Book Review: To Be Made Well
To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope by Amy Julia Becker (Herald Press, 2022)
My friend Amy Julia Becker has spent a lot of time thinking about health—physical, mental, and spiritual. She’s had plenty of reasons to think about it. In high school, she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, or stomach paralysis, an illness that made her throw up everything she ate.
It took years before a physical therapist was able to help her find healing, and more than that, help her learn something about how the mind and body need to work together for true health. And about how we too often “isolate our bodies from our minds and our spirits,” leading to injury, illness, and pain.
Once she was aware of this, Amy Julia writes in To Be Made Well, she started to see the pattern everywhere:
I recognized this disconnect again in my mid-twenties when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and doctors could recommend treatments but didn’t know how to offer care as she faced the reality of a terminal illness. I ran into it when our oldest daughter was diagnosed with Down syndrome and received labels of ‘defective’ and ‘abnormal,’ as if who she was as a person could be reduced to a category called ‘disability.’ I saw it again in my thirties when my back began to hurt and I couldn’t explain where the pain came from. And I needed this understanding when our nation entered a global pandemic and a time of racial reckoning, when a biomedical approach to healing was not enough to care for our wounded souls or our divided society.
Amy Julia builds on this realization throughout her book, asking us to consider healing in a new light: to see that it “is about returning us to minds and bodies and spirits, in community, that have been made well.” She structures the book around Mark 5:21-43, a passage that contains two healings: the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, and Jairus’s daughter. She explores and analyzes that passage to show how healing affects every part of the body and the mind—and not just our own bodies and minds, but those around us. In this model, healing flows outward into the community like ripples on a pond, bringing reconciliation and redemption where there was once disease and disorder.
Some of the stories of healing in the book are abrupt and dramatic, but not all of them. Amy Julia writes that sometimes just finding the source of pain or illness is enough to bring healing … but only sometimes. Other times, illness is incurable despite the best medical care and the most fervent prayer. But even then, she argues, it’s possible to experience healing—maybe not in the way we want, but in ways that will bring us into greater harmony with God and with our neighbor.
I’ve long believed that the mind, the spirit, and the body all impact each other, but To Be Made Well brought new depths of insight on the subject that I had never even thought of before. For anyone who’s ever dealt with illness or pain or mental distress of any kind, it’s an inspiring book, and a deeply valuable one.
(Cover image copyright Herald Press)
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