When Protocols Fail

9 December 2025

A friend of a friend recently asked me to explain a little about what I do. This seems to be what came out…

Greetings X,

Our mutual friend tells me that you don’t quite know what questions to ask. I sympathize; I have the same problem a lot of the time. Let me see if I can help get the conversation started.  I believe she told you her experience with my work. What I can tell you about that experience, from my side, is that humans are used to being looked at, but we are not accustomed to being seen. When I make myself entirely present to another person, I often know more than I “should” know about the problem, and my hands seem to find their way to helpful places. 

In the same way you can get someone to wash their own face by putting them in front of a mirror, sometimes the human body fixes itself when it’s invited to notice itself. It is very often the case that when I lay on hands and make myself truly present, without doing much of anything, my client’s system responds by reorganizing itself in more healthy ways. There are certainly techniques and disciplines and lots of practice time involved, but how much is human ability and how much divine intervention I couldn’t really say. But then, God never intended us to exercise our abilities without Him, did He?

As to how I might be able to help you, or what your session would look like, I’m afraid I don’t know for certain. Here’s what I can tell you: I will be present. You will of course be present. God will be present. You will be involved, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I am not a mechanic and you are not a car; this is not something I can do to you; this is something we will do together with God’s help.

The value of direct obedience to biblical teaching is hard to overestimate; I expect to pray, lay on hands, anoint with oil. I usually work general to specific, so I’ll likely begin by establishing contact with your system at your shoulders or your feet, noticing the pulses and rhythms in your body, looking for unusual tensions or movements in your visceral cavity or anything out of balance or that draws my attention for some reason. 

From there, we will proceed as seems best to us and the Spirit.

I know that’s not a particularly satisfying answer. It would be nice to give you a definite protocol, some kind of road map for what comes next. But the people with protocols are telling you they can’t find anything wrong. I’m the guy you call when you’re off the edge of the map, and still have to navigate the territory. I don’t have a map either, but I live here, so that’s something.

I didn’t set out to be this person. When God called me into ministry as a junior in high school, I had a picture in my head of what that would entail: an expository preaching ministry in a suburban Bible church. To that end I earned a bachelor’s in Bible, then a Th.M in New Testament. During seminary, I interned in a suburban Bible church in eastern Washington, training in exactly the kind of expository ministry I expected to pursue for the rest of my life. Upon graduation, I worked as a pastor and seminary instructor.

Then Jesus mugged me, and not for the first time. The first time was when He gave me to faithful Christian parents. I came to know Him early, and hardly remember a time when I did not know Jesus as my Savior. The second time was when, as a very angry 16-year-old, I found my life unlivable, and God taught me to forgive. I came to know Him then as a worker of miracles, the one who made me able to forgive when I simply didn’t have the ability.

This time around, the mugging took the form of a surprise: the small suburban Bible church I thought I was planting turned out to be an exit ministry for people leaving a cult. By the time I realized what I had gotten into, I had bonded to the people and didn’t want to quit. Getting the people out of the cult was hard, but doable. Getting the cult out of the people…well, that was another matter. Fast-forward several years, and this teaching pastor and professor had become, of necessity, a pastoral counselor, worship leader, liturgist, and church history teacher. God was just getting started. 

He brought me next to Englewood, and over a period of years and a series of gigs in youth and city ministry, He taught me to obey some verses that, although I’d known them all my life, I’d never quite seen, if you know what I mean. I learned to sing the Psalms. I learned to pray in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer. I learned to tangibly love my literal neighbors. I learned to rejoice, for real, when people slandered me. 

And then God began drawing my attention to a series of passages that talk about laying hands on the sick, praying for healing, anointing with oil. I’m sure you know the passages as well as I do, but for me suddenly the question bubbled up: why don’t we do these things? What would happen if we did? 

Not too long after that, He led me to enroll in massage therapy school. The entire endeavor was ridiculous; I couldn’t afford the money or the time for even the shortest, cheapest program. I told Him “If we’re doing this, then You’re paying for it, and since I know You can afford anything, I’m going to the best school in Denver.” And you know what? He made it happen. 

