Amy Julia Becker - To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope

Amy Julia Becker is one of the best practical theologians writing today. Her books are poignant, personal, and deeply profound, and To Be Made Well is no exception. Healing is a complex and complicated topic, but Amy Julia treats it with all the tender nuance and care it requires while offering hard-won insights along the way. If you are tired of simplistic answers but still searching for hope, you will find it here.

Sharon Hodde Miller , author of Free of Me: Why Life Is Better When Its Not about You

Amy Julia Becker is a brilliant writer who has masterfully explored the complex and sensitive topic of healing in a vulnerable, sobering, and comprehensive way. Whether sickness is in our body, our soul, or society, whether we are presently ill, recovering from illness, or on the way to being illthis book will better equip you both for your journey in the healing process and to be an agent of healing.

David M. Bailey , founder of Arrabon and coauthor of A People, a Place, and a Just Society

Timely, practical, and full of hope, To Be Made Well is a beautiful offering for our weary, splintered, and hurting world. Amy Julia Becker skillfully addresses our personal and collective need for healing through examples from the Bible, from her own life, and from a diverse range of trusted leaders. These pages hold timeless lessons and helpful application. Highly recommend!

Vivian Mabuni , speaker, author of Open Hands, Willing Heart , and founder and podcast host of Someday Is Here for AAPI women leaders

Amy Julia Becker has written a beautiful book, grounded in the person of Jesus and the healing he brings. This is not a book with a before-and-after story of miraculous healing; it is a book about how we live in a fractured world with bodies that bear on and in them the brokenness of living. It is a book about how we see Jesus, how he sees us, and how his love heals us just a little bit more each day.

Lore Ferguson Wilbert , author of A Curious Life: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and We Wish Someone Would Ask Us and Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

In an age marked by division, detachment, and dis-ease at every level, from the intimately personal to our society at large, Amy Julia Becker has a word of hope: Jesus can make us whole and well. What that holistic healing looks like and how we can participate in it is the creative gift offered in these pages.

David Swanson , pastor of New Community Covenant Church and CEO of New Community Outreach

Amy Julia Beckers words have been a salve for my soul for many years, and the words in this book are no different. With vulnerability, wisdom, and grace, Amy Julia guides us towards seeking and understanding what it really means to be made well. I hope everyone reads this book.

Heather Avis , New York Times bestselling author of The Lucky Few and Different: A Great Thing to Be

Amy Julia Becker turns the stories of the bleeding woman and Jairuss daughter over like a prism to show readers all facets and shed light on our personal, spiritual, and communal longings to be whole. Her writing is honest, insightful, and unafraid of complexity, always leading us beyond ourselves and into the mystery of Jesus, our ultimate healer. I hope many read this book and accept the invitation to participate in Gods deep and wide work of healing.

Liuan Huska , author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness

Herald Press

PO Box 866, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803

www.HeraldPress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Becker, Amy Julia, author.

Title: To be made well : an invitation to wholeness, healing and hope / Amy Julia Becker.

Description: Harrisonburg, Virginia : Herald Press, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021058457 (print) | LCCN 2021058458 (ebook) | ISBN 9781513809717 (paperback) | ISBN 9781513809724 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781513809731 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Healing--Religious aspects--Christianity. | BISAC: RELIGION / Christian Living / General | RELIGION / Christian Living / Social Issues

Classification: LCC BT732 .B43 2022 (print) | LCC BT732 (ebook) | DDC 261.8/321--dc23/eng/20220124

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058457

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058458

Study guides are available for many Herald Press titles at www.HeraldPress.com.

TO BE MADE WELL

2022 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803. 800-245-7894.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021058457

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-5138-0971-7 (paperback);

978-1-5138-0973-1 (ebook); 978-1-5138-0972-4 (hardback)

Printed in United States of America

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scriptures marked (NRSV) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword

A s I lay dying in a hospital bed at twenty-six years old

As I sit across the table from a mom devastated by the grief of her story

As I read the article crying out for justice after unimaginable loss

The question is always the same.

Will I be healed? Will we be healed?

And then a deeper question remainswhat does healing even mean?

This may be the ultimate struggle of our humanity. Knowing we have this glorious welling up of great possibility in us, of golden dreams, but finding it all, more often than not, just out of our reach.

We are wounded. We are disabled. We are in pain. We are grieving. We are lost.

And the juxtaposition between what could be but is not yet and may never be is almost too much to bear.

On an ordinary day in April 2008, I suffered a catastrophic and nearly fatal stroke, completely out of the blue as my six-month-old baby napped and my husband finished his final law school presentation in the next room. Our lives were upended in a moment. And my near lifeless body lay in an ICU bed on life support for months afterward.

A beautiful community of friends and family and internet strangers prayed and loved us through that terrible season. From around the world, visions and dreams of me bounding out of the hospital like a modern-day Jairuss daughter, resurrected from the dead, began to flow to our inboxes and hearts. Healing would come. Everyone was hoping and praying and believing it would be so.

And yet months later, I could barely breathe or move on my own, much less run back into the world as if nothing had happened. The dreams of healing from our community and in our own hearts began to fade. The grief of unanswered prayers was perhaps the deepest we have ever experienced.