Healing Line

Healing Line

The Mystery of Healing: A Personal Testimony

by Ed McCarthy
Summer 2015

I am a Christian attorney (that is not an oxymoron!) on the CHM board in Jacksonville, Florida. I married my wife, Ann, in 2001, and we have three beautiful children (now ages 12, 10 and 9). However, we gave birth to four, and it is through our experiences with the births of our children that my wife and I faced the topic of this article, the Mystery of Healing.

During Ann's first pregnancy, all was well until 30 weeks when her water broke, but she was not in labor. We rushed to the ER, and through a lot of prayer and great medical care, she was miraculously able to make it almost five more weeks before going into labor just before the 35th week. After a harrowing emergency C–section, Hannah was born and is now a stunningly beautiful, smart and athletic 12–year–old.

We wanted more children, and we were blessed with another pregnancy nine months later. From the first pregnancy, we learned that Ann has a bicornuate uterus, meaning that because of its shape, the baby could only grow on one side of the uterus. While a concern, the doctors did not realize how significant an issue this would be with the rest of the pregnancies.

With this second pregnancy, everything proceeded well until 21½ weeks weeks (normal gestation being 40 weeks). Ann went into labor; we rushed into the hospital and spent the next 12 hours doing everything possible to stop the labor and to keep the baby in the womb. Everyone at CHM was praying for our baby, but the labor could not be stopped. The next day Owen Carroll McCarthy was born at just under 22 weeks, perfectly formed, perfectly healthy, heartbeat strong to the very end, but just not old enough to live. Holding him in our arms, we were devastated. It was like a deep surgical cut without anesthesia. Owen's gravestone reads: "Born on Earth to Bloom in Heaven."

After much angst we decided to try for another baby. At 34 weeks gestation (most of which was on bed rest) and almost two years to the day of Hannah's birth, Ann gave birth to Cort, a healthy, smart, athletic boy, now 10 years old. He just scored 24 points in his YMCA league basketball game.

Despite significant hesitation on the part of our doctors, and knowing it was high risk, I trusted my wife's intuition that we should try for one more child. Nine months after Cort's birth, we were blessed with another pregnancy.

At 12 weeks Ann went on bed rest again and had her cervix stitched (a cerclage), but at 23½ weeks, she went into labor. We rushed to the hospital, and over the next 30 hours they did everything possible to stop the labor. To make matters worse, Ann's labor was so strong that it started to break through her cerclage. The doctors told us that if that happened, Ann was at risk of bleeding to death. The doctors had to remove the cerclage, but that was the only thing preventing the birth. In a very painful procedure, the cerclage was removed, and the doctors told us that the baby would be delivered in less than an hour. At 23 weeks gestation there would not be enough lung tissue for the baby to survive unless we put him on a ventilator. Even then he would only make it a few days. Essentially, the doctor told us we had two minutes to decide if we were going to put him on life support for a couple of days or just let him die at birth.

So here we were — physical and emotional wrecks — with no sleep in almost two days, reliving the loss of Owen. Ann had just completed a very painful procedure, and we had to make this God–like decision of whether to let our baby die at birth or keep him alive for a few days on the ventilator. Finally, a female NICU doctor came in and suggested that we needed to let the baby go because it was too painful for the baby, and the longest he would live would be three or four days. Sobbing, we decided we would not apply life support when the baby was born.

As that NICU doctor walked out, I remember internally praying — more like yelling — to God, "All right God, you have removed the possibility of any doctor taking credit for saving this baby, so what are you going to do? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO???" And I remember right at that moment, an immediate peace came over me, and I had this overwhelming sensation that "it's going to be all right."

At that exact hour, Judith and Francis were leading a CHM healing conference in Colorado for about 400 people, and somehow they had gotten word of what was happening. They stopped the conference and had everybody get on their knees and pray for our baby.

The doctor walked back into the room to check Ann's cervix. As he was checking her, he did a double–take and immediately left the room to find another doctor. They both returned, examed her, and a bit dumbfounded, they said, "We don't understand it; even though your cerclage has been removed, somehow your cervix has not dilated further. So we could try one final drug, Procardia, that only recently has been used on pregnant patients to calm contractions. If it works, maybe we can get two more days, get to the 24th week and perhaps have enough lung tissue to work with to keep your baby alive." Internally my faith surged — I felt like I was beginning to see what God meant when he said it would be all right.

We decided to try the Procardia and over the next six hours the labor slowly decreased and ultimately ceased. The doctors told us that it would be a miracle if we could get two more days to get to the 24th week. Two days passed and Ann went back into labor; she was still on the Procardia so they added a little Terbutaline and were able to bring the labor under control. Two to three days later, she went into labor again, and again they were able to bring it under control with the Terbutaline. This pattern continued for the next 6½ weeks. At 29½ weeks, Ann went into labor, but this time the baby's heart rate went down. They immediately performed an emergency C–section. What the doctors found was that the baby's umbilical cord was so tightly wound (not around his neck, but like a phone cord), that when he was pulling on it he was cutting off his own blood flow. The doctors said that if they had waited another day, he would have been stillborn.

declanDeclan was born at 2 lbs. 15 ounces and was almost 11 weeks early. He spent the next seven weeks in the NICU exceeding all expectations. Today he is a healthy 9 year old, 99th percentile in height; he is bright, athletic and as stubborn as they come. He is a living, walking miracle, and no doctor who was involved will dispute that.