Massage therapy led to Trauma Touch Therapy, Craniosacral Therapy, and an assortment of other modalities, and along the way I learned a few very important things. 

  1. Human attention heals. When one person–the whole person, body and spirit–sets all distractions aside and rests the full weight of their attention on another person, it is amazing how people can heal, even before anyone does anything. It seems that our systems adjust spontaneously in response to being really seen. 
  2. God shows up. His priorities are not mine; He doesn’t always do what I want Him to. But He always shows up, and He always works.  
  3. American Christians need a radical worldview revision. 

That last one was a real kick in the teeth. Most of us live like the world is what the materialists say it is — matter in motion — and then we add an overlay of heaven, hell, biblical miracles, resurrection, and so on. We’re basically materialists with a whitelist of exceptions that allow us to be meaningfully Christian. But no. The world was spoken into existence and is upheld by the Word of God’s power. Even matter isn’t what the materialists think it is; still less the human person. 

Genesis 2 says God made us out of dust and breath; we are a divinely forged union of body and spirit. When I lay my hands on another person, I’m never just touching a body. That fact raises an interesting question. If you have a sore back, obviously my body can work on your body for your benefit. Can my spirit work on your spirit? The materialists think it’s a nonsense question, but it isn’t, is it? 

I pray. I lay on hands. I anoint with oil. God shows up. This is either the church’s first and worst attempt at healing, a primitive medicine long since overshadowed by modern science, or it is a healing ministry God gave to the church, something we should never have stopped doing. 

I think it’s the latter. I invite you to come and find out for yourself.

Blessings, 

Tim

Leave a Comment » | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Healing, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Can a Christian do Energy Work?

28 October 2025

Some while back, a friend asked me about energy work. Isn’t it all some new age mumbo-jumbo, after all? Or is there more to it than that? This was my answer.

Moving into bodywork was…well, it was a surprise. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client in my new capacity. Doing that work has proven to be an adjustment. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net. Being an exegete by training and inclination, I was not much given to wandering out into areas that the text of Scripture didn’t explicitly address. Or so I thought…  But as I have come to grips with my new calling, I have begun to notice all the ways in which I was already plowing the fertile fields of general revelation, ways I was blind to because I just thought of them as “the way things are done.”

As a teacher, I had no qualms about showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure; it’s just something that works well, and gives newbies a starting point. There’s nothing unbiblical about it, of course. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling in God’s world, and paying attention to what works and what does not. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn, which is all as it should be.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy, but precious little about how to get it from the former state to the latter. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn. Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real, which brings me to your question about energy work.

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a married team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? In the complex interaction between physical and spiritual, there’s a lot we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of general revelation helps here, but it only takes us so far. We are learning that cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman’s Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a treatment of the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we are a century behind on really exploring the field, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. The Healing Touch Program also maintains a research archive at healingtouchresearch.com, and they’re pretty good about keeping it up to date.) So that’s one thing we might end up meaning by “energy work:” instinctive manipulation of very subtle physical electrical, magnetic, and photonic inputs. 

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop there. The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as both the pagans and Paul affirm. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, releasing trigger points, and so on. Could I also use my spirit to work on their spirit? It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, and upon experimentation, I find that it works. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, it all happens quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God moves. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. In all modesty, I’m good at what I do, but I’ve seen God do things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

So this is a very long way round to answering your question. As best I can tell, my energy work is partly manipulation of subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to study, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my energy work. I make no guarantees about someone else’s work. Certainly the process is open to demonic manipulation, and some energy workers directly invite it. Others address their requests to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between us and them — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. You don’t tell the difference between Moses and Jambres by technique — they both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. We are made to live in partnership with God; nothing could be more natural than a human being seeking spiritual help in an endeavor. We shouldn’t be frightened by partnership with spiritual power. That admittedly leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some of it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and I try to do more of what does next time.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same, and likewise for what I’ve learned about energy work.

