Beyond the Borderlands

Physical healing is in my view part of the Atonement, which is to say God's saving work for humanity through Christ's life, death and resurrection, but it seems to me that no freshly saved Christian should automatically expect it. It is surely God's will who He heals and who He doesn't, and if He does choose to heal, when, and to what degree of plenitude.
While delivered from the worst effects of years of alcohol abuse, I nonetheless briefly paid for my pre-Christian excesses in the early part of 1993 in the shape of panic attacks which could strike at any time after leaving the sanctuary of my residence. Thankfully, these only lasted a short period of time at their most debilitating, although I suffered on and off from them from several months, and they have recurred at rare occasions since. I controlled my panic syndrome with the help of the anxiolytic drug diazepam whose most famous brand name is valium, and which induced relaxation of body and mind, but to nowhere near the same degree as alcohol had done.

In the initial days of my sobriety I continued with my Post Graduate Certificate in Education partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College, while rehearsing for the play "Simples of the Moon" by Rosalind Scanlon, based on the life of James Joyce's troubled daughter Lucia, and which premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993. I also attended drugs and alcohol counselling sessions in Greenwich, my counsellor Elaine being a down to earth woman with a London accent and the gentlest eyes of pale baby blue who manifested total unflappability, which I suppose was an essential part of her calling. The only time she ever lost her equanimity in all the months I knew her was the occasion I announced to her over the telephone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to desist from taking diazepam, I defected to the powerful sedative chlormethiazole (heminevrin), which I had taken for a time back in the early 1990s as a means of controlling my drinking, and which unbeknownst to me at the time can interact with diazepam with fatal consequences. However, a sufficient number of hours had lapsed between my taking the chlormethiazole capsule and calling her for her not to be worried about my imminent health, and I can distinctly recall her literally laughing with relief at this revelation.

As well as Elaine I owe a colossal debt to Alcoholics Anonymous friends such as my sponsor Don who had been immensely supportive to me during my times of terrible trial, phoning regularly to offer me comforting words, and monitor the progress of my health, and yet for all that I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before ceasing to do so altogether. The reason for this was that only days after coming to faith in the Lord Jesus, and immediately following an AA meeting as I recall I received a phone call from Spencer Nash working for Contact for Christ, the result of my having cursorily filled in a form I'd found who knows where. I may have done so on a British Rail train, perchance in the summer of '92 while travelling to Waterloo with the sun setting over south London, ecstatic with anticipation of the festivities ahead.
He phoned back within a short while, keen to arrange a meeting, and if I remember aright I tried to put him off, but he prevailed upon me and was presently on my doorstep, a slim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently penetrating coffee coloured eyes and a magnificent salt and pepper moustache. After a brief conversation, we prayed together, and he remained my spiritual mentor for nearly two years.
Soon thereafter, I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant house in Surrey, not Surrey-in-London close by to where I reside, but the part of the county existent some distance beyond the Greater London border where suburb meets country, which is not to say that the whole of the county proper is uniformly wealthy, far from it, for comparative deprivation exists to a greater or lesser degree in many major Surrey towns, Woking, Addlestone, Redhill, Camberley among them.
At Spencer's house, he and I prayed together over areas of my pre-Christian existence necessitating deep repentance after having made an extensive inventory. My continuing use of diazepam and my longstanding addiction to cigarettes were two of the areas addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after gradually cutting my diazepam intake down to zero, I altogether lost a taste for tobacco. Admittedly, I continued smoking off and on for some four years after quitting valium, but I never really enjoyed a cigarette again, in fact, a single drag of a cigarette was enough to inhibit my breathing for the rest of the day, even robbing me of a good night's sleep. In time, even second hand cigarette smoke came to repel me.

By September 1994, I had been happily established within a local Charismatic Evangelical church, its base in South Africa, but its origins in the US, for over a year. My panic attacks had long ceased, and I was celibate, non-smoking, teetotal, growing in the Lord, and wholly committed to being worthy of the name Christian, to the walk to which I had been called by God. If in late 1992 I was growing impatient with what remained of my conscience, and how the latter inhibited my demented hedonistic lifestyle, within less than two years I had been transformed not just beyond all recognition but all belief, that is, without taking into account the miraculous changes that God can bring to bear on the life of one such as I, because God alone can effect such beautiful miracles. Of course, I've said that before, but I shan't stop declaiming it to anyone who will listen as long as there is breath in this poor body of mine.