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03.
Center or Periphery
Becoming more like Christ may or may not involve healing. For my tutor, Bill Vaswig, the reason why one person is healed and another is not a mystery. A young mother is struck with cancer in both breasts. An elderly man watches the death of his wife and lifetime companion. A boy finds little relief from a rare impediment. Those who have taken their suffering into the Kingdom have benefitted most from not asking the why? question, but the what? What can this experience do to build the character of Christ on the inside, as well demonstrate the Kingdom to the world on the outside (Rom. 5:3–5)?
Whether healing comes in this lifetime or the next (Rev. 21:4), it is certainly in the heart of God to heal (Is. 53:5). This is not always the accepted view in the West, but it has gained greater support from scholars from a wide variety of Christian traditions, and not just those who trace their roots back to Azusa Street.
Even though so many people around the world are looking for it, the message of some Christian teachers is that God has only a passing interest in healing. The gift is seen as a doubtful experience contained in only one of the peripheral “controversial” gifts of the Holy Spirit. And even then the Holy Spirit is often seen as the little brother of Jesus in the Trinity. In this way healing is located as a subset of a subset of a subset of God. Little wonder it is shuffled off to the sidelines of our churches.
However, the glorious truth that Bill was so passionate about is that God is for us (Rom. 8:31) and wants to answer our prayers and requests (Matt. 7:7–8). Thankfully, when it comes to the lavish offer of Jesus to us in John 15, he puts in a qualifier: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (verse 7, NASB1995Scripture quotations marked (NASB1995) are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.lockman.org)). The qualifier is there so that we don’t do too much damage to others or ourselves by handling such a powerful resource. But the point is that the person who abides in him will truly want other people to be well. Love impels us to pray for the wellbeing of a parent, a sibling or a child; and if there is ever any doubt about what to pray for, simply find something good and ask for it. Doesn’t God want to give good gifts too (Matt. 7: 9–11)?
The Kingdom of the heavens that opened at Jesus’ baptism has never closed (Matt. 3:16). Jesus said that his followers would be able to do the same kind of things that he did (Jn. 14:12). What, we may ask, did he have in mind here if it didn’t include some form of healing gift?
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04.
A Universe of Healing
Jesus knew how to handle this reality better than anyone else. He knew how to turn water into wine (John 2:1–11). Our world has only understood how to turn material things into energy, such as oil or gas or wood, and even that took a long time to develop. But Jesus knew how to turn energy into matter, and that is quite a different thing.
By his life and example Jesus appears to have gone out of his way to model something that is open to all humanity if they will relocate their lives into the Kingdom of God through the power of the Cross. But anyone who wishes to experience anything like this kind of power will need the same sort of character that he had so that they can deal with it.
Blighted with a serious heart condition, ill health forced Bill Vaswig to retire from leading a growing church in Southern California while still in his forties. Over several years I would listen attentively, often making copious notes, as this wounded healer explained what he had discovered about healing prayer, and I would watch him at work with a variety of sick people in both America and Britain.
In practical terms, Bill showed me several things. For example, see each person’s story as unique. It is only in the context of God’s deep love for them individually that anyone should consider engaging with the process of healing. Little good can come from inappropriately attempting to pray for someone to be healed. But that should not stop anyone from trying or watching for healing to come over time. See doctors as God’s helpers, not in opposition to his intervention. “Start small,” Bill taught, “and don’t go for resurrections for a while,” he would joke. Also, as a usual discipline, pray under the authority and supervision of a local church and avoid going it alone. Always be pastorally sensitive, be wise about praying for the opposite sex, and maintain a healthy level of humor that doesn’t allow the experience to get intense.
I asked our mutual friend Dallas Willard, why Bill was so effective in his prayer for people who came to see him. “Because he lives in a universe where these things happen—naturally and normally,” he said. Looking back on my own time with him, if Bill taught me anything it was that healing prayer is abiding prayer.
Bill had himself been prayed for by a remarkable Christian woman when he was experiencing struggles of his own, and his faith had grown considerably as he ministered to hundreds of people over thirty-five years. His own experience of grace gave him the assurance that what he was praying for was real. Through his own careful study of Scripture, his brokenness and his many years of training and experience, Bill had developed the character to handle the precious gift of healing. I want to develop it too.
