Faith that Heals: Stories of God's Love

About the Book

"Faith that Heals: Stories of God´s Love" by Jane Teas, Melinda Holland, and Georgianna Jackson The Centers for Disease Control funded this study to explore healing and faith. At the University of Carolina we began our academic study of divine healing with the assumption we knew what faith was, and that people would use God and prayer as coping mechanisms to make pain and suffering tolerable. Columbia was an ideal place to study the power of faith, with more than 800 churches to serve its 120,000 people. We often heard people in the hospital hallways talk about God and healing. But as we listened to over 100 people describe what it feels like to be healed by God, we began to understand that divine healing is far beyond a convenient coping mechanism. Some of the stories were almost identical to those described in the Bible, but in other stories, God seems at the beck and call of a believer, responding to desperate pleas, to shameful reproaches, and on occasion, amenable to bargaining health in return for faithful service. In our vignettes of healing, we found that God was active, not just a passive recipient of prayers, using visions, dreams, and whispers heard in the heart to heal and transform pain into a lightness of spirit. These stories tell of healings, but they also give 44 points of view about the nature of God´s mercy and grace.

About the Author