To Visit the Sick

  Some years back a young woman from my office ended up in the hospital in ICU.  Honestly, the doctors had no idea what was wrong with her.  What seemed to start out as a cold turned into a high fever with a coma.  After a few days I had figured out the doctor's schedule and tried to be there when the doctor arrived.  The news was grim:  she was not expected to recover and the hospital was recommending transfer to a long term care facility.  Her hands had already started to develop the curve common to deep coma patients.
  When I was with her each day, I began to call her out of the coma, to call her to wake up.  Although I didn't see it happen, later that day friends reported that her eyelids were beginning to flutter.  In another day her eyes were open.  
  The doctor said that the left side of her body was paralyzed and would never regain movement. My approach by then was to simply contradict whatever the doctor negatively diagnosed and to sing in tongues whenever I was with her.  She began to move her left side.  The doctor said she could hear but didn't know English.  I knew better and proved it to a room full of hospital staff. Although she was on her way to recovery, she still had no idea who I was. The doctor said she would not speak again.  More prayer.  She spoke.
  They moved her out of ICU onto a floor for patients who had suffered a stroke.  The doctors admitted she had not had a stroke, but she had weakness like a person after a stroke.  Physical therapy began to rebuild her strength.  The doctors said she would not regain her ability to swallow and would have to be fed through a feeding tube the rest of her life.  I continued to contradict, in prayer, what the doctor prophesied and to pray over her in tongues.  Finally, she remembered me.  She was speaking, weakly and hoarsely, but she was speaking.  Her mother had arrived from South America and was sitting by her side and praying also by this time.  She was walking and moving both sides of her body.
  She was transferred to a rehabilitation facility.  Eventually she completely recovered because God healed her and healed her and healed her.  She was wasn't healed instantaneously, but over a period of a couple of months she regained all of her previous abilities and was able to go home and be with her husband and young daughter again.  Later she returned to work.
  "To visit the sick" is one of the Corporal Works of Mercy.  Visiting the sick is something  many people do.  But when Christians visit the sick their purpose is to pray for healing and to persevere in that prayer.  Doctors diagnose what they can see and test for.  But Our Doctor healed people, raised them from the dead, and rose from the dead himself.  That's the kind of visiting doctor we should be.
  For Reflection:  Do I shy away from visiting the sick?  Do I offer to pray with them when I visit?
  Let us pray.  Jesus, you are the Divine Healer.  I offer myself to be used by you to not only visit the sick but also to pray with them.  I offer to persevere in that prayer and not become discouraged.  

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