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05.
Small Beginnings
On his last visit to the United Kingdom when Bill had all but stopped speaking in public about healing, he visited a community that had been badly hurt by unanswered prayer. Some years earlier a child of one of the elders had been very sick and the congregation gathered together to pray. But the girl died, and along with her died the church’s belief in prayer. Bill took me to one side and asked, “Why did they bring the church together when the Bible teaches that it is the elders who are to pray for the sick?” (James 5:14). The point had never occurred to me, but Bill explained that the elders were considered to have the faith and character required to handle the power of prayer. “There will be people in the congregation who don’t believe in healing at all,” he told me, “and this will have been a considerable block to God working.”
Over the next hour or so Bill lovingly listened, coaxed, and challenged the little group back into believing that God might just be able to heal people after all. “Do you believe that God can save someone from their sins?” he asked. Well of course he can, they replied. “Then what makes it harder for God to heal someone than to forgive them for their sin?” (Luke 5:23) A nice line Bill. You just kick-started another church into trusting God again.
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06.
Healing Humor: A Tribute from Richard J. Foster
Soon after Bill’s first open heart surgery, we attend a school of prayer led by Agnes Sanford. Neither of us had any official part in the program, so all week we were carrying on with lots of humor. In fact, it felt like the best thing I could do for Bill at that time was to help him laugh. So I did.
We laughed until our sides ached. And then on the last night of the week there a letter penned to the door and it described how “the two of you have been carrying on with jokes and laughter and you need to know that tomorrow is the final consecration service so would you please stop all the silliness and so that we can enter into this consecration service.” It was signed, “a concerned friend.”
I was furious! Why didn’t they tell us their name? Why didn’t they come and talk to us? Bill just sat in the chair and said, “They must have a bad spirit; we need to pray for them.”
I was pacing back and forth saying, “Why didn’t they come and talk to us! If they had only come, we could have dealt with it. Why didn’t they come?”
And Bill just sits there.
Finally he says, “Oh, we need to pray for them.” And he was trying to get me to get on my knees and pray. And as you can guess, he was the one who had written the note.
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07.
Communion and Confession: A Tribute from James Catford
Last year I took one of the most woeful trips across the Atlantic that any green-minded person could ever make. I flew to Seattle for just four days to sit on San Juan Island between Washington State and Vancouver with a trusted friend, Bill Vaswig, aged seventy-five. There, with half an eye whale watching, I entered more fully than I had ever done before the discipline of confession. All one evening I wrote page after page about my life as best I could remember it. Next morning we got started as I carefully walked my friend through my life, making my confession as I went.
Occasionally Bill asked a question for clarification, but mostly he just kept silent. At times he even looked bored and asked, “When are we going to get onto the interesting bits?” He didn’t seem to be taking this exercise as seriously as I was! But I pressed on, determined that I wouldn’t underplay things and then later talk myself into needing to do the whole painful exercise all over again. Once this profound experience was finished, it was finished, never to be revisited again!
Bill, a Lutheran minister, then put his hands on my shoulders and prayed for me. We took the pages I had written and placed them in a baking tray from the kitchen, lit them and went outside. There in the gentle breeze of a day drawing to its close we watched as the paper caught fire, turned to ash and drifted out to sea. “We can stop now,” I said as we got chilly when the papers blew out and we had to retrieve the matches. “No” he said, the gravest he had sounded all day. “We’ll wait to see it all disappear.” And we did.
The next day we took communion together and prayed for each other. Stumbling over our words at times we just collapsed in fits of laughter, unable even to get up off the floor. Something happened that day that only heaven fully knows about. I only wish I’d not waited so long to enter the discipline of confession in such an intentional way, or that I left such a large carbon footprint behind me.
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08.
On His Way Home: A Tribute from Emilie Griffin
On my last face-to-face visit with Bill, we were at a meeting high in the Rockies. As usual, his disposition was cheerful, playful, light-hearted. But I sensed in myself and possibly in him, too, a sense of parting. It was as though he had begun to cross over and could begin to glimpse the green fields beyond. Through the miracle of modern science he had pushed through the pain. But he was weary. He was wanting the rest and refreshment of being with the Lord.
