Over a month ago I was completely healed of chronic digestive issues and it is such wonderful dramatic change in my life–praise God!
This condition began years ago. I think I’ve had chronic digestive issues since around the time my youngest son, John, was born in 1988. It started out with just a couple foods; I had a reaction to avocados after he was born, and eggs started making me feel a little queasy so I just started to avoid them. I had gradually cut many foods out of my diet–dairy, kiwi, grapes, summer squash–that would cause digestive issues. Then it just seemed to increase over the years and after a while led to more and more serious digestive issues where I had to stick close to a bathroom or make sure I knew where one was. If we went out to eat I had to ask for a special menu which would show which foods had dairy or other common allergic items I needed to avoid. Besides eliminating all dairy from my diet, I even started backing away from gluten to see if that made a difference, since I noticed a difference when I ate wheat. I quit eating cereals with wheat and started making my own gluten free granola. I also tried to stay away from pasta, unless it was rice pasta. I had learned to manage the condition to avoid trouble most of the time, but God wanted me FREE. The list of the foods that I couldn’t eat just began to grow longer and longer. Even certain vegetables and fruits that I loved, I learned I had to stay away from, so that at the end I would have to watch very carefully what foods were included in each dish I ate whether at a restaurant or at a social gathering. Quite often when I was going to a restaurant I would end up eating only a salad with chicken in it just be safe.
Back in February of this year I began to notice that it was getting increasingly worse. At some point I started battling with diahrrea that became unpredictable and unmanageable. Instead of having an issue once a week or every two weeks, I would have a problem almost every evening or every other evening. Then it became worse and worse until mid-March I couldn’t keep anything in my system; it would go right through me. That’s when I went to the doctor. He put me on a medication thinking it was some kind of bacterial infection, C-diff or a parasite. He had me do some lab work and put me on a very strong anti-biotic for 10 days which seemed to keep my problem at bay. During the beginning of that time I went to a healing conference at Life Church; it’s where I saw the man come out of the wheel chair. I really enjoyed the teaching and it seemed like there were specific things that really spoke to my heart. They talked about hindrances to healing, for instance one was a fear of not knowing how to act if I’m “normal.” Another had to do with getting out of certain responsibilities by being sick. They listed a bunch of hindrances to people really getting set free and receiving their healing and none of them really resonated with me–I didn’t see any of those really being an issue, but what it did do was to help me have a question in my heart which I believe Holy Spirit prompted, “OK, God, if there is a hindrance to my healing, what is it? What would be MY fear?” and Holy Spirit definitely highlighted something. The fear that I had was, “If I’m healed and I have no restraint on what I eat, would I start overeating? Would that become a new problem to me? Well once I saw I had that fear I turned from it; I repented and asked God to help me not be afraid. So anyway, when the ten days were up it was only 28 hours later that the diarrhea came back full strength in the the middle of the night, so I called the doctor in the morning and he put me back on another ten days of the medication and I made an appointment to see a specialist and I was just hoping that I would be well enough to get to the colonoscopy that was scheduled two weeks later. I saw the specialist the day before I was to run out of the second dose of medication. I was a little nervous because we were going to have our family Easter celebration on Palm Sunday and then we were going to babysit the next day and I thought if this all comes back full strength, how am I going to be able to eat at all at the celebration with my family because previously when I finished the medication everything went right through me.
On March 27th I went to see the specialist and I had one more day of medication left, and he said he was glad the medication my primary doctor prescribed was keeping the symptoms at bay, but he expected the symptoms to fully return again as soon as I was off of it. He was wanting more lab work once I got off the medicine; he was wanting to find out if I had siliac disease, which means I would have to eat completely gluten-free, and he was also checking for a certain kind of colitis that was allergy related. That same night I went to Kingdom Sending Center’s “Encounter God” night that meets at our church building the second and fourth Friday each month. While at that meeting, Anthony Coltman, who was part of the worship team that night called out some words of knowledge. One of them was that someone had a serious colon issue and God was healing it, so immediately I put up my hand and someone prayed for me.
After the meeting I went up to Anthony and I told him that I had just been to a specialist for this very thing and he said, “Put your hand on the area,” and then he put his fist on top of my hand and said, “100% healed. So I just received that and felt like that night I should quit taking the medication, whereas when I was at the healing conference a few weeks prior I didn’t feel a peace about getting off the medication even though I knew God was working–a woman even had a vision of God completely cleansing my colon, but I didn’t have peace about stopping the meds then. However, when Anthony said that, I KNEW that I was healed, even though I didn’t feel any special sensation–electricity, heat, tingling–like I have on other occasions; in this particular case it was just a knowing in my heart that I was free. So I quit the medication and since then I have not had a single issue; it’s been over a month now. I have been eating food and enjoying foods that I have not eaten in years, without hesitation and it’s been really wonderful, very fun being able to eat those foods again. I’m eating cheese; I’m eating eggs and many other things that gave me problems before. There were some foods that I had had to stay away from altogether because if I ate any, within 20 minutes I’d be in the bathroom–and I’ve been able to enjoy those. I just give God the glory for healing my body. I’m having so much fun I feel like a kid again being able to enjoy the little pleasures that food can bring, but at the same time I feel like God has helped me to not go overboard.
Not only has all my labwork come back normal, but the specialist I saw, who just did my colonoscopy said everything looked fine. When I told him about my miraculous healing even before he started the procedure, he seemed genuinely excited about it.