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By David French

Opinion Columnist

I want to begin with a wonderful and mysterious story.

It begins badly. In September of 1995, when I was living in Nashville, I was diagnosed with chronic ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disorder with no known cure. The disease attacks your colon and can produce painful, dysentery-like symptoms, and they emerged right away.

By October I was in crisis. I’d lost more than 40 pounds, I couldn’t eat any solid food; every medical treatment was failing. I was hospitalized and met with a surgeon. Unable to ameliorate the symptoms, we started to consider surgery to remove my colon.

I was miserable. I was literally wasting away, in terrible pain. I was also a little frightened by the prospect of major surgery in my weakened state. I prayed, and I reached out to my friends and asked them to pray for me as well.

As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okediji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Christian fellowship, and she’s now a professor at Harvard Law School. I’ll never forget her first words. “It’s over,” she said. “The Lord has healed you.”

My initial reaction was frustration. I was resigned to the surgery, and I wanted encouragement, not false hope. As a Christian, I believe that God is real and works miracles. But I didn’t consider that he would work a miracle on me. My prayers were of the conventional kind that I grew up with — prayers that doctors would have wisdom and that I’d have the courage to face the challenge of the surgery.

But Ruth’s prayer was different. She asked God for healing, and she said that God had granted her prayer.

I hung up the phone feeling no different at all. I was still in pain, except now I was also a little angry. In hindsight, I don’t even know why. Perhaps because I wanted to believe, but just couldn’t.

I woke up the next morning without any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doctors reintroduced bland, solid food to my diet, and I consumed it voraciously. By Thanksgiving, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy later showed no evidence of the disease at all.

My doctor was surprised. I was surprised (and overjoyed). I knew that ulcerative colitis could have remission periods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve never had a recurrence.

I know that skeptical readers can offer alternative explanations for what happened. Perhaps I was misdiagnosed. Perhaps despite my initial frustrations with the call, there was some sort of powerful placebo effect. Perhaps there’s another explanation I haven’t considered.

And I’m cognizant as I tell this story of all the suffering people who haven’t experienced this kind of relief. I’m cognizant of my wife’s cancer battle. She’s now cancer-free, but not because she woke up one morning without symptoms because a friend prayed for her; it’s because she courageously endured every step of grueling treatment, from chemotherapy to surgery to radiation under the care of competent and compassionate medical professionals.

I’m sharing this........

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