Supernatural Healing

My Concepts of Supernatural Healing

My ideas about healing have changed dramatically over the years. At one time, like most people, I revered doctors as though they were close to God. Then I eventually changed to believe that Christians should not be sick at all. This held until my own daughter was struck seriously ill. Later I myself became very sick.

I think that supernatural healing is not as common as it should be because Christians, although they have gotten out of the world, they have not gotten all of the world out of them.

They do not completely believe in God.

They think there is some truth in evolution.

They think healing has been done away with.

They don't realize how much healing is in the Bible.

They don't see healing as part of "Normal Christianity".

The Methodist Church

I grew up in the Methodist church. I was saved when a traveling evangelist visited the Athens United Methodist Church in Athens Pennsylvania in 1967. My brother, Fred always wanted me to go to his Pentecostal church. They were a little "crazy" at his church, and it was about an hour drive away. I visited it once, but saw no need to leave the Methodist Church. While I was a senior in High School God called me to go to Bible School. I could not see how that could happen. After hearing how the VA could help with college expenses I joined the US Navy and headed in the other direction.

A Church in California

While I was in California in the Navy I heard sermons talking about subjects like "Prayer does not work", and finally gave in and left the Methodist Church. I went to another Church instead. There I was involved in door-to-door witnessing, hospital visitation, etc. Then at one meeting where we teens filled a hall, there was maybe 50 to 100 of us, someone asked a difficult question. She said that she had a friend who had been healed in a Kathryn Kuhlman convention. She wanted to know if that was of God?

The speaker asked if this friend was saved. The answer was, not until after she was healed. Well that was proof positive that the healing was of the Devil, because we all know that "God does not heal unbelievers". (it seems to me like Jesus only healed Non Christians!) Then he went on to say that the Devil heals, Doctors heal, and God can heal. But now that we have "That which is perfect, the Bible, that which was imperfect has been done away with". According to the speaker this means that spiritual gifts like healing are no longer needed and no longer happen. As a result God does not heal anymore, so "unless she was operated on by a doctor she was healed by the Devil!"

This left me very confused and my head was spinning. I had never heard of such a contortion of scripture before. Then I realized there was a big problem with their premise. So I stood up and asked, "If God does not heal anymore, then why do we pray for the sick??" I was promptly escorted out of the room and told not to come back untill I apologized. I did send a letter of apology, but did not return to that church.

To get my bearings back I called my old sunday school teacher across the country in Milan Pennsylvania. Little did I know that she had been asked to leave the Methodist Church and now pastors her own church. She assured me that God still heals, still hears and answers prayer, and none of the spiritual gifts have been done away with. So when I was transferred to the East coast I went to a Pentecostal Church. I also started reading books on healing. There were several by Oral Roberts and some about Kathryn Kuhlman.

My first Pentecostal Church

However my first pentecostal church turned out to be a very legalistic church. There were constant fights over girls wearing pants, and all kinds of things. It eventually led to fights on the church lawn and a church split. I tried to stay neutral until there were just too many threats against me for not taking sides. About that time my brother moved to Virginia and invited me to a new church. This church was called the "Christian Teaching Center", and was pastored by Jim Murphy. There I listened to Bible School Level teaching from people like Edgar Parkyns and was amazed at how little I knew about the Bible, even though I had been reading through it every year or two for over 10 years.

Off to Bible School

Eventually God called me to Bible school again, and my response again was "Lord no". But I knew that if He was Lord how could I say "no"? So I threw out an impossible fleece that if I could get into Bible school I would go. The problem was that I knew it was impossible to get to Bible School in time. I was on a US Navy ship in the Persian Gulf during the Iran versus Iraq war. Iran had declared war on us and had taken some hostages. People were being kept for several months past their military discharge date. So I knew that going to Bible school was totally impossible!

My ship the USS Faragut was in such bad shape that it had to be towed into port for repairs. After a few days they determined that they were unable to fix all of the problems, and it would have to continue to be towed. As they were getting ready to tow it back out to sea, they figured it would be anchored at sea for several months, and asked for all of those who were to be discharged in the next month to stay ashore. I was left behind with about three others on a little island in the Persian Gulf. While we waited a jeep came flying down the runway with about 4 guys firing off their machine guns. They were just testing them for the changing of the guard.

