There is nothing like a Sunday night service! Less formal, more intimate and relaxed. This week it was a Communion service. But first, rousing choruses led by my husband, then a song service conducted by one of the members, a colorful saint with a way with a song. She didn’t need a book, yet led us though verse after verse in her inimitable country style. I knew all but one of the selections-old, but fascinating with its newness to me--which I had learned by the time we stopped singing it.
Prayers, testimonies, and then it was time for the Communion service. One of the church ladies, a leader in the church, was in charge of this part of the service. She began by giving her testimony, which she said was related to communion. A soft-spoken, but clear communicator, she began by telling us of a 10-15 year period in her life when she was afflicted with serious, even life-threatening allergies and breathing problems.
“Every year, from February to May, I was covered in hives,” she explained. “I took so many oatmeal baths it’s a wonder I can even eat oatmeal today,” she smiled, shaking her head. Her allergies had become so severe that she was eventually housebound, not daring to risk a breath of perfume, hairspray, or any other more noxious fumes she might be exposed to in public.
“If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters.” She said she had learned the truth of that statement the many times she was rushed to the emergency room, usually to return home worse than when she went in. Nebulizers, inhalation therapy, medications and treatments became her line of survival in her struggle with severe asthma.
“I learned all the tricks,” she explained, “I knew I had to breathe through a straw slowly so I could get small amounts of oxygen to my lungs during an asthma attack. Finally, I came to the point that I said to God, 'Lord, if it’s going to be this way, I just can’t do this anymore.'”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t love my life, my husband, and God, but I was at the end of my rope,” she told us. "Then one morning as I was praying like this, I heard God say, 'Why don’t you take communion?'” She said she brushed it off, but the message was repeated to her a few days later. She found herself going into the kitchen getting out crackers and grape juice and preparing communion. “I stood at the counter, and as I ate the cracker and drank the juice, I felt something. I could really sense what Jesus had suffered for me to give me salvation, wholeness and healing,” she said.
Our speaker continued the story saying she began to take communion on a regular basis, especially when she felt the nudge to do so. “Then one day, I realized I hadn’t had to use my nebulizer that day. Another day I thought, ‘I missed my morning meds, and it didn’t bother me.'” As time went on, she realized she had gone a day without medicine, all the while, continuing communion as the Lord led her.
After weeks had gone by with no symptoms, she threw out all her considerable volume of medicine, then, fearful, she took it back from the trash. “I will discard one bottle a day,” she decided. That is what she did, until there was only one bottle left. “I still have that bottle, but it expired in 2005,” she said. “I keep it as a reminder for all God has done for me. I am completely healed to this day!”
Our communion service took on new meaning to us that night; it was followed by prayers for healing, and tears of rejoicing as praise was given for Jesus’s sacrifice for us.
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