Loaves and Fishes

I pulled into the Walgreens parking lot and into the lane for the drive through pharmacy. Hillsong’s Oceans played over the speakers. 

“Okay, that’s going to be five hundred dollars...is that normal?” the woman behind the counter asks me.

“Sadly, it is. It’s an expensive prescription.” I say.

The prescription is for three months worth, but still. Five hundred dollars. I let the sum of the amount sink in. Five hundred dollars every three months for the rest of my life? I don’t want to be a person who takes daily medication. And the things was, I was starting to feel like maybe I wasn’t meant to either. 

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto Thyroiditis four years ago, but they tell me I’ve had it much longer. The ultrasounds of my thyroid show extensive damage.“It looks like Swiss cheese” the thyroid tech had told me. I had gone on thyroid medication the first time when I was twenty years old, and even though it was temporary and was able to wean off, when I had another baby four years later and my hair wouldn’t stop falling out by the fistful, they put me back on. Then I weaned off again until I had yet another baby and then re-did this whole cycle once more and it was then—my fourth rodeo—that they told me this was a sign of a chronic problem. It wasn’t just an isolated case. Instead, we were talking a real live autoimmune disease. Lifelong medication. No cure. My body was confused and my immune system had begun attacking my thyroid and not a thing could be done about it.

Oh, I tried all the things that they say can be done about it. All the things people on the internet and in books say will help. I did every possible test you could do to determine the root cause of my disease. This, in an attempt to treat it, in hopes it would help. 

Autoimmunity is progressive, meaning it doesn’t stop. And usually, if you’ve been diagnosed with one autoimmune disease, chances are, you’ll be diagnosed with another and maybe another. People who are autoimmune tend to “collect” disease. There is no known cure for autoimmune diseases. Any of them. Knowing this, I figured I’d better do everything I could to slow progression and not get another one.  

I tried extreme diets and cleanses. I avoided caffeine and sugar and fruit and alcohol and grains, and legumes, and nuts and seeds and nightshades and a partridge in a pear tree. I survived basically on meat, veggies, avocado and coconut oil for months. 

Next, I did a heavy metal detox and got tested for food allergies. I got a colon cleanse and did a cleansing and detox of my liver. Maybe? It was either cleansing or detoxing or both. Something like that. Anyway, I also took all the supplements. Went in the sauna to sweat. Went to accupuncture to…well, I’m not sure. I fixed my leaky gut—if I had a leaky gut. And all this time, I got my blood checked faithfully. Blood checks were necessary for me to see how much progress I was making and with all this change, sure enough, my Hashimoto antibody numbers went down. This is doctor talk for “I got better.” I mean, my hair still fell out like crazy, which was always my main symptom, so I couldn’t really tell, but my blood work said I was better-is.

I tell you everything I did and yet I’d be remiss to not emphasize this fact: I was completely gluten free for three years. Anyone who knows anything about Hashimotos knows that gluten will kill you dead.

I kid, I kid, (barely).

So because of all this work, my antibodies went down, but they never got below a certain point. They just sort of hovered around a couple hundred year after year with little variation while I did everything I could think of. That is, until in the most ironic twist of my life ever, my numbers went lower than they ever had before after I reintroduced gluten to my diet. 

I knew it, I thought. I just knew the whole time I was avoiding it that it wasn’t about the gluten. 

It was about something else. 

Now I found myself in line at a Walgreens pharmacy, having just spend five hundred dollars on medication I didn’t want to take, for a disease I was becoming more and more convinced had spiritual roots.

When I was first diagnosed, I read about there being spiritual roots to autoimmunity, but it all seemed a little hard to comprehend. Like, they say for *some* people, autoimmunity has spiritual roots but it seemed too nuanced and personal to untangle. Could be this, could be that, could be none of that, could be all of that, WHO KNOWS, ISN’T THIS A FUN GAME?

So I stopped studying about spiritual roots because even without that element, Hashimoto is multi-fasited and so complex. Like, it has to do with hormones and stress and diet and gut health and heavy metals and viruses and parasites and constipation and your emotional state and exercise and just EVERYTHING. And it’s exhausting. And as I reached across to grab my bag of mediation from the nice pharmacist lady at Walgreens while Hillsong’s Oceans played in the background I thought “I don’t ever want to have to buy this stuff again.”

I had the thought because of something that happened earlier that week. Something I haven’t told you yet, which is this: Lately I had had the thought that God might heal me. But I also wasn’t sure. BECAUSE HOW CAN YOU VERFIY GOD SAID HE MIGHT HEAL YOU? What if I’m just crazy? And yet. I was beginning to think that maybe He really and truly was going to —ahem—perform a miracle.

For me.

