Summit Point Health Hub

Feel Like Yourself Again

I've been a Christian for forty years. Last fall, a single word in a verse I've read a hundred times stopped me cold. I'm a pastor's wife. Have been for thirty-eight years. My faith isn't something I practice — it's who I am. Which is why I can't believe it took me this long to find what I'm about to show you. It was sitting in plain sight the whole time. In my own Bible. On my own kitchen table. But I have to start with my hands. I'm sixty-one. I've played the piano at my husband's church every Sunday since the week I married him. His name is Wendell. For forty years he's pastored a little country congregation — the kind that never could quite pay a full salary. So four afternoons a week, all those years, I taught piano in our front room. Scales. Hymns. Recital pieces for half the children in the county. A woman who played for the Lord on Sundays, and for the grocery money the rest of the week. Three years ago, I started watching myself disappear. It started with my hands. I'd wake early and sit on the edge of the bed, working my fists open and closed, slow, like a woman trying to start a cold engine. I told Wendell they were just stiff. I said it the way you say a thing you're hoping is true. Then it was the evenings. Asleep in my chair by seven-thirty with the news still going — a woman who used to sit up past midnight marking up hymnals for Sunday. Then it reached the piano. I'd always played every verse with both hands full. Now I played the melody with my right hand and kept my left in my lap, the way you keep a hurt thing still. And one Sunday in front of everyone, I lost the back half of a hymn — my fingers just stopped, mid-verse, and wouldn't come down on the next chord. The congregation looked down at their laps, polite. I looked at my hands. Sixty-one years old, sitting at the front of the church I'd given my whole life to, lost inside a hymn I've played since I was a girl. I'd been on an arthritis pill for nine years. Naproxen, the prescription kind. And every time Wendell drove me in, the doctor said the same thing. My X-rays looked stable. My heart was strong. My blood pressure was something to watch. This was just part of getting older. Once — I'll never forget this — the doctor looked at Wendell instead of at me, and said, kindly, that sometimes the worry is harder on a woman than anything that's actually wrong with her. I didn't argue. What was I going to say — that I could feel it in my bones? You can't put that on a chart. But here's the thing I hadn't told the doctor. I'd seen all of this before. My mother was on the same pill. She took it faithfully for years, and every checkup they patted her hand over her X-rays. And the whole time, she got quieter, and stiffer, and smaller — and everyone called it age. She died five winters ago. Her heart. Her X-rays were stable the week she died. I have thought about that more times than I can count. I'd carried that question for five years — how a woman does everything right and dies anyway. I'd stopped expecting an answer. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I prayed. Every night, for three years, I asked God for my hands. I won't pretend I always prayed with faith. Some nights it was just the same worn-out sentence, said into the dark. Then came a Tuesday evening in October. I was doing my reading at the kitchen table — I was in Leviticus, of all places, the book everybody's read-through-the-Bible plan stalls out in. And I came to a verse I have read a hundred times in my life. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood." Leviticus 17:11. I'd read it a hundred times. But that night, one word wouldn't let me go. Blood. Because my checkup papers were sitting on the counter not four feet from my Bible. My blood work. My blood pressure. The doctor watched my X-rays. But everything he waved past, everything that was supposedly fine while I disappeared — the blood pressure creeping up every visit, the inflammation number he'd checked once to rule out the bad kind of arthritis — all of it was in my blood. The life of the flesh is in the blood. It felt like a nudge I wasn't supposed to ignore. So I did what a church lady does. I got out my concordance, and I searched the word blood. I stopped counting somewhere past four hundred. Blood on the doorposts in Egypt, so death would pass over. Blood on the altar, covering sin. Blood sealing the covenant. Blood as the price of redemption itself. The word runs from Genesis to Revelation like a red thread you can't pull out without the whole thing coming apart. I sat back in my chair. The Bible is not a book that happens to mention blood. It is a book about blood. And somewhere in those four hundred verses, I noticed a strange little one. Genesis 49:11 — Jacob, blessing his sons, speaks of wine and calls it "the blood of grapes." I read that twice. The Bible, calling the juice of a plant