draw her into intimacy with Him.

He didn’t let fibromyalgia get away with Sarah’s heart. He let it run for a while because He is the only wise One. He knew the exact moment to take it all back and vindicate Sarah to the fullest measure.

That moment was sprinkled in nanoseconds through her illness in the form of grace but it matured in an instant on November 9th, 2008.

I knew she had been fully and completely restored when I hugged her. She had a human back—not a rigid board stiff with pain and the fear of pain.

Yesterday she was a starter for her high school’s varsity girls basketball team.

Now she has full health and new solidarity in her secret place. Our God loves us well. My God loved my Sarah well. In it all.

-Jessica Reis

God is Big

Back in August, I made a decision to dedicate my time this year to prayer and fasting, once a week. I have grown up as a Christian and one of the biggest things I have always struggled with is trusting God and believing that He can still move and work in big ways. My faith had been confined to my needs and my worries, and while I was aware of God's work on a larger scale, I didn't always believe it affected me. So I began to pray weekly and fasted each Tuesday, praying that God would allow my faith to grow stronger and that He would let me see him do work in a real, tangible way. Nothing happened for the first three months, but I continued to pray.

And then God started happening in big ways.

Over fall break, the first weekend in Novemeber, I was sitting in my parents church in Atlanta when God gave me a vision of a mass of students, all gathered together on Bowman Field to worship Him and pray for our campus. Behind the students was a huge tidal wave that was just perched, ready to come crashing down. When I got back to Clemson, I shared the vision with a friend of mine. She absolutely flipped out and encouraged me to come to her house church to share it with others. Now I have to preface that I was raised in a church setting where sermons were not regularly preached on dreams and visions and spirit-moving actions. We were commonly referred to as the "frozen chosen"… And I was slightly scared/skeptical/confused on what exactly was happening.

But God took those fears away after I shared this vision with the house church. I wasn't sure what sort of response I was going to get, but lets just say the roof almost erupted off. I quickly found out that God had given this same vision to others, and they had been praying for months that God would give them a way to make this dream real and actually happen.

And that is just the beginning. God has put a revival spirit in the hearts of so many of His children at Clemson that it is unreal. If you have been coming to DCF this past semester, you've probably partaken in one of the multiple prayer times we've had where hearts have been crying out for our community and that the lost would find the love of Christ. Students across campus ministries and organizations and churches are coming together to pray and to worship and to share the gospel. Uniting as nothing but Christians, there is a movement of believers that are not being hindered by any sort of labels or fears and are proclaiming the Gospel in front of their classes and in 200 person lectures and in the dining halls and all over campus. There are efforts being made right now for a large gathering of Christians to happen on Bowman to pray for our campus and another event in Little John to have a massive gospel presentation happen for all who want to hear. People are physically being healed and hearts are being softened left and right.

I don't know about you, but that is not the sort of Christianity that I am used to seeing. This movement that the Holy Spirit is flowing through is not at all what I had in mind when I started praying 3 months ago. But who says God has to answer our prayers in a small manner? The small growth I figured would happen has been blown out of the water by what God is teaching me and through what my own eyes have been a witness to.

He is alive and is proving His power to me and to this campus and to the world. There is a new revival happening and it is an unexpected, but welcome, answer to my prayer.