As always, he seemed to be not the patient but the healer. Because I was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, an illness that is affected by stress, he acted as my lookout, one who found the best places for me to sit, the safest spots for walking without danger of tripping, the best views of God’s amazing landscape. Ill as he was, he was all friendship and brotherly concern. “Look, here’s a place where you can cross without falling,” he said brightly, showing me just where to put my foot, where to touch down with my cane.
But in spite of all the attentiveness for my own predicament and his, he did fall. One of the ministry team drove him to a local hospital, where it was determined that some sticking plaster and an extra boost of cortisone could keep him going until the meeting ended. Hating to miss any of the deep pleasure of being with us, he returned and took on his customary role of telling us about the healing journey of his life.
We all sat spellbound while he led us on a journey of the baptized imagination. Many illnesses are caused by a memory of past pain, Pastor Vaswig told us. In order to become fully open to the healing grace of the Lord we should retrace our steps, beginning with our first conscious moments in the womb. Psalm 139, he suggested, was one way to remember the things we had forgotten in our journey through the birth canal. With all the grace and charm of a man standing in need of Christ Jesus himself, Bill Vaswig led us into the heart of Christ. Some part of me, some part of us, knew that he was on his way home.
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09.
A Man of Laughter and Love: A Tribute from Nathan Foster
I wonder if I might take this time to talk about the passing of one of the most beautiful humans I have known, Bill Vaswig.
Those of you who float around in Renovaré events will know Bill as one of the founding board members and a gentle man who prayed for everyone. Bill was a flirt, and a smiling jokester, who loved well.
While Bill was my father’s closest friend for forty years, my first memory of him was when he came to pray for me as a teenager. I’m not entirely sure what brought him to my room, but what I do remember was that those were the days of my misguided attempts to try to please God. I worked hard at perfecting my legalistic view of faith and regularly practiced ruthless judgment towards others and myself. So you’ll understand my shock when this Lutheran pastor laughed in the middle of his prayer. I don’t think he understood that God required seriousness when being addressed. But, shock was brought to a whole new level and my respect for him plummeted when with passion and intensity he prayed the following words. “God, would you clean up all the shit in Nate’s head?”
As the months wore on, this experience proved to be paradigm shifting. I have since found it immensely helpful to use honest, colorful metaphors in my own prayer life.
Another formative experience I had with Bill came many years later after a midnight incident in which my substance abuse landed me bloodied in an emergency room getting a CAT scan and multiple stitches. In the end, my wife asked me to not come home. Eventually, I made it to Bill’s place where he spent three days praying for me. As you may expect I was filled with shame and embarrassment. I tucked my head in my lap as I recounted the last months of my journey and to my amazement Bill responded to my shame with laughter. When the shock of his reaction wore off, I began to see his message. He was trying to tell me that everything was going to be all right, that while my life was out of control, things could be okay. This brought tears to eyes. While I didn’t know it at the time, his countenance was exactly what I needed. In the proceeding days he treated me with such care and tenderness, fully believing that I could get sober and that life awaited me. While my last drunk was a few days away, this experience was a hinge in my healing process.
And so as I stood graveside and listened to my father deliver the final words, I watched two of the graveyard workers appear from the hazy shadows with muddy clothes and long greasy hair carelessly tucked under their hats. Both had a good two weeks’s worth of facial stubble covering the scars of sadness and hope lost in days past. I image Bill would have loved to talk with these men. I could see him taking them in and praying for them with well-executed profanity and perfectly timed laughter. I watched as the workers, nervously sauntered over to the casket, maneuvered ropes and hooks, and began to drop my friend’s cold shell into the ground. With an echoing thud, the earthly chapter was closed on eighty years of a life spent loving and praying; the earthly experience of William Luther Vaswig was to be no more. And while his memory, his goodness, his laughter, and his love will continue to reverberate for many years, I exaggerate not when I say his death is a profound loss for humanity. The heroes of our age are dying. But, in death, God always seems to find a way to bring about new beginnings.