Back Pain Gone

Neal’s Story

I have always struggled with sharing personal testimonies because I feel like they aren’t necessarily worth sharing – I have a long history of experiencing God’s faithfulness but I always feel like my testimony isn’t exciting or groundbreaking. I also struggle with faith – I am very technical and analytical, and a lot of times I discount the amazing things God does, writing it off as coincidence.

I am in the Army and back in March I was in Louisiana for a month of training. I got incredibly sick, unable to put on my body armor or walk anywhere without getting light-headed, nauseous, and needing to lay down. I couldn’t hold most food down; even looking at food would make me nauseous. I was evacuated from the training site and the doctors thought maybe I had a stomach ulcer. I was given medication to treat stomach ulcers and it helped for a couple weeks – until it didn’t. The medication made me lose my appetite and I became very weak and the nausea started to come back. I stopped using the medication and things started to get better. I got tested for everything – they took blood, urine, and stool samples to try and figure out what was wrong with me. All the tests came back negative. I was referred to a gastroenterologist and they did an upper endoscopy where they stuck a camera down my throat. They found that my GI tract was inflamed which is gastroenteritis, but that nothing else was abnormal. They took a couple biopsies – again, normal. No stomach ulcer. No infection. No explanation. I just… got better over time. I convinced myself it was probably something my body fought off somewhere over the months of testing, but in the back of my mind a glimmer of faith said that it wasn’t a coincidence.

More recently, a couple of weeks ago I hurt my back working out and it just kept getting worse. I am a helicopter pilot and the vibrations tend to cause back problems over long periods of time. The pain got to the point that I was dreading going to work out in the mornings. On the morning of last Sunday, August 8th, I decided I was going to go to the doctor because I just couldn’t keep pushing through the pain. It just so happened that the message that morning was on healing, and I decided to come forward to ask God to heal my back. While I was standing in line waiting for someone to come pray over me, I started praying over myself. I heard a voice in my head say that “This pain is not from God. Rebuke the pain in Jesus’ name.” And I did. Over and over again I cried out in silence, rebuking the pain in Jesus’ name. By the time Gunter and Alex came to pray for me, the pain had gone but I still doubted. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was just temporary. But Gunter and Alex came over and prayed for my back and told me to try to do something I couldn’t do before. I squatted down (which had been almost impossible before) and I just started ugly crying in front of everyone, I couldn’t believe it. I was healed.

A couple days later the pain started creeping back in and I was tempted to think “I knew it! It wasn’t real! It was just a trick!” But I knew that voice was not God’s. So I decided to try again, in my car, on the way to work – “God I know this pain isn’t from you. I rebuke the pain in Jesus’ name.” Over and over. And the pain went away and stayed gone! God cares about the small things. He cares about the aches and pains, and He cares about the “big ones.” My testimony is not too small, and my experiences are not insignificant. Whoever is reading this – yes it is weird. No I can’t explain it. And yet here I am without pain – I truly believe it was Him all along.