Trials Along the Christian Path

Once in Pentecostal churches, we learned a whole new way of living. We were new at it and excited to learn. One of the First trials to come along was that I had Epilepsy, and in the Bible there is a man who has seizures who has a demon cast out of him. (Matthew 17:14-16) When some of the church members saw and heard that I had seizures, they decided that I, too, had demons. And for the next 6 years at that church, they tried to cast they demon of epilepsy out of me every chance they got. At first I was willing in this, wanting the seizures to stop, go away, etc., but as time went on, I became afraid of altar calls and healing services. To this day I will rarely go forward at altar calls and I definitely don't go to healing services.
They were well-intended people with good hearts, but they got carried away, or at least some of them did. If any of the older saints there had stopped and thought about it, they would have realized the one thing that could have prevented years of spiritual abuse from taking place – that is that the devil cannot abide where God lives. And God lives within my heart; therefore the devil and his demons CANNOT and COULD NOT HAVE ever lived in me to cause the epilepsy. Hence, Epilepsy is and always was a medical condition, not a spiritual one.
But they still were not satisfied. If the devil could not be cast out, the next thing they tried was Holy/Miraculous healing. Lay hands on the sick and they shall recover (Mark 16:18) was a verse I heard over and over. So I had multiple hands laid on me a-plenty. I felt the weight of the hands and I sometimes could barely stand up under the weight of them. Again, they were all good-hearted people with only positive intentions. But when it came back weeks later that I was still having seizures, they blamed me and said I didn't have enough faith, and they quoted Scriptures at me like “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove” Matthew 17:20. They had NO IDEA the amount of faith I had. I believed to the end of the Earth and back, but it didn't heal me. This is another form of Spiritual Abuse. And at first my parents didn't know any better because they were as new to the faith as my brother and I were. The four of us were all learning together. As I got to be an older teenager, however, I rebelled and refused to go forward at altar calls out of fear of what was to happen, and my parents didn't expect me to either. Somewhere deep inside I knew my healing was not going to come by way of am miracle. It was going to come, but not by way of the miraculous touch.

(Image from http://gotoheavennow.com/couldnt-cast-demon/)

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