blood. I didn't know what to make of it. But it sent me somewhere I'd never been — because if scripture talked about plants that way, I wanted to know what else people had believed about plants and blood and healing. So I kept reading. Not scripture now — history. And somewhere past midnight I found something I'd never heard in forty years of church. For centuries, there were doctors — devout men, believing men — who held that God had marked His pharmacy. That the Creator had signed His remedies. That He shaped and colored the cure to match the condition, so that people who couldn't read a word could still find what they needed. They pointed to walnuts, shaped like the brain they nourish. To eyebright, marked like the eye it treats. They believed God had left His fingerprints on the medicine. I read that, and I looked over at the counter. At my checkup papers. At everything that was going wrong in my blood. And a question rose up in me so simple it almost felt like someone else asked it. If God colored the cure to match the condition — what did He make for the blood? And I didn't need a concordance for this one. Every woman who's ever pitted a bowl of sour cherries knows the answer. There is exactly one fruit on this earth that bleeds. Pit a tart cherry and you'll see it. It stains your hands like you've been butchering. It bleeds across the cutting board, and the stain doesn't want to scrub off. I sat there at my kitchen table with my heart going. Now — I want to be honest with you, because I know you can check. I went looking for cherries in my Bible that same night. They're not there. Not one verse. I searched trees, orchards, fruits of the field. Nothing. And I'll admit that deflated me for a minute. But then I realized something. The Bible doesn't mention the walnut either. God didn't write His pharmacy down in chapter and verse. According to those old doctors, He wrote it into the things themselves — into the shape, into the color. Into a fruit that bleeds. So I did the last thing I knew to do. I checked whether anyone else in history had ever seen what I was seeing. They had. All of them. Assyria grew it — it's the first cherry anyone ever wrote down, eight hundred years before Christ. Theophrastus, the father of botany, described it for his students. The Romans carried it home from the Black Sea and planted it across their whole empire. And the old healers of Europe used it — the fruit, the stems, the bark — for aching joints. Civilizations separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. No way to speak to each other. All drawn to the same red fruit. As if the knowledge had been placed inside them. I went to bed that night and lay awake next to my husband, listening to him breathe. The next morning I did something I almost never do. I sat down at the computer and I looked up the science. I'm not good at it — my granddaughter set the thing up, and I type with two fingers. But I had a question now that the Bible had given me and no doctor ever had, and I wasn't going to let it go. I expected to find a few blog posts. Health-food talk. The kind of thing you read with one eyebrow up. That is not what I found. I found real research. Universities in Oregon and England, where researchers have been testing tart cherry on women's aching joints for years — not as folk medicine, as medicine. Published trials. Peer-reviewed journals. Measured results, in real patients, with real blood work. I sat there scrolling with my coffee going cold, and one thought kept circling. If all of this is real — and it is, you can look it up the way I did — then why had I never heard one word of it? Why hadn't my mother's doctor heard of it? Why hadn't mine? It took me two more evenings of reading to understand why. And I'll warn you, this part made me angry in a way I'm still praying about. Here's what I learned. A drug company can patent a pill. They patented mine — and in its day, that patent made it one of the best-selling drugs in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars, every year, for one arthritis pill. But you cannot patent a fruit. You can't own something God made. Anyone can grow it. Which means no company on earth will ever spend a fortune telling your doctor about it — there's nothing in it for them. So the research sits in journals nobody reads to us. The old knowledge got demoted to pie filling. And the fruit that Assyria grew, that Theophrastus described, that the Romans planted across an empire — it ended up in a can on the baking aisle, while the pill gets a folder in every doctor's office in America. Within one generation, something God had set on tables since Assyria was simply — forgotten. Nobody banned it. Nobody had to. They just stopped mentioning it. And a whole country forgot. I sat with all of that for a few days. I didn't tell Wendell yet. I wanted to understand one more thing first. I wanted to understand what was actually happening