To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope

By Amy Julia Becker

Washington, CT 06793
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781513809731

Book preview

Introduction

Istarted throwing up when I was fourteen years old. It began on a Friday night in December, a few hours after our family of six enjoyed a special dinner in the restaurant of a local hotel. The lobby looked festive, with white lights and greenery and holiday music in the background. A magician moved from table to table, hiding coins and pulling scarves out of unexpected crevices. My little sisters giggled with delight.

It came time to order dinner, and I faced a decision. I hadn’t eaten a full meal in weeks. Earlier that fall, I had vowed to limit myself to one thousand calories per day. I wrote this goal in my journal and signed it, a pledge to myself and to the gods of thinness.

I had just come home from fall term at a boarding school, so my mother wasn’t aware of my dramatic shift in eating. She would have registered concern about my new diet of apples, frozen yogurt, bagels, and salad. That night, I broke my pledge. I ordered fajitas and an ice cream sundae. I wanted the pretense of normalcy. I didn’t want my family to notice that anything had changed.

The food tasted sumptuous, but I worried about what the scale would tell me in the morning. Once we returned to our house, I decided to balance out the meal by riding the stationary bike in our attic. My dad worked out twice a day, so even at the odd hour of nine at night, no one in my family thought much about my decision to exercise. The surprise came just before I got in the shower, when I threw up. I didn’t feel nauseated. I didn’t gag. It was more like a polite, unexpected, not even entirely unpleasant regurgitation. I mentioned it with a shrug to my mom the next morning. But then it happened again the next night. And the next. Within a few weeks, I was involuntarily regurgitating everything that went into my body.

In February, I was admitted to the hospital for observation. The plan was to feed me scrambled eggs with radioactive particles and then watch those eggs move through my digestive track. But the eggs didn’t move. They sat in my gut.

Your stomach walls look gray, my gastroenterologist said. Like the stomach of a ninety-year-old. The technical diagnosis was gastroparesis. My stomach was paralyzed.

Identifying the cause of the problem didn’t make a difference. I couldn’t keep down any food. I was losing weight. I took medication to improve motility, but it didn’t help. After a year of painful blood draws and tests and tubes that never amounted to much change in my condition, we tried acupuncture and biofeedback. I tried a diet restricted to simple, soft foods. I tried drinking only Ensure. I tried prayer—members of our church gathered around me, prayed for healing, and anointed me with oil. And Shirley Prey—an elder whose spiritual gifts fit her name—said to me gently after the anointing: This one will take a long time. I went on and off intravenous fluids, in and out of the hospital, became familiar with fainting from rising too fast. Those early months turned into five years of struggle.

A part of me wanted to get better, but mostly I felt relieved that I could eat without fear of what the scale would report, and relieved that I couldn’t be blamed for self-harm. I had friends with anorexia and bulimia who were in and out of treatment centers and therapist offices. But I could tell myself, and my parents and teachers and doctors, that my body was inexplicably malfunctioning and I simply needed a medical cure.

Looking back decades later, I vacillate between calling this illness an eating disorder and accepting the medical diagnosis of gastroparesis. I can see my unhealthy mindset around food. But my body also was clearly impaired. I still don’t have the words to combine the bodily and psychological reality. Pulling the threads of the physical and the emotional aspects of my situation only results in a tighter knot. Even now—when I think of how often as an adult I’ve succumbed to illness in a time of stress, or when I think of friends lying in bed from migraines while managing the pressure of childcare and working at home during a pandemic, or when I read about the increase in debilitating back pain and substance use disorders and anxiety in the modern era—I see in myself and in our culture an inability to connect the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects of who we are. And I, like many others, feel a longing for that connection. A longing for healing.

Two years into my illness, my boyfriend at the time (and now my husband) confronted me. He had noticed how I excused myself from every meal. He noticed my dry, brittle hair and skinny limbs. He noticed my evasive answers to questions about food. He asked me to count how often I threw up in a day. The next night I told him: eight times.

Peter insisted I needed help, and I was both ashamed and relieved to agree with him. This time, I felt certain that the answers would come from uncovering my emotions around food and my body. So I went to therapy. I met with a nutritionist. I ate as she instructed, and I gained twenty pounds over the course of a few months. Until one day, I broke. I returned to the familiar pattern. Soon thereafter, I found myself in the emergency room. Routine bloodwork indicated my heart was in danger of stopping. I was seventeen years old.

As I saw it, doctors had failed me. Therapy and nutritionists had failed me. And prayer had failed me. I had wanted God to swoop in and offer an immediate and miraculous change to my body, and that didn’t happen. All I had left was myself. Four years in, I set a goal of only throwing up twice each day. Then a goal of once a day. Then once every other day. It was miserable. I hated the changes to my body. I hated the sensation of forcing food into my stomach. But I also wanted to get well. I started to take small steps that seemed to actually make a difference. I stopped buying magazines like Self and Shape and Glamour, with images of women in bathing suits and promises of the next great food or exercise fad on their covers. I memorized Bible verses about how God cares about our hearts and not about the way our bodies look. And I started to receive physical therapy for my stomach.

