Daily Reading for March 6 • William W. Mayo, 1911, and Charles Menniger, 1953, and Their Sons, Pioneers in Medicine
Far too often we have seen Christian healing and the healing provided by the medical community as separate and distinct. In recent decades, though, we increasingly hear people affirm that healing is “both/and”: it is found in both the medical community and the church, it involves both the individual with faith and the medical personnel who see their expert care as part of the resurrection of the forgotten touch. . . .
Dr. Lisa Thorn once commented to me, “In this world of MRIs, CT scans, blood work, and so on, it is so easy to forget the power of touch. I am reminded of this in reading your work and it helps when I am examining patients. The more experienced (read: older) I get in doing what I do, the more crucial I find intuition and palpation (the technical term for touch!) in diagnosing.” It is very important that the Christian healing ministry is offered in conjunction with the medical profession. We never suggest that anyone cease taking their medication or go contrary to the advice of their physician. When prayer and medicine go hand in hand, the combined protocol can be very powerful. When we find a Christian doctor and a Christian prayer team working together, we see miracles happen.
One analogy I have found useful in describing the healing ministry is a set of railroad tracks: one rail is the finest medical expertise and treatment available to us; the other rail is the spiritual and faith dimension; and the third rail is the power of the Holy Spirit to bring about healing. If we take any one of the rails away, the train will not run. We need all three.
From The Forgotten Touch: More Stories of Healing by Nigel W. D. Mumford. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org