Well, I had better stop. I’m sure this was far thicker of an answer than you were really asking for, but I didn’t think I could do your question justice with less. Perhaps as I grow, I’ll be able to make it simpler.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Losing Ground with Style

21 October 2025

Every common rock is disease-free, but we do not call rocks healthy or well on that account, because we intuitively recognize that health is more than the absence of disease; it is the presence of vitality.
Health is not an accident; it is a gift from God. As with any gift, health calls for gratitude, and gratitude cannot be merely spoken. A child who says “Thank you” to his grandmother for the hand-knit sweater and then never wears it is polite, but not grateful. Saying “Thank you” is appropriate as far as it goes, but embodying real gratitude requires right use of the gift.

Every gift has its right use. A sweater should be worn; an album should be played; a toy should be played with. Even that most generic of gifts, money, is meant to be spent — as is our health. The gift can be stewarded, but not hoarded. We are all spending our capital, and in the end, our last creditor drains the account. In N. D. Wilson’s unforgettable phrase, “death by living” is the best we can hope for. So the question is not whether we will spend our health, but how — and how quickly.

Healing is the art of slowing down, of losing ground with style. We all move toward the edge of the cliff where our last creditor is waiting. Healing is helping someone spin away from the edge this time, helping someone dance two steps forward for every three steps back, helping someone dance instead of just being inexorably dragged toward the edge, clinging in vain to a bean-sprout sandwich. He who saves his life will lose it, as the rabbi said. Might as well dance.

Healing takes in the whole person. It is not enough to say that we require words for the spirit and touch for the body. A living soul is made of dust and breath, body and spirit, coextensively. You have never touched a living body without putting your fingers on a soul. When you touch a spirit with a loving word, watch what happens to the body — pupils dilate, posture and muscle tone shift, cheeks flush, breathing changes. Sometimes a word heals the body. Sometimes a touch heals the spirit.

But in reality, we do not heal people. Healing is a mystery, a gift. A surgeon can align bones and stitch up a wound, but we say that he set the bone and closed the wound, not that he healed the injury. He can bring the pieces into proximity with one another, but he cannot make the skin join, the blood vessels reunite, the fascia reconnect, the fracture remodel. A counselor can cause thoughts to meet that had been carefully hidden from one another, but he cannot reach in and fill the place where someone tore a hole in his client’s spirit. We remove barriers. We align the parts, hoping for wholeness. We create an opportunity, a container in which someone can receive healing, if it is given to them. And we wait, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for weeks. The work is too fine for any hands but God’s.

Leave a Comment » | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Healing | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Bodywork and the Dominion Mandate

12 March 2024

For those of you who don’t know, I went back to school when I was 40. I had a Bachelor’s in Biblical Studies, a 4-year Th.M. in New Testament, and was working in my field. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. Going to massage therapy school…it was unexpected to say the least. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net.

Several years into it, I have come to understand that my task is not all that different from any other field. We all plow the fertile fields of general revelation; we just don’t think of it that way. We think in terms of “It works” or “That’s just how you do it.” For example, as a teacher, I had no difficulty showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure, but it’s hardly unbiblical. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling and paying attention to what works and what does not. The 3-point topical outline just works, and it gives newbies a starting point. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Where Scripture speaks about the oak tree, all that it says is true, but it doesn’t speak to every question we have. For many questions, Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy. It does say some things about the factors involved (e.g., “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”) But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us about how to get it from illness to health: treating specific infectious diseases, setting bones, making medicines, correcting postural imbalances, releasing visceral restrictions. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn.

Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real. So why wouldn’t the same kind of craft knowledge dynamic apply to working with the spirit? Of course we start with what God has given us, but then we learn by experience from there. (If that sounds hazardous, try not learning from experience, and see where that gets you!)

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? There’s a complex interaction between the physical and spiritual, and there’s a lot there we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of the dust and only take us so far. It is now beyond scientific question that living cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or electromagnetic inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a look at the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we’re a century behind on research, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. This kind of subtle physical phenomena will be one of the things people mean by “energy work.”)  