inside me. Here is what I found, over four nights at my kitchen table. I'm going to tell it to you the way I finally understood it, because nobody had ever explained it to me either. Inflammation is not poison. Your body makes it on purpose. It's how you heal a cut. It's how you fight off a cold. Every cell in your body knows how to call for it. It was never the enemy. The trouble is when it won't switch off. You ever cut an apple and leave it on the counter? Come back an hour later and the face of it has gone brown. Nobody added anything to that apple. Its own enzymes did it. The same thing happens in your joints. When the inflammation won't switch off, it smolders into a fire. And the fire turns on enzymes that eat away your cartilage — the cushion that keeps bone off bone. But it doesn't stay in the joint. It runs through your blood and into the walls of your arteries — layer over layer, year after year — and stiffens them. That's where the blood pressure comes from. Then one day the heart that's been taking that fire every single day gives out. That's the heart attack. Not the arthritis you have. The fire nobody put out. And here's the part that stopped me cold, because it answered a question I'd been carrying for five years. The X-ray — the one the doctor reads every year, the one he calls stable — shows the cartilage you've already lost. That's all it does. It cannot see the fire. You can have a stable X-ray and a fire in your arteries in the same body. My mother did. For years. They patted her hand over that X-ray the whole time the fire was burning where nobody was looking. Her X-rays were stable the week she died. And I finally understood that both of those things were true at once. Then I read the part about the pill itself. About what it was doing to me. The pill quiets the pain by shutting down the enzyme that makes the pain signal. But that same enzyme makes something else. The shield — what lines your stomach, and what keeps your blood pressure in check. Your stomach. Your kidneys. Your heart. Shut the enzyme down to quiet the pain, and you drop the shield at the same time. It's the same switch. You cannot throw one without the other. Taken every day, year after year, that adds up — a study in the BMJ found people on a daily anti-inflammatory were up to 50% more likely to have a heart attack. The hands that won't open in the morning. The chair by seven-thirty. The hymn that loses its own ending in front of a full church. That's not age. That's the fire. And the blood pressure creeping up every visit? The pill pushes that up too. They call it a side effect. It isn't. It's the pill doing exactly what it's built to do. So the pill fails twice. It never touches the fire that's actually dangerous. And it drops the shield that keeps your heart safe. And there's one more twist to it. When the fire eats your cartilage, your body reads the broken pieces as damage — so it lights more fire to clear them away. Which gives the enzymes more to eat. Round and round. That's why the pill has to be taken every day, year after year — it's pressing on a wheel it can never stop spinning. So somewhere past midnight on the fourth night, I wrote two lines on the back of an envelope. What I actually needed. Something that puts out the fire. And something that leaves the shield alone. The pill does neither. And nothing in the pharmacy does both. And then I turned back to the one thing that had started all of this — the fruit. Because I still hadn't answered the question I'd carried in from my Bible: what exactly is that red? It has a name. Anthocyanins. The bleed itself — the stain that won't scrub off the cutting board — is the pigment God colored that fruit with. And it turns out that pigment is an anti-inflammatory — a fire-fighter — but not like any anti-inflammatory you've ever heard of. Most of them work like a carpet bomb — they shut the whole enzyme down, the pain and the shield together. Anthocyanins are a smart missile. They go upstream, to the switch that turns the fire on in the first place, and they leave the rest alone. And they get in. Carried in the blood, to the joint and the artery walls, right where the fire burns — the place no pill can reach. They work on the fire at the source. And they never touch the shield. The shield stays up. There was a trial — three weeks, women with osteoarthritis, tart cherry twice a day. The inflammation number in their blood came down. And it came down most in the women whose fire had been burning hottest. I pushed back from the table and sat very still. Because the fire in me was in my blood. And the life is in the blood. And God grew the defense inside the one fruit on this earth that bleeds. Now, if you're anything like me, you've already got the next question ready. If the answer is a cherry — why isn't everyone who eats cherries healed? I asked it too. And the answer broke my heart a little, because it's the same