Practitioners always fascinate me. Whether it’s carpenters, plumbers or electricians, I love to watch them at work and to ask a myriad of questions.
So it is with healing prayer. For several years, I often travelled in the States with a Lutheran pastor called Bill Vaswig. He was a contemporary of two other leaders in the ministry of healing, the Catholic Francis McNutt, and the Episcopalian Leanne Payne. Watching Bill taught me so much about healing prayer, both its theological underpinning and its practical outworking. At conferences and in his little consulting room outside Seattle, we would talk, study, pray and even laugh together. It was a sweet time.
Our mutual friend Dallas Willard once asked Bill over dinner what he actually thought about when he prayed for someone. What was going through his mind? These and other questions I put to Bill in a series of online interviews (www.renovare.org Bill Vaswig Healing Prayer Interviews).
Bill described his experience of coming to faith in Christ in the 1940s. He was the son of a poor itinerant evangelist in North Dakota, and his mother knelt by his bed and led him to the Lord.
Wisely, his mother asked Bill what he felt. ‘Not very much’ was his honest reply. ‘What are you sensing?’ she asked. ‘I feel like I’m walking towards the edge of a very high cliff with the wind blowing all around me’ he replied.
In the way Bill told the story, the response we would expect to hear from a loving mother was to slow him down and tell him not to do anything reckless like stepping off the cliff. What parent wouldn’t wish to pacify their frightened child?
But she didn’t. Instead, without hesitation, she shouted ‘Jump, Billy, jump!’ And he did.
