c. 1996 Religion News Service

EDITORS: Robert Kirby is a Christian humorist.

(RNS)-Forgive me if I ramble. I’m in a lot of pain right now, physically and spiritually. I had a hernia operation last week and it shook my faith.

A few months ago I developed a small abdominal bulge where no bulge had previously existed. It kept getting bigger. After some debate, I went to the doctor. His solution was an operation that today closely resembles the aftermath of an armed robbery gone wrong: I quietly gave up a bunch of money to a man in a mask but got stabbed anyway.

None of that matters anymore, thanks to my new friend, Perk O’Dan. But what has shaken my faith through all of this are the Bible stories about sick people being healed via the miraculous power of prayer and religious rites.

I’ve been a Christian my entire life and whenever I’ve gotten really hurt or sick, it’s always taken a nagging wife, a doctor and more money than I make in a year to fix me up. Not once have I been made whole again because of a miracle. And frankly, I’m getting a little fed up.

I’m not saying that God doesn’t heal people. I believe he does. He’s just always healing other people-people in the Bible, the Watchtower and the New Republic. Never me.

I grew up on faith-promoting stories of Jesus healing the sick, casting out demons and raising the dead. It wasn’t just Jesus, either. His apostles got in on the act. Pretty soon lots of people were doing it.

Even today some people rely on blessings to get better, calling modern medicine a crutch of the faithless. Some faiths will actually let people die rather than have a doctor administer to them. I know fellow Christians who think the spirit is a catchall replacement for surgery, Midol and even Rogaine.

I’m not talking about religious loonies. I’m talking about me, your average common-sense believer. Where’s my faith healing? How come I’m always getting stuck with an HMO instead of a less expensive miracle?

My qualifications are all in order. I’ve never been possessed by demons or afflicted with leprosy, but I have been darn sick. I came down with double pneumonia once and nobody showed up to heal me. In fact, my wife left me to die in our apartment while she went back to work.

The only person who came by to comfort me during this difficult time was the Trix rabbit, although a doctor later said this was a hallucination brought on by high fever, coupled with the normal sensory deprivation of married life.

I’ve been in car wrecks, fights, falls, industrial accidents, misunderstandings with really big animals and even a medium-size explosion. Never have I peered up through a fog of pain and found an apostle ready to make me whole again.

All of this might have made me bitter but I started thinking that maybe I’m being saved for something special. Maybe God is storing up the miracles due me so that when I die, I’ll get them all in one lump sum in the form of being raised from the dead. Yeah, that’s it.

And let’s see an HMO beat that.

END KIRBY