story as everything else. The cherry in your grocery store is not the cherry Assyria grew. It's a sweet cherry — a different tree. For the last hundred years, they've been breeding it for one thing: the fruit bowl. Sweeter, bigger, easier to ship, season after season. And the old sour cherry — the one that stains your hands, the one the research is about — only makes it to the store cooked, in a can of pie filling. The cherry that used to be medicine became candy. You could eat them all week and barely touch the fire. The modern table lost what Assyria's table had. And nobody even noticed it leaving. So I went looking for the old cherry. The real one. Most of what I found at first was the same disappointing story wearing different labels. Cooked juice and heat-dried powder in nicer packaging. And then I found the Amish. There's a handful of farm families in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — plain-faith people, German stock — who never traded their sour cherry for the sweet one. They've been keeping one old orchard line alive by hand for more than 150 years, grafting every new tree from the old ones, passing it down through every generation. Never crossed with the grocery cherry. Picked by hand every July, at the height of summer, when the fruit is darkest on the branch. A community of believers, keeping the old trees alive by hand, while the rest of the world bred the medicine out of theirs. But now I had a problem that felt almost silly after everything I'd found. How does a pastor's wife two states away get her hands on an Amish orchard? Those families don't have a website. You can't order a harvest off a farm you've never seen. And then I found it. There's exactly one small company that works with those Lancaster County families and brings that cherry to the rest of us. It's called GoodGrove. Now, you can't ship fresh cherries year-round from one harvest a year — any farm wife knows that. What you can do is what farm wives have always done with a summer harvest: put it up. They cold-press the fruit, and the whole harvest goes into capsules — so a woman two states away can have that cherry every single morning, summer to summer. I didn't order right away. By then I'd read enough to know how most of these bottles are made — dried at high heat, which cooks the life out of the fruit before it ever reaches the capsule. Heat kills anthocyanins. So I checked. GoodGrove cold-presses every harvest — never heated. What reaches the capsule is still alive. 3,600 milligrams equivalent in every serving. And it's third-party tested in the USA — an outside lab, not the company checking its own work. I looked into it. Then I ordered. Something in my spirit told me I hadn't stumbled onto any of this by accident. The bottle came three days later, on a Thursday. Before I did anything else, I twisted one capsule open over a white saucer and tipped a drop of water onto the powder. It bled red across the china like a fresh cut. I sat there at my kitchen table with my hand over my mouth. A hundred and fifty years. A community of believers, keeping those trees alive by hand through every generation — and what came out of that capsule, after all of it, was the verse. The life is in the blood. The fruit that bleeds. Red on white. I'm a levelheaded woman. I've been a pastor's wife for thirty-eight years, and I have seen every kind of coincidence people bring to church and call a sign. This did not feel like a coincidence. I didn't wait for the right moment. Thirty-eight years of marriage teaches you there's no such thing. I set the bottle on the kitchen table between us that evening, next to his coffee, and I told him everything. The verse. The blood. The old doctors who believed God signed His remedies. The fire, and the shield, and the fruit that bleeds. The old trees a community of believers had been keeping alive by hand for a hundred and fifty years. The red on the saucer. I could hear myself starting to talk too fast, the way you do when you need somebody to believe you. Wendell let me finish. Then he looked at the bottle for a long moment. "Lois," he said. "I've preached forty years of Leviticus. I never once found a cherry in it." That's my husband. Gentle, and dry, and tired down to his bones. I'd known he'd say something like that. So I didn't argue the science, and I didn't argue the scripture. I put my hand over his on the table. "I'm not asking you to believe it," I said. "I'm asking you to let me try it. I bought it with the grocery money, and I'd do it again. If nothing happens, you can preach a sermon about your foolish wife and I'll sit in the front row for it." He was quiet a moment. Then he turned his hand over under mine and held it. "All right," he said. "For you." I took both capsules right there, with the last of my coffee. I got up and started the dishes, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands. I wasn't expecting anything. Everything