Healing

Vision

By Ruth Eshbaugh

I had two visions about the time I went forward in church to make my calling public. The first one was during a quiet time. I sensed women around me crying. There was deep wailing and grief, pain that went to their very core.  I had the sensation of my shoulder being wet with their tears, but it really wasn’t.  All I can say is it was a sense of it being that way. I didn’t really hear the crying, but felt it.

Then a few weeks later I sensed one women crying, she wasn’t a single woman, she represented many. She was crying like before and she was enveloped in darkness. Then there was a light, like a lamp that came and entered into the very core of her darkness and grief.  I knew the lamp was Jesus. I feared the woman was me.

[Continue Article]

About Brokenness

By Ruth Eshbaugh

I am a broken person and God is healing me. How do I know this?

I am a broken person because I am newly divorced. I am a broken woman because I left a difficult marriage after 28 years that ended years of verbal and emotional abuse and neglect. I am a broken woman because as the result of the events surrounding my divorce I lost my ministry, my church and my support group. I am a broken woman because the sin against me was aimed at my identity as a woman, as a person and as a believer. I am in need of healing and I am finally at a place of healing. That place of healing is inside of a local church body. The most difficult part of this is that it was in a local church body that I was wounded. It makes the process difficult and slow. I have trust issues, I have abandonment issues. I need to reach out and I have fear of doing so. It is not an easy place to be, but it is where I am. And God is there with me just as He promised.

In my new church we are studying Ephesians and what it means to be part of the body of Christ. It is an important study for me personally and very timely. I realize I have not left the body of Christ because of a bad experience. I left a church and have moved on to find healing and restoration. When I first arrived it seemed impossible that I would ever be ok again. I stayed to myself, afraid that if people knew what I had been through they would judge me too.

[Continue Article]

Loving the Unlovable

By Ruth Eshbaugh

Sara was a small disfigured woman in her twenties. She had multiply medical problems; the surgery on her back meant to straighten her spine with metal rods didn’t seem to have helped. Her disposition was sour. She smelled because of her lack of hygiene and the warm damp climate of Florida. My life had intersected with hers at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for youth. Sara liked to sit by me much to my great displeasure over the situation. She often became angry and excitable over any attempt the group had in confronting her disposition and views on life. We collectively knew what worked and what did not. Sara did not have a wining strategy for life, sobriety or relationships.

I was not a believer at the time, although God had gotten my attention and I was well on my way to being overwhelmed by His love for me. I could not resist loving Sara, loving that which was unlovable in her. It wasn’t even so much that I loved Sara, but I was in love with the possibility of a God who loved me just as I was and would rescue me from my addiction if I sought His strength.

[Continue Article]

Beth, Birds, a Little Girl and Some Thoughts about Heaven

By Robin Shreeves

The musicians at the pavilion on the beach were practicing the song “I Can Only Imagine” – a song that muses on what it will be like in heaven. Through an opening in the pavilion I could look out onto the beach and see about 40 seagulls soaring freely.

Free, I thought. That’s what heaven will be like – freedom from what weighs me down in this world. I will have the ability to soar freely like a bird on the ocean breeze.

I had been invited to the pavilion by Beth, a woman who had introduced herself to my friend Challey and me out of the blue as we walked the boardwalk from Asbury Park to Ocean Grove.

Beth could have been 25; she could have been 40. It was hard to tell. She was only about 4’10” tall, and it was clear that she had some mental incapacities.
 

[Continue Article]

Is it God's Will that I be Healed?

Bible Study

By Bernice H. Jacobs

John the Apostle states in 3 John 2, "Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." (KJV)

So how do we know, for certain, it is God's will for us to prosper, be in good health and free from infirmities? 

First, where does sickness come from?

Sickness is revealed in the Bible as coming directly from Satan.

Read Job 2:4-7

Read Matthew 17:14-18

What is the purpose of the Son of God?

1 John 3: 8, "He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning.  For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil." (KJV)

[Continue Article]

"But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5 (NKVJ)