Testimony of Healing June 12, 1995 Issue

As a child and young adult I questioned some of the concepts I...

Harriet C. Maloney

As a child and young adult I questioned some of the concepts I had learned concerning Christianity. I had not come to identify myself with any of the Protestant churches I had attended. Instead, I thought freely about what the truth really is. I simply could not accept that it was the "will of God" that someone should die young or suffer some debilitating affliction. Would a God who is loving take a young child from loving parents, or a young wife from a family, because He needed this person in heaven? No, that was not the God I wanted to know. I could not believe that man was put on this earth to be a helpless victim of disease and circumstance. I could not believe in a devil or evil that could have more power than God. And I refused to believe in a God who loved some more than others.

I had suffered from allergies, poison ivy, severe ear infections, and many common ailments that man is supposed to have. But sometimes I rejected both these miseries and the medicines that were intended to relieve them. I did not like the effects of medicine; it seemed there were always unpleasant effects, and I actually preferred to suffer from the given ailment. I questioned why, if God made physicians, they were given the knowledge to heal us at such a slow rate. And did God not love Early Man as much as he loves us, who now have present-day medicine?

Then my life began to fall apart. My husband, who had been loving, patient, and steadfast through years of a happy marriage, was succumbing to alcohol, becoming cruel and untrustworthy. The more I tried to mend things, the worse they got.

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