August (Web-only) 2003

ARTICLE TOOLS

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The question of healing came up repeatedly in our lives, especially after we began to tell people about Hyung Goo's illness. A lot of his relatives, in particular, thought that what you should do about AIDS was pray for healing. Hyung Goo wasn't quite sure how to respond to this. He would have liked nothing more than to be healed, and prayed himself for healing, but he wasn't sure he wanted to trail around to Korean Pentecostal faith healers, which seemed to be what his family members had in mind.

We broached the subject with the minister who had married us. Had he prayed with people for healing? Had he been invited to do so, or had he volunteered? What had happened as a result? David told us that he had been asked to pray with sick people for healing on various occasions. He had done so, and some had been healed and some hadn't. As he understood it, the initiative rested with the sick person—it was up to him or her to ask for such prayer, or not.

Hyung Goo found this enormously freeing. It made him feel that he was in charge of his own response to his illness. Other people could pray privately that he would be healed—that was fine and he welcomed it—but he could make his own decisions about whether to seek out formal prayer specifically for healing, and not feel that he was being delinquent if he didn't expend a lot of energy doing so.

By the fall of 1994, Hyung Goo had been seriously ill for a year. He had had pneumonia off and on since the spring, along with chronic anemia, nausea, pain, and the eye infection for which he was taking IV medication once or twice a day. In October I received a summons to jury duty in federal court. I wrote a letter requesting to be excused on the ground that there was serious illness in my ...