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Grace Alliance CEO Joe Padilla talks about how he wrestled with depression and suicidal thoughts when he was 17 years old, but it wasn’t until his wife’s struggle with depression got to an all-time low that he started doing lots of research.
That research led to not only his wife’s miraculous healing, but also the formation of Grace Alliance, which specifically provides resources to Christians who are dealing with mental illnesses.
“After about a year and a half of doing all this [research], my wife was getting better,” Padilla says. “And then she kind of said, ‘I feel like myself again’; she had weaned off about six medications [and was] down to one medication. … A neuroscientist friend of mine said, ‘Joe, from where your wife was to where she is now, that’s a clinical miracle. You just never see that from her condition that she was in.'”
His wife dealt with depression while serving with him on the mission field in a different country, to the point where they had to come back home to America, Padilla says on the Charisma News podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. They looked for resources from both the medical community and church, but his wife still didn’t experience healing. Padilla was in despair, because of losing his job and vision for ministry and because of his wife’s condition, which led to him suffering from anxiety and going on antidepressants.
“It was just one of those like, hey, this is the book of Job—I’m living this, this is it. We were loving Jesus, we were not necessarily doing anything wrong. … It’s like, what’s going on and why did we lose everything?” Padilla says. “And so you hit these kind of suffering moments. And those are the places that God starts to change some perspective. … As I look back, I think it’s almost like Jesus was saying, ‘Joe, I am not the God of your theology; I am the God of you. Follow Me.'”
To listen to the entire story and find out how God transformed Padilla’s life and healed his wife, click here.
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