The next problem was that there was only one C5 military transport aircraft left flying due to lack of repairs. It somehow made it to the island. As its propellers wound down you could hear the damage the dust had done to the engines. It then took us over to Spain. It was then grounded because it needed too many repairs and was considered unsafe to fly. The next day the pilot wanted us onboard for a "test run". Once everyone was there he said if we wanted to risk it, he was flying back to the states for Christmas, and we could go along. Otherwise you could get off and spend the holidays in Spain. The rear hatch did not close and the brakes did not work but somehow we made it over the ocean to Deleware. It was a long cold night and they gave us extra blankets. When we landed I could feel the brakes being applied and the plane would turn crooked, then he would release the brakes and straighten it out and try again. I heard we stopped very very close to the end of the runway. Fortunately I did not have a window as they are few and far between on a C5. At that point they grounded all the remaining C5's due to some problem with the wings falling off amoung other things.

In Delaware I had to have a discharge physical, debrief, etc. and everything was closing for Christmas. Since there was no time for the required tests, they put me in charge of a dorm for the holidays. However the next day a doctor gave us all a quick "one look over us" physical and I was discharged. At the airport I paid almost all I had for a plane ticket home. Then I spent the remaining money on a meal. Next it started to snow. Then it really snowed. They were busy de-icing the planes. The flights were being delayed. Then they canceled my flight, it was almost midnight. I went to the ticket counter and asked for a refund. However I had been there over 4 hours and the money had been sent to the bank. They would mail me a check. Now I was broke.

Others there were also very upset, it was the night before Christmas! So I made a deal with someone. I would help him get to the buss terminal if he would pay the taxi fare. When we arrived at the buss station there were two more seats available. My friend got his, and I called my sister in Elmira New York to see if she could get me a ticket. She called back a while later, she had paid for the ticket with the only credit card she had that worked. So I went to the office to claim my ticket. But they said there was no buss going there! They proceeded to argue as the last minutes before departure closed. Then, with one minute to go, they figured it out, and I was on my way. I arrived home about 7 AM on Christmas morning!

My mom helped me buy a three-piece suit, and some other things I needed to go to school and before I knew it Christmas was over and I was enrolled in Bible School. A few weeks later the military mailed me my discharge papers!

My start in the Ministry

While in Bible School I came across a book called "None of These Diseases", by McMillan. Through reading it I seemed to adopt the idea that Christians should not get sick at all. If we follow God's rules we will have "none of these diseases" that the Egyptians had.

I started as an elder and a Sunday school teacher at a church near Salamanca NY. A few years later I was a Pastor pioneering a church in Cuba NY. There I often preached on healing and prayed for the sick after just about every service. I sometimes spoke at up to three churches a week. The church only had 4 to 6 regular attendees, so I held down a full time job to make ends meet. I had two cars but they needed constant repairs and I ended up borrowing my bosses vehicle way too often. We made so little money that we would go to McDonalds and buy a cheeseburger and cut it in half so we could have a meal out.

Hannah's birth

My oldest daughter was born on September 24, 1984 after a three hour delivery. When you have never been in a delivery room you do not know how to tell when the delivery is going terribly wrong. Yet even I could tell things were going from bad to worse. During the three hours in the delivery room they had lost our childs heartbeat three times, everything stops and the room gets quiet while they try to find a heartbeat. Then it would start up on its own once again. There was blood everywhere, more blood than I had ever seen before. I thought Kelly had lost too much blood.

After two hours of trying to deliver the child Kelly was totally exhausted and it is no longer possible to naturally deliver a child. So after two hours of trying to deliver her, Doctors then started assembling an emergency C section team. Then after three hours they came in to tell us they were ready to start, and wanted to take Kelly into the operating room next door. At that point I asked them to stop everything. I was going to pray for her. I do not remember what I prayed, but in a few minutes later my first daughter was born naturally, without any surgery. She was blue and had problems right from the start, but I proudly announced to the waiting doctors that our "miracle child" was born.

My daughters illness

After 18 months of almost normal life my oldest daughter Hannah became ill. At first she had a red rash, possibly "roseola". She was weak and could not eat we had to hand feed her. Her fever slowly rose to around 103 degrees. After seeing the doctors several times, she ended up being admitted to the hospital. For days they ran every test they knew of but could not find what the problem with her was. By the time they gave up, her fever had reached over 105 degrees. They gave up and recommended that we transfer her to a bigger hospital.

We left the first hospital after she had a bath, and we had wet washcloths with us to try to cool her down. It is about a three hour drive from Olean NY to Strongs in Rochester NY. However that drive that night was the longest drive of my life. My daughter's life was hanging in the balance and there was nothing I could do to save her. I kept thinking that I had driven this way many times before and it did not take this long, why was it taking so long? After what seemed like an eternity we arrived and the doctors were there waiting for her. Her fever was about 105.7 on arrival.