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop with the dust — we know there’s more to a human than that! The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as the pagans inferred and Paul affirms. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, waking up hypotonic ones, reorganizing fascia, breaking up unhealthy adhesions, releasing trigger points, mobilizing organs, and so on, right down to (maybe) using my hand’s magnetic field and biophotonic outputs to affect the injured area at a cellular level—but that’s not all. If I can use my body to affect their body, why can’t I use my spirit to affect their spirit?

It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, at the very least. Upon experimentation, I find that approaching the interaction conscious of both dust and breath makes for a more effective result. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, all that happens very quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God often moves in dramatic ways. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. This is work I was born to do, and in all modesty, I’m good at it — but I’ve seen God do a lot of things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

As best I can tell, my work is partly manipulation of the body, partly communication with the body through subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to understand, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my bodywork. I make no guarantees about someone else’s. Insofar as it’s an interaction between two fallen people, it’s certainly possible there will be demonic attack or interference, and some practitioners openly invite it, addressing the demons by name. Others address themselves to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between a prophet of Yahweh and a shaman — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. Moses and Jambres both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. That leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some if it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and next time, I try to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same; the only verse we need is the Dominion Mandate. Likewise for much of what I’ve learned about bodywork. The more I do, the more I learn. I can’t wait to see what God will show me this week!

2 Comments | Autobiography, Dust and Breath Anthropology, Functioning Supernaturalism, Healing, Livin' the Bivocational Dream, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Trust your Feelings?

8 August 2023

I am known, in certain quarters, for my scornful response to people suggesting that we trust our feelings. I usually object by way of a Star Wars reference: “Trust your feelings” is bad advice unless you’re Luke Skywalker—and even he ended up kissing his sister, so you see what trusting your feelings gets you.

When I’m making that argument, I’m driving home the point that we have no magically prelapsarian place within us that can’t be wrong. There’s a case to be made for distrusting every part of us. You shouldn’t believe everything you think any more than you’d believe everything you feel, nor the other way round. We can and should interrogate and discipline our emotions just like we should interrogate and discipline our bodily urges and our thoughts. At the same time, there’s a ditch on both sides of the road. We can deify our God-given emotions, elevating the gift over the Giver, and that’s bad, but it’s equally bad to denigrate and ignore the gift God gives.

There’s no biblical reason to think emotions are any less trustworthy than thoughts. When Adam fell, he didn’t land catlike on his feet, so that his heart didn’t fall quite as low as his belly, his genitals (of course!) falling lowest and his brain landing uppermost, and therefore most to be trusted. No, it was a faceplant worthy of Wile E. Coyote — all of him fell all the way to rock bottom, and made an Adam-shaped hole when he hit. The project is to sanctify the whole shebang.

God made emotions, and He didn’t do it just so we’ll have something to distrust. There’s a righteous use for them, and when we’ve catechized our loves and loyalties properly and we’re using them rightly, there’s every reason to act based on emotion, just as there’s every reason to act on a properly vetted logical argument.

  • Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him. Should He have distrusted that emotion?
  • Love fulfills the law. Someone will say, “Love is not an emotion.” What a foolish idea! It’s not just an emotion, but it is an emotion, isn’t it?
  • Paul also says to let the peace of God rule in your hearts. What is that, if not emotional experience?

Someone will have noticed by now that these are the fruit of the Spirit. Yes, just so; the Spirit works in our emotions as well as our thoughts. Why are we determined to distrust the fruit of the Spirit?

1 Comment | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Healing | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Supernatural Faith: An Interview

14 June 2022

I had the opportunity to sit with my friend Chris Morrison of Gulfside Ministries and chat for a while. You can find the interview here.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Laying on Hands

7 June 2019

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will raise the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven.

There are a couple of hermeneutical moves here that are common in conservative circles. The first is to simply ignore the text. When a nosy student asks why we don’t do this, you must mutter something under your breath about cultural context, and change the subject.