Would He? Wouldn’t He? Hope and doubt danced together in my brain and as I drove away in the tears of it all, I prayed along to the song:

“Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders

Let me walk upon the waters

Wherever You would call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander

And my faith will be made stronger

In the presence of my Savior”

See, what happened before this was, I was going about my life normally when I came across a church who said that when it comes to autoimmunity, knowing, loving and living your life for Christ, along with addressing your strongholds and then taking accountability for our sins and renouncing them, or I guess “making a conscious decision to turn from them and not doing them habitually anymore because you finally realize the little things matter and you want to trust God when he says this is how you should live,” and then addressing any bitterness you might be harboring for people along with un-forgiveness and pride, or “exaulting or glorifying yourself” and all the other stuff we nurse that brings death instead of life to our bodies by not allowing ourselves to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, all that stuff keeps us from healing. And in telling you through the longest run-on sentence of my life, that is what they say. They also say when we know WHO WE ARE in Christ and live from that place, it allows our bodies to heal because we are finally functioning the way were were created to so the body is no longer confused.

You know. Just your normal everyday message to stumble upon.

The thing is, this idea makes complete sense to me if the kind of healing we seek has spiritual roots. And I do believe a lot of sicknesses we suffer have spiritual roots. But not all. What about when people who already walk with God intimately like this get sick? What about mental and physical handicaps, which get healed a lot less frequently? What about people who are not supposed to be healed? Who are being called home to heaven? What about falling into thinking that there is some formula, and that if we just found it, and renounced all our sins, and figured out every last person we hold grudges or bitterness against and then figured out, down to the nitty gritty, where we are in error and turned from that and then made amends and humbled ourselves and denied ourselves and figured out who we were in Christ and just DID ALL THE THINGS PERFECTLY AND COMPLETELY then we could get the miracle. What about falling into that thinking? Thinking there are works we can do to what? Earn healing?

This does not sound like my God. And I'm sure this is not how it's presented. But it's where I knew I'd go. I’m sure God uses healing programs like these to bring people into truth and healing and if I had been further led to go, maybe I would have, but as it stood, I AT FIRST felt led to go, and then immediately all these thoughts came up. I discerned a big pause. I heard Gods still small voice saying, "hey wait a minute. Let's unpack this for you. I may have something else for you." And so I started to consider. If I knew Jesus as Christ and Savior, and if He has made himself real to me and I am learning to walk with him, free from the enemy’s lies now, in real time, and if I’m learning by His grace to deny myself and renew my mind, do I really need to rely on a program, as good as it might be, to help me do everything He’s doing with me anyway? Or is the program for people who may not know Jesus as Christ or how to walk with Him out of their lives of bondage and all the things that keeps them there? 

It’s probably that last one, huh?

That’s what I decided. I decided that my savior was bigger than any program or formula or solution and the reason I felt conflicted over “am I going to be healed or not healed? And am I going to need to take medication for the rest of my life or will He help deliver me? Should I go to the program or should I stand firm in the faith I already have?” was because THAT IS WHAT I WAS CONFLICTED OVER. My focus was on the healing and how it might happen and if I was doing the right thing in order to make it happen, and would he or wouldn’t He. That’s what I was focused on. So as I drove away, both thankful and resentful of my medication, unsure if I’d need to pick it up again, I knew that it was the healer I needed. Because the healing and the healer are the same.

“Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders

Let me walk upon the waters

Wherever You would call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander

And my faith will be made stronger

In the presence of my Savior”

Increase my faith. Increase my trust. Take me deeper into you. That is where the healing is because that is where You are. That was my prayer that day.

I decided I did not want Him for what he could do for me, but for what He had already done for me. Him making himself real to me that one day not too long ago—his opening of my eyes and making me a new creation in Him, that had been my prayer my whole life. I didn't know that's what I was praying that whole time. But it's what I was praying. So now that I had it, I was certain it was the only thing that really mattered becuase it changed me. He had answered that prayer. And I had done nothing to earn it. So I decided, if He never chose to do anything else for me, it would be enough. His bringing me from death to life in this life would be enough. But that isn’t the end of the story.

Because I know him, I know he also wants us to ask, seek, and knock. He deeply cares about our hurts and ailments and unrest. He wants us to come to him with that. He wants us to come to Him for everything. That’s the whole point of having a relationship with Him, but inside of our wants, our needs, our yearnings, He wants us to trust Him whatever the answer. To trust that He is still good. That His grace is sufficient because this is what He says. And the only way this is genuinely possible is if he has made Himself real to you first. If you have been saved and brought to life in Him. And I had. So I decided to ask, seek, and knock, but first, to be still and know that.