Once a week, I lay on a table—passive, receptive—and talked as Kim, the physical therapist, pressed on my abdomen and kneaded my paralyzed organs back to life. She asked basic questions like What’s your favorite food? When I talked about how much I loved french fries, my stomach audibly gurgled, as if the prospect of that nourishment and pleasure demanded a bodily response. For years, I had carefully separated the physical and mental aspects of my being, but telling Kim simple stories about my parents, my sisters, my boyfriend, my school, combined with her gentle massage, seemed to knit me back together. I could feel my stomach wake up. Over the course of a few months of weekly sessions, I finally began to get well.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I was learning that our modern medical system—as marvelous and innovative as it is—has tremendous limits when it comes to healing. I recognized this disconnect again in my mid-twenties when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and doctors could recommend treatments but didn’t know how to offer care as she faced the reality of a terminal illness. I ran into it when our oldest daughter was diagnosed with Down syndrome and received labels of defective and abnormal, as if who she was as a person could be reduced to a category called disability. I saw it again in my thirties when my back began to hurt and I couldn’t explain where the pain came from. And I needed this understanding when our nation entered a global pandemic and a time of racial reckoning, when a biomedical approach to healing was not enough to care for our wounded souls or our divided society.

Most people do not have such an extreme story of illness and disorder at such a young age. But all of us have been taught to isolate our bodies from our minds and our spirits. Many of us have physical ailments that stem from stress or heartache, whether it’s the minor affliction of a cold sore on a lip or the major disruption of a chronic condition. And even when we do not carry our emotional pain within our own bodies, our bodies nevertheless feel the pain and division of the world around us.

We live in a society that assumes our personal and collective pain can be addressed through biomedical fixes. For Christians and other people of faith, we often hope for our own version of a fix through miraculous intervention. Sometimes surgeons or prayer can instigate immediate physical changes in our bodies. But even then, and especially when we wait and wait and wait without any change arriving—we are in need of a more comprehensive healing. As much as modern medicine can play a crucial role in our lives, it is nevertheless not enough to restore us—individually or collectively—to health. We need a broader and deeper understanding of healing in order to be made well.

This book is an exploration of this type of healing—comprehensive personal, spiritual, and communal restoration to a life-giving relationship with God. Looking at stories about Jesus, and especially the story of a synagogue leader and a bleeding woman in Mark’s gospel, part 1 addresses the nature of Jesus’ healing. This healing is for our whole selves—mind, body, and spirit. This healing is an invitation for each of us and all of us to know God’s love personally. This healing is also a call to be received by and restored to community. Part 2 considers how distraction, shame, anxiety, and injustice can keep us from healing. And part 3 explores ways we are all invited to receive God’s healing love, just as we are all invited to participate in extending that abundant love toward others.

My own longing for healing and wholeness began when I couldn’t figure out a way to piece my body and soul together, when doctors, alternative medicine, therapists, and my own willpower didn’t have the answers. Within all that confusion, I did turn to God. I didn’t receive a quick fix, but I did receive a sense of God’s presence. God was with me, even if my prayers weren’t answered the way I thought they should be. I’ve now walked alongside others on their own journeys toward wholeness, and I have seen how healing can happen even in the midst of ongoing pain and unanswered questions. I now wonder whether God’s refusal to cure my illness with a quick miracle was in and of itself an invitation to a deeper work of healing.

I emerged from those years of illness with a better understanding of how my body and mind and emotions were interrelated, with a deeper faith, and with a greater sense of purpose in the world. I was like the blind man healed by Jesus in John’s gospel. Two thousand years later, I echoed his words, I don’t know who it was who healed me. I just know I once was blind and now I see.

PART I

The Nature

of Healing

Chapter 1

Restored to Self

A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed. Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

—Mark 5:25–29

When our kids were six, four, and one, we moved to a new town. My husband Peter had been hired as the head of an independent boarding school, and while I was still trying to write essays and blog posts and even books, I became more than ever the primary household manager and the default parent. Sometime within that first stressful year, my lower back began to ache.

During the day, I rarely noticed it. But at night, I woke up and squirmed as I fought to get comfortable. I tried exercises to strengthen my core. I tried stretching. I tried a pillow under my knees. Nothing really helped. I mostly overcame the pain and the accompanying sleeplessness with two Advil from the top drawer of the bathroom vanity, nestled alongside the hairbands and nail clippers. Sometimes I included a Tylenol PM or melatonin in the cocktail of pain relief. Over the course of a few years, what had been intermittent pain became constant. The medication became a necessity.

The nightly Advil habit nagged at me. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life popping pills in the dark. But then the pain began to creep toward my tailbone.

I told our daughter Marilee, four years old by this time, that I couldn’t pick her up anymore, because it strained my back. I told William and Penny that it hurt me to have them sit on my lap. Those conversations brought with them both a sense of failure—I was supposed to be able to hold them close—and relief that I could reclaim a little bit of my sense of self. I didn’t want to be blamed for having needs for things like time alone or personal space. I wanted instead to blame my body.

Stretching. Core strengthening. Medication. A self-prescribed Sisyphean regimen.

I finally reached out to a yoga teacher whom a friend recommended. Maybe she could identify postural problems or guide my body into better balance or offer some stretches to practice every day. It seemed worth a try.

Anne is thin, strong, willowy, with long, straight, blonde hair. She wears cashmere cardigans and loose, flowy shirts atop leggings. She arrived at our back door with a gentle smile and a yoga mat. We walked upstairs together, and then she invited me with a gesture to sit cross-legged on the floor facing her. This is going to hurt, I thought. But I am nothing if not obedient to authority, so I took my uncomfortable seat.

She said, Tell me why we’re here.

I told her the story of my back trouble and all my attempts to cure the pain. I told her I thought I had a problem with alignment, and I wondered if she could help.

She nodded. "Whenever I hear the word alignment, she said, I tend to think of what is out of balance in your life, not primarily in your body."

Regardless of whether she meant for me to do so, I took the prompt and spilled the story about the move three years earlier and Peter’s job and my sense of failure as a writer and at home. There was the daily race against the clock, with Marilee at school for three