When after two years, I finally thought I had found a way forward, someone suggested us to turn to Jesus.
When we heard about a rehabilitation centre for children located nearby the home of Paulina's parents in Jakarta, we decided to check it out. Paulina flew to Jakarta to have a look. Whilst there, her mother introduced Paulina to Ibu Jester, a lady from the local Catholic church community. They got talking and Jester asked Paulina what we were doing to support Naomi and help her recover. Paulina told her about all the things we did and also shared her fears and doubts. Jester listened and afterwards suggested Paulina to do the one thing we had not done: turn to Jesus.
She then told Paulina an amazing story. Years ago, Jester had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Her doctor concluded she had just little time left and that even if they would immediately operate her to remove the cancer, her chances of surviving were next to nil. She decided not to have the operation. Although her situation was hopeless, to her own and especially her doctor's amazement, she later found herself miraculously healed. Jester testified it was Jesus who had healed her. At the moment He had touched her, she had seen the cancer leaving her body. Feeling better, she went back to the hospital where the doctors found that 90% of the cancer had disappeared. Astonished, they asked her what she had done. Jester said she had not done anything and was amazed to hear the diagnosis. They decided to closely monitor her and a few weeks later the cancer was entirely gone. Jester was declared completely healed. Since then she dedicated herself to the church and to praying for people in need. I understood that when she prays, she sometimes has "promptings", meaning that specific words, sentences or visions emerge that relate to the people she is praying for. It sounded similar to what my mother experiences when treating people but in Jester's case these promptings were often references to the Bible.
After sharing her story, Jester told Paulina that we had ignored Jesus. All this time we had put our trust in all kinds of healing methods but we had forgotten about Jesus. Paulina, Catholic since she was 12 years old, felt ashamed. She had prayed, at times, but overall, she admitted, Jesus played no major role in her life. Jester told Paulina it was important to repent and put her trust in Jesus, to surrender Naomi to Him and to let Him help us. Jester then offered to pray for Paulina and sang songs of worship.
The evening when Paulina arrived back in Singapore I was keen to hear what she thought about the rehabilitation centre but instead she told me about her discussion with Jester. “We've offended Jesus,” she said and told me about Jester's miraculous healing. She also told me that when Jester was praying for her, a scripture verse emerged in Jester's mind and that they had looked it up in the Bible. It said: “This illness is not unto death.” I asked Paulina if that sentence referred to Naomi, and she confirmed it did. Obviously that sounded rather good because that possibly meant Naomi would not stay like this forever and that, at some point, she would recover. To be sure, I asked Paulina what this actually meant and in what context I should interpret it. I wanted to know what Jester said about it and what else they had talked about. Clearly tired from her trip, Paulina did not feel like discussing and since it was already late she retired to bed. Jester's comment had triggered something in me so I stayed up, went to the study room and thought.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had never thanked God for letting Naomi live. Two years earlier, when I stood powerless in front of those closed doors of the resuscitation room in Shanghai, I had pleaded with God for Naomi's life and walked away receiving what I asked for without ever looking back to thank Him.
I felt bad. On top of that, Paulina's comment that we had offended Jesus compounded my uneasy feeling. “What did I do?” I wondered. I did not see myself as an offensive person and I did not see how anything I had done would have been offensive to Him. I didn't even know if Jesus was real and had never really paid attention to Him. Maybe that had something to do with it. I had never made an effort to learn about Him.
I did not grow up in a religious family so when I was a kid, Jesus was not a familiar person to me. I did go to a Christian secondary school but I do not remember it as a particularly religious place. As I matured and paid more attention to what was going on around the world, I became convinced that religion did more harm than good. The constant violence in the Middle East – especially in Israel where Christianity originated – confirmed that to me. Also, a variety of bad experiences with Christians made matters worse. A husband and wife were preaching to me each time I met them but at the same time they were cheating and steeling. The few times I had visited a church, I found that whilst in church people were abnormally friendly but as soon as they were outside again, started gossiping about each other. It was the hypocrisy that put me off.