But that’s not enough. “Cultural context” is not a magical phrase that allows you to ignore a text. The text meant something, and the original readers were meant to obey it. So are we. Obedience in our context might look different, but it will look like something. It is our job to figure out what. The best place to start is with the original context.

In the original cultural context, this was not simply some religious ritual. Oils infused with various herbs and scents were common in the culture, and using such oils medicinally was also common. In other words, to the original readers, anointing with oil was not simply a religious ceremony, it was a medical treatment.

Once you know that, you can transfer the principle to our day. Imagine you have someone in your church who is a cancer patient.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, giving him chemotherapy in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven.

Of course, the oncologist giving chemotherapy is not likely to be an elder in the church — but skip that for now. Let’s suppose the doctor is indeed an elder in this case, and move on from there. Do you see the departure from our standard attitude toward medicine? The medicine is administered “in the name of the Lord,” and when the sick person recovers, the recovery is attributed to the Lord, through the prayer of faith.

So the minimal application of this culturally conditioned command is to address sickness as a spiritual as well as a physical issue.

But I wonder whether we ought not go further. After all, we have mass media and Youtube, but we still believe that going to church in person is better. We have Facebook and phones and texting and many platforms for connection, but face to face is still better than anything else, by a long shot. Would it be so surprising to find that–especially where physical and spiritual matters overlap–the first-century ways of addressing things still have something to offer us?

I think they do. And so I still practice this passage as written: anointing with oil in the name of Jesus, laying on hands, and praying for the sick. My experience has been that this is valuable; when we are simply obedient, we do better than we know.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Complex Mechanisms and Simple Interventions

31 May 2019

Every system of the body is incredibly complex. The deeper we look, the more we find. For example, take the circulatory system. It took us a long time to figure out that blood wasn’t just sitting there in vessels; it circulates. Then it took us a long time again to discover that the veins only return 90% of the fluid that goes out in the arteries. The other 10% returns through the lymphatic vessels, which we didn’t even know existed until about 100 years ago, and which serve a whole series of important immune functions. We’re still learning. We didn’t even know there was a connection between the brain and the lymphatic vessels until 2015, and we still haven’t mapped it all. Likewise, it took us a long time to work out the physiological complexities of blood clotting, and so on.

But God is kind to us, and we didn’t even have to know platelets existed, still less how they worked, to know that direct pressure on a small cut was the appropriate therapeutic intervention. If it’s a bigger hole, you might need to resort to pressure points and sutures — and again, we knew how to do that long before we knew how clotting actually worked.  Of course, some cases are orders of magnitude more complicated than a simple cut, and in those situations, you want a medically educated specialist. But those cases are a tiny minority; most people go their whole lives never needing any more wound-care intervention than direct pressure and a band-aid, maybe the occasional occasional staple or stitch.

I expect to find that the human energy system is as complex as any other system; the more we look, the more we’ll find. So far, Randolph Stone’s characterization of how different parts of the energy system interact seems most likely to me. Perhaps he’s wrong about some, or even most, of the particulars, but in any case, something similar seems to be true.

(And then, of course, it may turn out that energetic medicine is presently in its late Ptolemaic phase, the endless shells, vortices, meridians, and interconnections all reminiscent of spheres and epicycles. Perhaps the whole shebang will yield to a small, elegant set of principles after all. That doesn’t seem to be the pattern with living systems, but who knows? Maybe we’re just waiting for the next Copernicus.)

Regardless of the structural complexities and their ramifications for more complex clinical practice, I am finding that the vast majority of problems I run into in the human energy field can be addressed with a small number of fairly simple interventions. I would not be surprised to see that trend continue.

And if it does, I’d like to see some form of energetic first aid become very common knowledge. Something you would grow up knowing, just like you learn to put direct pressure on a small cut.

 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

To an Unknown Socket

24 May 2019

Energy workers quickly discover that it’s a bad idea to try to heal someone on your own power. Not that it’s impossible — it’s truly amazing what a human spirit-to-spirit connection can accomplish, especially for someone who doesn’t get much of that — but it’s unwise. You have a finite supply of energy, and if you expend it into someone else, you leave yourself depleted, worn out, and vulnerable.

