In honor of Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit helps us, I'd like to share the story of how I was healed of life-long food allergies.
From the time I was an infant, I had food allergies. The conventional wisdom when I was born was that formula was better for infants than mother’s milk. So, that’s what I was given. Even though we know better now, that’s what I was given. Not surprisingly, my immunity was compromised.
In my early years, my parents regularly went to a local farmer to buy goat’s milk because I was allergic to regular milk. Eggs, wheat, oranges, chocolate among other things, also attacked my body any time I consumed them.
At some point in my youth, I must have grown out of the severest of the reactions, and I ate more freely but I continued to live with a variety of symptoms all my life. When I turned 30, however, I became very ill.
Under an unusual amount of stress during this time, I woke up one morning with one large severe burn similar to that of a sunburn on fair skin covering my face, neck and shoulders, and swelling my eyes almost shut. The stress combined with milk sent me into a bout with food allergies that I had never before experienced.
Over the next six years I went from being thirty pounds over-weight (135) to fifteen pounds underweight (90) while the list of foods that I had to eliminate from my diet grew longer as the years progressed.
For six years, I tried to heal my body the natural way, but I only got worse.
In October 2001, I had finally had enough and decided to go to a medical doctor. On my first, and only, visit to the allergy specialist, she tested me with tiny needles dipped in allergens for a few things that I didn’t think I was allergic to. Within seconds, parts of my body started to go numb and my blood pressure shot up.
Immediately, she gave me antidotes for the reaction as she would have for anyone, but nothing worked. My blood pressure would not go down. For the next four hours, I lay in the office waiting for my blood pressure to return to normal so that I could leave. When it finally did, she told me not to come back until I had detoxed.
I left feeling helpless and hopeless. I had spent the last six years trying to detox. What more was I supposed to do?
Feeling cornered, I said, “Okay, Lord, this is between You and me.”
I went on a week-long water fast to detox from the inside and, every day, I took Epsom salt baths to detox from the outside.
One of the reactions I dealt with was hundreds of open sores from my thighs to my ankles which itched so intensely that I was often compelled to scratch uncontrollably, to the point of causing myself to bleed. Unfortunately, the hot salty baths irritated the sores causing indescribable pain.
One thing I had learned about spiritual warfare is that anything that is out of control is likely demonic. God is a God of order. Anything that is out of order is not of God. The fact that the treatments the doctor used to get my blood pressure down didn’t work, combined with the fact that no matter what I did to help myself heal, I only got worse, along with the fact that the itching was so intense that I could not stop scratching, even to the point of blood. I concluded that in addition to the initial natural causes of the allergies, there was, at least to some degree, demonic involvement.
On the third day of the fast while I was in the tub, I was in such agony, both physically and emotionally, that I cried out to the Lord. “Whatever I did, Lord, to open the door to this thing, I’m sorry! I repent!” As I cried out, I began to go start manifesting demons.
I had been through several deliverance sessions before, so I was familiar with the sensations and process, but I had never been through one by myself. I asked the Holy Spirit to help me through it.
Feeling a kind of tightness in my chest, experience told me a demon was beginning to manifest. The best way I can describe it, I “saw” floating in front of me a something like a placard or name plate with the name on it.
I prayed against it, renounced it, broke my agreement with it, prayed in the name of Jesus, then I felt it rise up through my throat and leave me in a similar way one might feel when trying to vomit. In a matter of moments, I could feel the next demon beginning to manifest. Again, I saw the name plate with another “name,” and I went through the process again. This happened ten or eleven times in the space of about an hour. Some of the names I saw were characteristics, like selfishness, pride, self-righteousness, and others like affliction.
Selfishness was particularly annoyed that I was telling it to leave. It took control of my hand and tried to scratch me just under my throat, almost as if it were trying to grab hold of something to keep from being thrown out. I told it that it had no right to harm me and I commanded it to stop and leave, which it did. After I got out of the bath, I saw the three red scratch marks on my skin.
A few days later, again in a bath, I felt it happening again. Repeating the routine, this time three left.
I finished the week-long fast and when I began to eat again, I found I had indeed been healed and able to eat things that I hadn’t been able to eat before the fast. A month later at our Thanksgiving meal I fearlessly, gratefully consumed all the typical Thanksgiving Day fare on the table.