I'd read said the real work — the fire — was weeks away, and it would show up on blood work, not at a kitchen table. It wasn't twenty minutes later that I stopped at the sink with a plate in my left hand. I was flexing my right hand. Opening it, closing it, turning it over, looking at it the way you'd look at something that had no business working. "What is it?" Wendell said from the table. "Nothing. It's —" I kept opening and closing the fist. "My hands are warm." He didn't understand. "They've been cold for about two years," I said. "I'd stopped noticing. You stop noticing." I opened the fist one more time. "They're warm." I had to turn back to the sink so he wouldn't see what that did to me. Now — I want to be honest with you about that first evening, the same way I've been honest about everything else. That wasn't the fire going out. The fire takes weeks, and it shows up on paper, not at a sink. What I felt that fast was something simpler — my blood moving easier, reaching where it hadn't in a long time. But standing in my kitchen that night, staring at my own warm hands, it felt like the first word of an answer. And the answer kept coming. The first week, it was the mornings. Every morning for three years, I'd sat on the edge of the bed working my fists open like a cold engine. That first week, I sat up, swung my feet down, and stood. I just — didn't. The worst of it was gone. I didn't say a word to Wendell, afraid that saying it out loud would stop it being true. The second week, it was my head. The fog that had been sitting behind my eyes started to thin. It was like somebody had turned the lights up in a room I didn't know had gone dim. I sat up past ten with a hymnal in my lap, marking it up for Sunday. Every night that week. And the third Sunday, I played. Every hymn, start to finish, without losing a single chord. Both hands full on every verse — the way I used to. Afterward, one of the older women caught my eye across the fellowship hall with a look I won't forget. Like she'd seen something she couldn't account for and was afraid to say it out loud and jinx it. That week, I started leaving the pill in the bottle. Nobody told me to. I didn't decide it all at once, either — some mornings I'd reach for it out of habit and realize I didn't need it. By the end of the month, it was a bad-day pill. "Nine years on that pill," I told Wendell. "Three years watching myself slip, and being told it was my age. Three weeks on that cherry, and I feel like myself. A woman doesn't need a medical degree to read that." I'll tell you the truth: setting that pill aside frightened me more than I let on. It was the one thing every doctor had been certain about. But I couldn't argue with my own hands either — because I'd lived those nine years. And I'd just watched them come back. By the fifth week, the ache was gone, and my Tuesday students were back. I'd teach until the last car pulled out of the drive, and then I'd keep playing past dark, just to feel my hands do it. And I want to tell you what that sound was to me. That was the sound of my prayer being answered. Three years of the same worn-out sentence, said into the dark — and the answer came back as lamplight and an old hymn and a woman's hands on the keys. I had my yearly X-ray and blood work already on the calendar. Wendell drove me. The doctor pulled up the new results next to the old ones, and I watched his face do something I'd been waiting three years to see it do. My X-ray first — the picture they'd patted my hand over for nine years. Same as last year. Stable. The doctor barely looked up. Said it looked about the same. But then he got to the rest. The inflammation number — the one he'd checked once to rule out the bad kind of arthritis — had been 5.2. I'd asked him to run it again. It came back 1.6. And my blood pressure had gone from 146 over 92 to 126 over 80. "That's twenty points," he said, half to himself. "In nine years, that number never came down. Not once." He scrolled back to the old results, then forward again, like the road between the two might explain itself. I knew what he was looking at, because I'd done the reading. The X-ray had never been able to see the fire. And the two numbers that could — the ones that pill had never once brought down — had finally moved. "What changed?" he said. "I take a cherry," I said. The doctor looked at the screen. Then he looked at me — really looked, maybe for the first time. The steady hands. The color in my face. A woman sitting up in the chair instead of folding down into it. He didn't reach for the pad. "Whatever you're doing," he said, "keep doing it. And let's take you off the daily naproxen. Keep it for a bad day." Nine years of appointments, and that was the first one that ended with one less thing to pick up at the pharmacy. Now — before you go looking for this yourself, I have to tell you what happened with my sister. Because Judy's the reason I