Dear Prophet Owuor, even Jesus would go to the hospitals
By CORNELL NGARE @cornellngare
The irony with one of the many titles held by Prophet David Owuor is that he is called a doctor and yet he has never been seen along hospital halls. Of course, there are all sorts of doctors and not all of them deal with broken bodies. But Dr Owuor does, or rather, he seems to and claims to.
Hundreds of testimonies of healing always seem to follow him wherever he goes. Most recently, reports of patients leaving hospital beds to attend the “healing services” in Kisumu made headlines in local media.
Some relatives even discharged their loved ones from hospitals and dragged them to the prophet, despite protests from doctors and other concerned parties.
Diabetic patients stopped their insulin jabs and HIV patients pushed away their antiretroviral medication. Even surgical patients shunned the blade for the healing touch of this “man of God”.
But what perplexes me is that the Jesus that prophet Owuor claims to worship, according to the bible, never asked people to bring their sick to him. To be fair, neither has prophet Owuor.
Even so, Jesus would always go out of his way to heal the sick. He visited the sick in bed and healed them, such as Peter’s mother-in-law. Jesus interrupted his packed itinerary to go heal the daughter of Jairus (in fact he took too long that she died and what was to be a healing ended up being a resurrection).
Remember the Roman centurion? He asked Jesus to speak a command and his servant was healed. Not to mention the dozens of lepers and blind men that Jesus healed on his way to wherever. But it seems Prophet Owuor is too “holy” for this. What do you expect from someone whose followers wash the streets before he can tread on them?
“HEAL THE SICK”
And even if many people came to Jesus, the Bible never says that these people were taken from their needed medical care. In fact, the four friends who broke through the roof to bring their friend to Jesus are praised for their love and faith. But the most striking stories of healing are those where Jesus “went about doing good” and “healing the sick”.
If you want a picture of Jesus on the hospital bedside, you can check out the man who had been ill for 38 years at the pool of Bethesda. I am not sure there were hospitals at the time of Jesus, but this was the closest to a hospital we can find in the Bible. Jesus came to this man who was waiting for the angel to stir the water so that he could get in. He asked the man what may appear like a moot question “do you want to get well?” and then he healed him.
So what is this we are hearing about people rejecting hospital treatment for healing prayers? I strongly welcome the move by the Attorney General’s office to come up with tough laws to govern how religious institutions conduct their businesses.
The more conservative religious followers of prophet Owuor and his ilk may see this move as “an act of Satan to oppose the work of God.” But if the God they claim to worship is indeed stronger than Satan, then they have no need to worry.
The God I know does not do his work according to the structures that are set up by man. He is God. He owns everything. Who knows, maybe the regulation of religious institution may just be one more way God is using to protect the innocent and the ignorant.
But then again, it is little surprise that those who think God only heals through crusades and not through medical doctors will have a hard time wrapping their heads around this.