Former missionary Lois Sobkoviak suffered from rheumatoid arthritis so debilitating she was practically bedridden. She prayed for healing, but nothing seemed to change. Then she saw nutritionist Cherie Calbom on an episode of Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural talking about God’s power to heal through juicing.
After googling Calbom, Sobkoviak and her daughter decided to travel from Chicago to attend a health retreat Calbom was hosting in New Mexico. “It was very hard for her to get around at the retreat,” Calbom says. “She could barely move … and was in a lot of pain.”
At the retreat, Sobkoviak participated in a three-day juice fast, which was followed by a raw foods meal. She also received prayer and learned about proper nutrition, juicing and the power of emotional detoxing.
The result still has Calbom shaking her head.
Sobkoviak arrived on a Sunday, but by Wednesday she was taking steps without a walker. On Thursday, she was walking completely on her own and was pain-free.
“When she walked into the dining hall, the whole room burst into tears and cheers and applause because they knew how bad off she was when she got there,” Calbom says.
Calbom is the author of more than 25 books on juicing and whole foods nutrition, including her latest, The Juice Lady’s Anti-Inflammation Diet, which releases this month, The Juice Lady’s Big Book of Juices and Green Smoothies and Juicing for Life, which has sold roughly 2 million copies. She can rattle off dozens of stories like Sobkoviak’s—people whose lives were transformed when they discovered the healing power of juicing. But Sobkoviak’s testimony is particularly exciting to the woman affectionately known as “The Juice Lady,” because Calbom has always felt her true mission is to help the body of Christ become healthy and whole.
“My real heart is for God’s people,” says Calbom, who leads popular juice and raw foods cleansing retreats around the nation with her husband, Father John Calbom, a Russian Orthodox priest. “We each have a unique, individual purpose that’s part of [God’s] big purpose. And there are so many Christians who are not engaged much at all with what’s going on with God’s great purpose because they’re not feeling well.”
A Vision to Restore
Though she’s spent most of her professional life in mainstream circles writing books, leading juicing seminars and doing presentations on QVC for the Juiceman juicer and the George Foreman grill, Calbom says she received a clear calling years ago from God to educate people, especially the church, about juicing and maintaining a junk-free diet of whole foods.
While attending a pastors training event in the late 1980s led by the late healing evangelists Charles and Frances Hunter, “I heard God speak clearly to me,” Calbom says. “I left that location in the Spirit, and God told me specifically to go back to school and get a graduate degree in nutrition and be a credible resource and teach His people how to live because they were perishing for lack of knowledge.”
Not long after that experience she had a vision that is still etched in her memory: “I saw God’s soldiers—it seemed like thousands of them—lying on the battlefield. And as I walked among them, I could see labels written on them: chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, migraine headaches, lupus, on and on—the diseases of modern man. They were holding their bodies, many of them in a lot of pain, and holding the areas of pain. Because they were down, unable to pick up their shield and their sword, the enemy was really beating up on them, much more than those people standing and able to hold up their sword and shield. They were kicking them and punching them and really beating them down with discouragement on top of their physical distress.”
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