But here's the mystery: we still lost Owen. We prayed just as hard for Owen to live. Why did God save Declan but not save Owen? Losing Owen shook the very foundation of my belief in God. I never doubted that God existed, but I doubted that he cared, that he really would step in and do something.

For the next year and a half I continued to struggle with why God allowed this to happen. I was earnestly seeking answers, and even took a Bethel Bible course. A class of about 40 people, we were studying John 6 when God pierced my heart. At this point in John, Jesus was seen as a great teacher and rabbi, but the people did not yet understand that he was the Messiah; he was about to change their paradigm. He was asked how to get to heaven, and he answered, "Unless you eat of my Body and drink of my Blood, you cannot get to heaven." This was a hard teaching, and John says that a lot of Jesus' followers turned away. Jesus turned to his twelve disciples and asked, "You do not want to leave me too, do you?" Simon Peter responded, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the holy one of God." (John 6:66–67)

I had read this verse at least ten times before, but this time it was as though God pulled the veil from my eyes. I started sobbing so hard I had to leave the room and go into the hallway. I realized that Simon Peter had no idea what Jesus was talking about. They had not even had the Last Supper and Simon Peter certainly did not know about communion. But he did not need to understand; he just knew that Jesus had the words of eternal life and he had to trust Jesus. That's what pierced me. I realized I did not need to know why Owen died. It was okay to trust God even if I couldn't understand why.

With this revelation, I continued to weep and just prayed to God, "Forgive me for not trusting you. I give you Owen; just take good care of him." With that prayer, I felt a release of something and the beginning of my reconciliation with God. I realized that I was trying to play God. Basically, I was placing myself in God's seat to run the universe. And in my universe either Owen should have lived or I should have answers as to why he didn't live. Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, I was exercising my independence from God, saying, "God, I know how to do this better than you do." I came to more fully understand and accept that there is a mystery to how God works, including in physical healing. At CHM we have seen some tremendous physical healings. For example, 4–year–old Taylor Mac Smith (son of Taylor and Kathi Smith) was healed of a malformed esophagus valve right after having a doctor confirm that it was a permanent condition.

Another healing our community experienced was when fellow Board member and friend Jim Francis, was healed of Stage IV Thyroid cancer sitting in the Mayo Clinic waiting room. He was waiting on a CT scan that would show the cancer had spread to his spine. He had been reading and praying through a book on forgiveness and right then he turned over some major forgiveness and resentment issues to God. As he sat in the waiting room, he literally felt something lift off him. Not knowing what that feeling meant, he went the following week to CHM for prayer for the first time. He filled out the form that asks for three things to pray for. He wrote (1) healing and (2) peace for his family; and he intended to write (3) that God would guide his path — but did not because he decided the first two were enough for this short prayer session. Two trained CHM prayer ministers prayed over him and sensed that he had already been healed. Then one of them asked if she could anoint his feet with oil because she sensed God saying that he wanted to guide Jim's path — the very thing that Jim had not written down. Jim returned to Mayo Clinic to get one final scan before his surgery, and the doctors could find no cancer on his spine; in fact, they couldn't find it anywhere in his body. He was cancer free, and has been for more than ten years now.

mccarthyfamilyYet, sometimes the physical healing does not happen. It could be because of blocks to healing such as lack of forgiveness, addictions, unrepented sin, occult behavior or generational sin from which the person needs to be broken free. Sometimes the sick person even embraces the sickness as penance for their sins, which acts as a block to any potential healing.

But sometimes there is no such block, or the block is prayed through and the physical healing still does not occur.

One of our beloved CHM workers, Jeff Sampson, died of cancer after years of battle and several times believing he had been healed. There certainly was no shortage of prayer by Francis and Judith and all of us at CHM, but God did not heal his cancer, and allowed him to go much too soon. The why is a mystery. But when the healing prayers are in love (such as with the prayers for Jeff), then very often spiritual and emotional healing occurs, even when physical healing does not.

In summary, the mystery of healing and its closely related cousin, the mystery of suffering, were perhaps best explained by the Bishop of Durham who addressed the mourners of a coal mining accident in England about a century ago:

  It's difficult to understand why God let such a disaster happen, but we know and trust him and all will be right. At home, I have an old, silk bookmark given to me by my mother. When I examine the wrong side, I see nothing but a tangle of threads. It looks like a big mistake. One would think someone had done it who didn't know what they were doing; but when I turn it over and look at the right side, I see, beautifully embroidered the words "God is love". We are looking at this today from the wrong side. Some day we shall see it from another standpoint and we shall understand.  

 


Ed McCarthy Trial lawyer and partner at the Rogers Towers P.A. law firm in Jacksonville, Florida, Ed has served on the CHM board for almost 20 years. He is married to Ann and they have three children.
Summer 2015 Issue