Jeremy has a tattoo on his thigh that says “saved by grace” and as I was riding my mountain bike the day after Walgreens, I was struck by that. I thought “I bet we are healed by grace too. Not because of what we do or don’t do, even though what we do is evidence of us being followers of Christ-- The being a follower of Christ thing, that’s the key, and you know what? I bet the Followers of Christ who are healed, are healed by Grace and grace alone. Even if the healing comes by way of the body coming into alignment with the mind of peace and how it was supposed to function all along. That was God's design that it would function that way, wasn't it? That was his grace.

We don’t receive healing because we obey or do all the right things. We obey because we have received healing already through Christ. The healing comes first from knowing Him and following Him. If the body follows, it follows. That’s why it doesn’t work the other way. We can’t pursue healing without meeting the Healer.

“God?” I prayed “I can’t renounce my sins perfectly because I can't remember them all. I can’t follow you perfectly even though I try. I can’t make sure the quality of my prayers are always top notch or that I’ll say the right words or ask the right thing. But I was saved by grace and now I am asking you to heal me by your grace."

I told Him I believed I had a spiritual disease, and that none of my works or anything I can ever do in my own power would ever be able to reverse it fully. I told him that if I tried I’d get wrapped up in legalism and it would take my mind off abiding which was my main call.

I finished “If it be your will, I accept healing by your grace and your grace alone. I ask you to redeem my body through your grace. My hope is in Christ alone. But, regardless of the outcome or whether you heal me or not, I trust you. I trust you with my everything.”

. . .

Jesus said “you’ve come looking for me not because you saw God in my actions but because I fed you, filled your stomachs—and for free.“

There’s this famous story in the Bible about the loaves and fishes, you may have heard of it? In it, Jesus was preaching to a huge group of people for hours already when it came time to eat. However, they were in the middle of nowhere and the only food found was five loaves of bread and two fishes. Because there were well over five thousand people present, it meant they could not even come close to feeding everyone. Still, Jesus had the crowd sit, and then he started passing out what little food they had, and as he did, it multiplied. By the end, after the whole crowd of over five thousand had eaten, the disciples picked up twelve whole baskets of leftover food. It was a wonderful miracle that the whole crowd had witnessed. The crowd was so happy to be fed, they were ready to declare Jesus king.

But the miracle isn’t the part of the story that resonates with me. 

What resonates most with me happens after. Because what happens the next day, after the miracle is performed, is the people who witnessed the miracle go looking for Jesus, and when they find him, Jesus says “you’ve come looking for me not because you saw God in my actions, but because I’ve fed you, filled your stomachs—and for free.”

Jesus then said “don’t waste your energy striving for perishable food like that. Work for the food that sticks with you, food that nourishes your lasting life, food the Son of Man provides. He and what He does are guaranteed by God the Father to last.”

So I guess it’s not about the miracle, or in this case, the literal bread which filled their stomachs. The bread is just the cherry on top. The bread is not the focus or the prize. God is. Jesus is. We must want Him because He saved us—because we see God at work—not for what he can give us now. What we really should want is the One who makes our stomachs filled, but not because we want our stomachs filled.

For me this means, I should want Him more than the miracle. 

Because it’s Him that saves. It’s through Him we are provided all we need.

I think I always thought the bread was the miracle (along with everything else I think I need to keep my belly full and happy). But the best part of this whole story is when the people are all looking around like “huh?” after Jesus essentially says “you’ve only come looking for me for what you can get” Jesus then says “I AM the Bread. He who comes to me will never go hungry. He who believes in me will never be thirsty." When Jesus says “I am the Bread” he is saying “I am what you seek."

He is saying, I AM the miracle. The living miracle.

Then He says “the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.”

I’ve read the story about Jesus saying He is the bread of life before, but never, not even once did I connect it to the loaves and fishes story. I never knew the reason Jesus was talking about bread was because he literally just performed a miracle using bread and now that everybody came to him wanting more bread he had to be like, stop looking for the bread. I AM THE BREAD!

I mean, really.

The miracle isn’t the point.

Being healed isn’t the point.

Jesus is the point.

So that’s what I learned.

I’ll still asking. I'm still knocking because He wants me to, but I will not mistake the miracle for the miracle worker.

Because what I seek is Him. Above everything else, I seek Him.

I know this loaves and fishes story doesn’t answer the “Hashimoto Walgreens story” directly. Will He? Won’t He heal? But the thing is, I don’t think it is supposed to. What we do and don’t do, what miracles come, and which ones don’t, I think what I’m learning is through it all, what matters is that we realize He is the point and when He is the point, we are to come to Him. “We’re in pain” we cry. Jesus says ”Come to me.” It’s not an answer, and yet, somehow, it’s the complete answer. It’s the only answer. And when you know Him, really know Him, this answer is more than enough.

When I pray “Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders, let me walk upon the waters wherever you would call me” He says “come to me.”

So I’m coming to you, God— whatever your answers are, that is what they are—answers. But You are the point, and I’m coming to You, for You.

You are the bread.

May I never forget.