know how easily this whole thing can go wrong. I'd called Judy halfway through all this and told her everything — she has Mother's hands too. The same pill. But Judy did what most people do. She went on Amazon and bought the first tart cherry bottle she saw. Twelve dollars. Three weeks. Nothing. Not one thing. And I felt awful, because I knew she was one bad experiment away from calling the whole thing foolishness. So I drove over with my bottle, and Judy and I did what I'd done that first Thursday. We twisted one of her capsules open over a white saucer. A dull, brick-brown powder came out. Dust. Then we opened one of mine. Red. Judy tipped a drop of water onto it and it bled red across the china like a fresh cut. Red is alive. Brown is dead. And remember what I told you — heat kills anthocyanins. Judy's twelve-dollar bottle had been dried at high heat. Cooked dead before it ever reached the capsule. She'd been swallowing brown dust for three weeks. I left my bottle on her counter and ordered Judy her own that night. Eleven days later, her husband Roy called me. He didn't even say hello. "She's back at her quilt frame," he said. "She's been at it all week." I knew exactly what he meant. It's spring now. I'm at the piano most evenings. Last week our youngest granddaughter sat beside me on the bench in the last of the light, and I put her small hands on the keys under mine and taught her the first hymn I ever learned — my hands steady, sure, alive like twenty years ago. I think sometimes about how close it came to going the other way. If I'd skipped my reading that Tuesday. If I'd been in any book but Leviticus. If I'd searched for the fruit, found nothing, and closed the book — and I almost did. If a handful of farm families had let one old orchard go, any winter in a hundred and fifty years. If that capsule had bled brown. I've stopped pretending any of it was luck. My doctor watched the X-ray. I watched my hands. And God had been watching both of us the whole time. So let me turn to you, because I don't think you read this far by accident either. Maybe it's you. Going quiet behind an X-ray everyone calls stable. The hands that won't open in the morning. The chair by seven-thirty. The hymn — or the jar lid, or the top button — your fingers can't finish anymore. And a doctor who keeps saying it's just your age. You're not imagining it. You never were. And maybe you've been praying about it, the way I prayed for three years. I can't tell you what your answer is. I can only tell you mine was in a verse I'd read a hundred times, growing on old trees in Pennsylvania dirt. The life is in the blood. It's called GoodGrove. It's the old sour cherry — cold-pressed, never heated, 3,600 milligrams equivalent per serving, third-party tested in the USA. I checked. https://trygoodgrove.com/cherry P.S. — If part of you has been wondering whether you're imagining it — the hands, the chair, the fading behind an X-ray everyone calls stable — you're not. I was told the worry was harder on a woman than anything actually wrong with her. I was right the whole time. So are you. P.P.S. — About the pill. I let it go to bad days on my own, and my doctor took it down from there, and I've told it to you honestly — but I need to say this part plainly. I'm not telling you to throw your pills in the trash. A bad day is a bad day, and that's between you and your doctor. But understand what that pill is. It quiets the pain. It never touches the fire. P.P.P.S. — Your first morning, do what Judy and I did: twist one capsule open over a white saucer. It should be red, and bleed red the moment water touches it. Red is alive; brown is dust. Then two capsules, a tall glass of water, and pay attention around the twenty-minute mark. What you may feel — the warmth, the lights coming up — isn't the cure. The cure takes weeks and shows up on paper. But it's the sign the anthocyanins are alive and in your blood. P.P.P.P.S. — GoodGrove comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Take it the full ninety days, get your blood drawn, and if nothing moves, send the bottles back for every dollar — full refund, no questions asked. Nine years of that pill, and nobody ever offered my mother or me a penny back. One more thing to know: it's one orchard line, a handful of Amish farms, one harvest a year in July. When a batch is gone, it's gone until next summer. Right now it's up to 50% off on the official page — full price is nearly double. That's what I'd do: three months for you, and three for whoever you've been thinking about since the first page. P.P.P.P.P.S. — Wendell preached this past Sunday on Leviticus 17. I played every hymn, both hands, every verse. He takes his two capsules every morning now too, right beside mine — the fire doesn't ask whose blood it is. Ninety days, fully guaranteed. And I'll tell you the truth: I still can't read that verse the way I used to. https://trygoodgrove.com/cherry