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How Healed Do You Want to Be? William T. “Bill” Faris (Ampelon Publishing, 158pgs, $13p)   After reading Bill Faris’ new book, “How Healed Do You Want to Be?”, I think I better understand how illness exists on various levels—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, social. And I think I better understand how that denying illness in any of its forms is to have a deficient understanding of it. His theme is that healing is more than just a temporary fix, a Band-Aid on a festering sore. God, it seems, works his eternal purpose through both tragedy and triumph, sickness and health.
Right from the outset Faris reminds us how fragile life is and how things can change in the blink of an eye. Several years ago, his wife, Robin, and two of their children were involved in a freak automobile accident on a rain-slick highway. It was a normal, everyday trip to-and-from school that abruptly changed—indeed, everything changed—in a split-second when a construction truck pulled into their lane. Robin suffered the most injuries, 50 fractures in all, with massive head trauma. Bill’s first realization after arriving at the emergency room was that he was not in control. This was not a comfortable place to be, considering his wife and children were victims of q life-threatening accident and in critical need of help. Yet that feeling of helplessness turned out to be yet another of those life lessons God teaches us through crisis. Faris writes, “As the first days of Robin’s long hospital stay wound on, I became aware of something I did not expect—something I call ‘the gift of fight.’ I suppose others may call it ‘faith,’ but I much prefer the term ‘fight’ because that’s what I felt. I felt fight.” It was his learning curve that has also helped me, his reader, to see that the “gift of fight”—faith—is sometimes not so much denial as resolve … and the ability to tell the difference between the two. As seventeenth-century cleric Thomas Fuller observed, “Health is not valued until sickness comes.” Throughout the book, Faris unpacks Jesus’ cryptic question to the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda: “Do you want to be healed?”—a rather odd thing to ask a man who had showed up daily, for decades, at the healing pool superstitiously hoping for healing by being placed into its occasionally stirred waters. Of course, he wanted to be healed. Why else was he there? But for Faris Jesus’ question begs yet another: How healed do you want to be? Healing is so much more than just temporary relief from some nagging symptom. Total healing is a process that encompasses five facets: release, repair, restoration, redemption, and revelation. To each of these facets Faris devotes a chapter, concluding by saying that “it is impossible to have a good theology of healing if you don’t have a good theology of suffering. Each depends on the other.” Too often, we stop before healing is complete. Once the symptoms are relieved we think we are healed, while the process remains incomplete. In all, Faris’ sensible view of healing is one of the better books I have read on the subject. Thankfully, it is short on theory and long on practicality, filled with both scriptural proof-texts (for theologs) and practical anecdotes (for the rest of us).
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