Mandi Eatough is a senior at Brigham Young University studying Political Science. She is originally from Redmond, Washington. She writes this guest post as an Open Letter to Latter-Day Saints About Growing Up Sick in A Church That Emphasizes Healing as The Result of Faith.
I was born sick.
For a long time nobody knew how sick I was. When I was three it was just asthma. When I was ten it was just growing pains. When I was thirteen it was just in my head. When I was a junior in high school it was just pneumonia. When I was a freshman in college I just wasn’t eating right.
When I was a sophomore in college it was a clearly late diagnosis of autoimmune disease and a nervous system disorder that had been destroying my body for more than twenty years without treatment.
I was so angry. I was angry at my doctors for dismissing the pain of a child that had no way to defend themselves. I was angry at my parents for believing the doctors when they said there was nothing else they could try. But most of all, I was Angry at God for not healing me.
As a born & raised Mormon I was taught that when you’re sick, you ask God to heal you and if you have faith in Christ, you will be healed. This message is repeated so frequently, and with such surety that I was certain that I couldn’t be sick. Over and over these messages get repeated:
“And Jesus went about all the cities and villages… healing every sickness and every disease among the people.”
“And Alma said: If thou believest in the redemption of Christ thou canst be healed.”
“Lay your hands upon the sick, and they shall recover.”
I mentioned my anger with God. This anger came in that moment of diagnosis where I felt like my illness was a broken promise. It felt as if each healing blessing I had received throughout my life had been a waste. I thought that I had shown faith in Christ when I asked for these healing blessings, and that if I asked enough I was supposed get better.
I didn’t get better.
What we don’t talk about enough in the context of the healing power of the priesthood are the caveats that comes with the promises of healing. As Elder Oaks said in his general conference talk Healing the Sick:
“The words spoken in a healing blessing can edify and energize the faith of those who hear them, but the effect of the blessing is dependent upon faith and the Lord’s will.”
I knew I had to have faith to be healed, but I didn’t think about healing as something that may not happen for everybody if it’s not the will of God. I don’t think that this is some big secret that was kept from me. I’d wager we talk about the will of the Lord in church just as often as we talk about the healing power of the priesthood. But in my experiences in the church, these two concepts had such a large disconnect that I couldn’t even begin to understand how I could fit into a gospel that promised healing when I was still sick. Part of this disconnect stemmed from the pain I experienced growing up in a church that emphasizes healing as the result of true faith.
In my first set of scriptures I crossed several verses out of various sections of the Doctrine & Covenants with a black sharpie at some point while I was in Primary. Each of these verses promised healing of physical afflictions. I don’t remember how old I was when I did this, but I remember the primary lessons where my teachers promised that if we were hurting we could ask for a blessing to make it better. I did, and it didn’t.
As I got older, my illnesses got progressively worse. By the time I was in Young Women’s my undiagnosed illnesses regularly kept me from church activities and meetings. After missing a ward youth temple trip because of yet another infection one member of my ward told me that I had been “deceived by the devil”, and that “there was really nothing wrong with me.” I believed them.
In a YSA ward at college (after diagnosis) my Bishop counseled me that my church attendance was suffering too much because of my illness. He informed me that church meetings more important than my medical treatments and continuously insisted that I would be healthier and a better member if I were to discontinue them. I had to go the stake president to get my ecclesiastical endorsement that my bishop refused to give me so I wasn’t kicked out of school.
I don’t recount these instances because I want to call these people out or because these experiences are representative of my experience in the church. I recount them because people don’t understand what I mean when I say that church can be painful for people who are already in pain.
I mean that I am exhausted by the burden of dealing with the spiritual pain brought about others who are unable to understand how a sick person could possibly have true faith. I mean that the addition of this pain to the physical pain I already experience because of my illness has often felt unbearable. I mean that it has made me question my place in a gospel that is supposed to be for everyone.
In the last session of General Conference, Elder Hallstrom posed the following question:
“Do we have the faith ‘not [to] be healed’ from our earthly afflictions so we might be healed eternally?”
I cannot describe how that moment felt to me. I was overjoyed to hear those words spoken in a discussion of healing and faith. Particularly in a setting with such a large audience. I have spent years in the church trying to learn how to have the faith to be not healed. I did this alone. I couldn’t even find the words to express the concept until a couple of years ago. No one was there to tell me that it was okay that I wasn’t getting better. Hearing Elder Hallstrom use this phrase meant that the words I had used to express my own experience in the church were far more accessible to other members looking for the same.
For so long, my church experiences came with messages of ensured healing for the faithful. This message, meant to give hope, often caused me to doubt. However, knowing that Christ’s love for me isn’t any less because I’m sick has been a blessing that, for me, far exceeds the potential blessings of healing that I have not received.
This doesn’t make my pain go away. For me chronic illness comes with this pain beyond the pain that comes with the conditions I deal with every day. The pain that comes with knowing that no matter how many hours a day I dedicate to keeping my body from getting worse, it really isn’t going to get better. No matter how badly I want to be better, no matter how much faith I have in the healing power of the atonement, this isn’t something that I get to fix.
If you’re in pain at church, whether physically, emotionally, spiritually, or in any other way you may not even know how to correctly express, I want you to know that it’s okay. It’s okay to hurt, and it’s okay for church to make that hurt worse. That pain doesn’t have to go away for you to belong in the gospel.
If you aren’t in pain at church, or if you are interacting with other members in your ward who are, please don’t assume you can heal the pain of those around you. Compassion, empathy, and charity are key to honestly bearing one another’s burdens, mourning with those that mourn, and comforting those who are in need of comfort.