When people present their mystery symptoms to doctor after doctor with no progress, I call that the healing merry-go-round. As hard as you try to get off the ride, you just keep going in circles.
In most professions, the job is black-and-white. That’s not to say that people such as plumbers, mechanics, accountants, and lawyers have easy occupations. They don’t. Yet they operate within sets of rules. The accountant who can’t get her columns to balance will eventually figure out the mistake in the ledger and post a correcting journal entry. The plumber who comes to fix a malfunctioning dishwasher will, even if the source of the problem is confusing at first, eventually figure out that a certain part needs to be replaced—or if that doesn’t work, he’ll install a new appliance.
Even some aspects of medicine are clear-cut. When someone gets into a skiing accident, for example, there’s no mystery about what caused the broken leg— and no mystery about how to fix it. With something like a bone fracture—where cause, effect, and treatment are well-defined—it’s like a ferry ride: there’s an end to the trip, and it’s somewhere different from where you started. Perhaps there’s fog along the way that complicates the journey—a patient’s fractures are splintered, or she gets a pen cap stuck in her cast—but there’s an established Point A and Point B, and medical personnel are trained to carry the patient from one place to the other.
Medical science is incredibly advanced at physical body repair. It’s developed lifesaving technology that allows patients to make radical recoveries from car accidents, broken bones, heart transplants, and so much more. Where would we be without the dedicated people who perform routine procedures and revolutionary surgeries every day? In the 20th century, medical science made great breakthroughs in virology, too . . . but it all got swept under the carpet. Because there was no funding to take these discoveries to the next level, these amazing doctors were left in the lurch as their findings about certain viruses went largely ignored.
With mystery illness, the causes of symptoms often aren’t evident. There’s no clear trigger, no clear explanation of someone’s suffering. Doctors’ training doesn’t map out Point A and Point B. There’s no rule book for them to follow. A skeptical physician may not even see a clear indication that someone is suffering —and so launch the patient on a continual search for validation that her or his condition is even real.
So many people with chronic illnesses aren’t getting better. Sometimes it doesn’t feel so much like a merry-go-round as a glum-go-round. It’s time for that to change. I’m here to tell you that the fact that there’s no rule book for mystery illness doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Take the legal profession, for example. Countless people become lawyers because they’re drawn to justice. They enroll in law school, get jobs . . . and then the realization hits that the justice they can bring to their clients is limited. It’s all within the confines of human-devised, and sometimes unjust, laws. Having rule books isn’t always a good thing.
Because there’s no rule book for mystery illness, there are also no limits to recovery—if you plug in to the secrets I reveal in the pages to come. Healing is one of the greatest freedoms God offers us. Healing is the law of the universe, the light, or whatever you choose to call the higher source—not the law of humans—and so it grants true justice. Untethered by statute, healing from mystery illness can exceed imagination.