The solution is simple: don’t use your own energy. But you can’t just create energy ex nihilo. It has to come from somewhere. For me, that is not a problem. I live under an open heaven, with the unlimited resources of heaven available. (Dad often has His own ideas about what the person needs, but that’s fine. He told me to ask, and I’m asking. He always shows up.)

I have a number of spiritual-but-not-religious friends who link into “the universe” as their source for healing power. Sending your requests out into the universe addressed to “General Delivery” and hoping someone benevolent answers is, well…maybe not the best idea. Not everybody that might wander across that request is your friend. This is going through life dependent on the kindness of strangers. It is the equivalent of flying Ben Franklin’s kite in a thunderstorm. It is eating mystery meat from a random flyspecked cart in a south Asian market, and hoping your intestines can take it. It is plugging your extension cord into a random socket in a foreign country and hoping the voltage matches.

But sometimes, it comes out all right. And when it does, people thank “the universe,” which is like building an altar to the unknown socket.

I know what it feels like when God is at work, and I’ve felt Him at work through some of these people. He can suck up all the bandwidth and work through anybody He wants to. He did it with Saul. He did it with the witch at En Dor. He did it with Balaam. Heck, He did it with Balaam’s donkey. In my experience God moves through people you wouldn’t expect often, because He has exalted His word above His name.

I picture my friend standing by the massage table, one hand on me, and the other extended to the sky, holding up an extension cord and praying that it will plug into “the universe.” God reaches down, grabs the cord, and plugs it into Himself. Then He nudges a watching angel and winks.

“Don’t tell her,” He says. “She’s not ready to know yet.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What is energy work, anyway?

17 May 2019

Here’s what I know. In creational terms, you don’t have a soul, you are a soul. That’s what a human being is — a living soul. And a soul is made up of two things: dust and breath, brought together by God. “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into His nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

  • What is meant by “dust?” The physical stuff, the literal dirt that returns to the dirt when we’re done with it.
  • What is meant by “breath?” The immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it, as Solomon once said.
  • And — most crucially — what is meant by “and?” . . .

That’s where we’re going to need to play the mystery card. The spirit and body interact in complex ways that we don’t really understand.

There’s a whole range of very subtle physical processes going on in the body. X-ray tomography shows that acupuncture points are structurally different from other points on the body. An electrical current travels faster down a meridian than between two randomly chosen control points the same distance apart…and slower than nerve conduction speed. There’s something else going on.

There are some very subtle, but actually physical, things going on that we’re just starting to understand. We’re just starting to even have the instrumentation to measure some of these things. So that’s the first thing that we mean by energy work – very subtle physical processes.

With respect to those physical processes, here’s my working hypothesis: just like every person has a skeletal system, a circulatory system, and a nervous system, every person has an energy system (or systems). Part of this is simply not that controversial (see Oschmann, 2nd ed.), but the useful models run far ahead of the science and make claims that, as yet, the science can’t really substantiate. But this stuff seems to work anyhow, so I’m using it.

But for me, subtle physical processes is not all I mean.

As Christians, we’re really good at understanding that the spirit relates to God. So far, so good. But spirit can interact with any other spirit, not just God. The first place our heads typically go with that is to realize that we can interact with demons. Which is true. But what about other people?

We can interact with other humans at a spiritual level. My spirit can touch your spirit. I don’t necessarily need to touch your body to do that. 

That’s the second thing I mean by energy work.

And — here’s the fun part — there’s not really a clear boundary between those two things. The spirit and the body interact in complex and hard-to-understand ways. I greatly envy people who have a governing theory for what they do. I don’t have one, having not yet encountered a model that I found persuasive enough to adopt wholesale.

In the meantime, it is my experience that I can achieve effects with my clients by manipulating the energy field that I cannot achieve without doing so. It is my experience that I can do these things while working in concert with God in prayer, giving God thanks. So — guided by Paul — I’m not concerned about meddling with something I shouldn’t. God seems to be blessing it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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