Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
James 5:13-16 NIV
Throughout my life I have tried to remain blissfully ignorant of how sick I really am. I think that this mental state has served me well and has caused me to push to get out of the hospital and back to life. My first hospital stay at Vanderbilt with meningitis was no different. Aside from some pain in my back and the occasional fever I felt fine. I continued to work from my hospital bed, even live streaming in a National Day of Prayer vigil with the help of our staff and elders. My days were taken up with spinal taps, bloodwork, and scans, all while receiving some of the most potent drugs you could ever imagine through my IV and eating some of the best food Nashville had to offer (Thanks to the generosity of so many friends and family and Door Dash!)
The medicines I was on, constant middle of the night interruptions and LifeFlight landings caused my days to get mixed up with my nights. I routinely found myself wide awake at 2am. I watched the entire The Last Dance documentary, read a myriad of books, and scrolled mindlessly through the internet.
And every morning, when the doctors would make their rounds, I would lobby to be sent home. I was convinced that the infection was fungal, but they could not be sure, and as a result, they were hesitant to release me. However, I am nothing if not persistent (My wife might say stubborn), so I kept pushing, after all I had a family and a church to get back to. I couldn’t waste any more time in this hospital when I could be up and doing what I was called to do.
The hospitalist began collaborating with my regular infectious disease doctors and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the consensus was that the infection was fungal, and there was no more reason to keep me waiting in the hospital.
After the better part of two weeks in the hospital, I would be going home. Home health would be coming to set me up with in infusion therapy, and the medicine that they had settled on was one of the most potent and dangerous antifungals that existed. It was so bad it had even gotten its own nickname:
Ampho the Terrible.
This was not the first time in my life that I had taken Amphoterricin. In fact, this would be the fourth. Twice with fungal lung infections, and once with a fungal brain infection I had been pumped full of this neon yellow poison. It was such a bad drug that there would need to be additional meds given to help control the side effects that came as a result of taking it.Â
So once again my girls loaded up in the car and headed to Nashville, but this time it was to bring me home.Â
But the summer didn’t bring the healing that I had hoped that it would. Over the next few months the pain in my back would continue and my body would grow weaker and weaker. People were beginning to notice the toll that the infection and its would be cure were taking on my body.
And so Jodi called upon the church to pray. And pray they did. One evening as the sun was setting over the West Tennessee horizon dozens of people from Crosswind Church showed up in my back yard.
Children, teenagers, volunteers, regular attenders, and elders gathered around Jodi and I and approached the throne of grace on our behalf. They prayed heaven down. They prayed for healing and restoration. They prayed for Jodi and for my girls. They prayed because they were just naive enough to believe what James said in his letter:
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. — James 5:13-16
Little did any of us know, that it would take almost a year for these prayers to even begin being answered.
Jeremy Powell 