What also made Christianity unattractive to me were the claims made by those who believed in what was written in the Bible. Were the Earth, animals and human beings really created in just a few days some 6,000 years ago? Was it not proven by now that it had taken almost a billion years just for the Earth to become cool enough for living things to even exist? How about the story of Adam and Eve and the talking snake? Maybe it is because of these difficult to substantiate Bible texts that not many people openly talk about their Christian beliefs, especially not in "educated" company, simply to avoid embarrassment. Interestingly, you can talk all you want about Buddha (and the associated peace and tranquility), about zen, karma, meditation and yoga without raising any eyebrows. All this seems fully accepted, not embarrassing but rather trendy and exotic. In contrast, if you drop the name Jesus in a conversation, the temperature may well drop as well, or rise, as craftily depicted in a movie made by a well-known American atheist. I watched that movie and enjoyed it, even though it was pure mockery. The objective was clear: to prove that those who believe in Jesus and in what is written in the Bible have surely thrown their intelligence out of the window. This was best evidenced by a Christian senator who was interviewed. Responding to a remark of the interviewer that it was kind of disturbing to know that a person who is running part of the United States believes in talking snakes, the senator sheepishly remarked that you did not need to pass an IQ test to serve in the senate. Evidently, the people interviewed in this movie were carefully selected and did an outstanding job making a fool of themselves. I knew that but it still drove me further away from Christianity.
I did not want to be a Christian. I did not want to be part of any other religion either. I believed in my own way. I was a free thinker. I believed there was a God – somewhere, out there, up there – but not one I had a personal relationship with.
Jester's story made me wonder if I had been wrong in discarding Christianity. I found myself in a dilemma. I had spend a lot of time trying to make sense of our situation and had been warming up to various forms of energy healing and the related philosophies. Admittedly, I had not managed to feel at ease with any of them but at least I had found something that gave meaning to our situation and something that gave me a sense of control. That was important to me. So when, out of the blue, Jester told us to turn to Jesus, I was caught by surprise. Turning to Jesus felt like making a U-turn. I could not help but feel that doing so meant I had to turn my back on the path I had just started to explore. I felt I was forced to choose one over the other, which did not make any sense because nobody was actually forcing me. It was unsettling.
Sitting in the study room, I reckoned it made sense for Paulina turn to Jesus but not for me. Why would I turn to Jesus? Actually, I was not sure what to do. The one thing I was sure about, was that I had not found what I was looking for because I was still very much looking. Besides searching for the most effective therapy to help Naomi recover, on a spiritual level I was still trying to discover where this “It’s all right” message came from. My thinking was that if I found the messenger, I would also find the answers to my other questions. Was I making progress? I thought I was. It had taken me two years of struggling to finally find a way forward. Why would I turn around, walk the other way and start all over again? I suddenly felt incredibly tired but I still needed to give Naomi her medicine. An hour later, I too went to bed and instantly fell asleep.
The next day I got up determined to sort things out. I asked Paulina what else she and Jester had talked about. Apparently, they had talked for hours and had read various passages from the Bible, amongst which the sentence that said: "This illness is not until death". How could a text written 2,000 years ago possibly refer to Naomi? I asked Paulina in what context these words were spoken, what text they were part of and how to interpret them. Although she had made lots of notes during her talk with Jester, Paulina was not as confident to explain her notes as I was keen to understand them. If the illness referred to in the Bible was not unto death, then unto what or when was it then? I also wanted to know who had made that statement and why. Also, how did Paulina and Jester now actually arrive at this sentence? Did Jester, during her prayer, suddenly think of a particular number combination and then opened the Bible at the corresponding page to see what it said? How did Jester know those numbers referred to the Bible? Did she perhaps knew this text already, deemed it relevant to us and therefore looked it up and read it? These questions were just related to that one sentence but pretty much everything Paulina told me raised more questions she could not answer. In the end, I was completely confused and Paulina completely upset. Suggesting me to figure things out on my own, she left the room, leaving me with a bunch of Indonesian notes and a tiny, pocket-sized Indonesian Bible, neither of which I could use because I do not understand the language. In hindsight, I should have taken an English Bible to look up those verses Paulina had written down but at the time that did not even occur to me. It would not have made any difference anyway as I was not ready to absorb and interpret what I would have read.
We did not speak about the topic anymore but over the next couple of days I kept thinking about it. Initially it bothered me that Paulina and I were not able to just discuss and create some clarity but gradually the frustration with not being able to answer all these questions faded and made way for a new question: if it was Jesus who had healed Jester, could it have been Jesus too who saved Naomi that night?
A few days later, at midnight, I was giving Naomi her medicine. Everything went very smooth. She swallowed well, no medicine was spilled and once we were done, Naomi immediately slept. Rather than leaving the room, I stayed with her. After a while, the thought of Jesus possibly having saved Naomi popped up again. It occured to me that I had not given Jesus much of a chance. Whereas I had given clairvoyance, reiki and many other things the benefit of the doubt, I had not done so with Jesus. Then, in the darkness and quiet of the night, I turned to Him and without so much of a thought I whispered: "Have pity on me. I will open up to you. Please help.” An unusual choice of words, I thought, but that was all I said.
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