In those days my world as I knew it fell apart. I took a job as a maintenance worker at Elim Bible Institute. They diagnosed her illness as "Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis" or JRA for short. My daughter got better for a while. She went home from the hospital with a prescription for about 18 to 24 children's aspirin a day. Slowly she improved, and was well enough to walk a little and even play on the swings. I would push her on the swing for what seemed like hours. She was happy, and life was fine for a while.

Then suddenly in 1988 she took a turn for the worse. She ended up in PICU (Pediatric intensive Care Unit) on a regular basis. First she had congestive heart failure and nearly died. She was in the hospital for dehydration because she could not eat. In the morning they took some tests including an X-ray and sent us home. We disobeyed the doctors and stayed at the hospital. A doctor asked us what we were doing there. We asked for the results of all the tests before we would leave. The doctor assured us that it was not necessary but he would try to get and check her test results for us. That saved her life. Eventually he returned with another doctor. He said "This is Doctor Clark a world renown heart specialist". Her heart was so swollen that according to the doctors, if we had taken her home, she would not have survived the trip.

They could not put her out to operate on her heart, so they performed a new operation for the first time ever. They took a large needle and guided by a sonogram to her sack surrounding her heart. There they removed the fluid around her heart without opening up her chest. She remembered seeing the needle. The volume of the fluid removed was greater than the volume of her heart. No wonder she could not eat!

A few weeks later she had vocal chord paralysis and nearly suffocated. She would make a loud groaning noise in her sleep. We recorded the sounds and played it for the doctors. The doctors sent her home with antibiotics for "possible pneumonia". That night we took her to the Emergency Room. There they ran more tests and tried all kinds of things, but her blood oxygen rate was slowly dropping. All we could do was sign her over to the doctors care and they did not even know what they were going to do next.

After about 4 hours that seemed like an eternity to us, the doctors finally returned. They had succeeded in saving her life by giving her a tracheotomy. She had to have the tracheotomy to get enough air to her lungs. Then they had put a camera device down her throat and discovered that her vocal cords were swollen and paralyzed to where they were suffocating her. Once again we had ignored the doctors and saved her life.

I also remember the long walk to her bed to see our daughter again. We passed one child who had been hit by a car and was covered from head to toe in bandages and casts. We passed all kinds of children suffering with cancer, and all kinds of diseases. It seemed like a very long walk. Finally we reached her room. There among the equipment she was barely alive. She was so weak and pale. She was coughing up blood. There was blood on her bandages and a tube leading from equipment up to her neck. Her lips and fingers had almost no color left in them.

The doctors said that she would never talk again. They could only find a record of one other child with this condition. She started trying to learn sign language. We stayed there in the hospital with her around the clock. I missed more days of work than I made it to. This was the worst time of my life. I remember during that November in the hospital looking out at the first snow of the season falling and wondering how it had ever gotten this bad. I had believed in divine healing. Now my own daughter was so very close to death. Why had God failed me, where was God in all of this?

Now after all that she had been through I had to give up and say "God if it is your will you can take her". There was nothing else I could do. My prayers seamed to fall on deaf ears. Life was a daily struggle. The doctors suggested that we should put her in a "home". Instead I learned how to take care of her and eventually she was able to come home again. I slept for months sitting next to her bed. If she stopped breathing during the night I had to get her going again. We had a daily struggle to keep her going. One night I could not get her to breath, she was turning blue. We called for an ambulance and that night we went to the hospital in the ambulance. Once again she was admitted. This time they put her on IV antibiotics for "atypical pneumonia". Again she got better for a while.

The doctors had given her IV antibiotics and they had previously loaded her up on steroids. Next they added methotrexate. That combination led to some improvement for limited time. She was even able to walk and roller skate for a while. Methotrexate suppresses the immune system and can give short term improvements for those with arthritis. However the long term it can lead to liver failure and death. I did not know that at the time. She slowly got worse. Eventually she was hardly eating, unable to walk, and generally sick. The doctors kept increasing her medicine. Somehow I got the idea that her medicine was what was making her sick! So I became fed up with the doctors and started arguing with them. They claimed to have blood tests on their side. Then by accident we discovered they were not getting the blood tests at all, they were going to the wrong doctor! When we told them that they did not have any of her blood tests they backed down and let us take her off the medicine.

We made arrangements with the lab to send a copy of all blood tests to our family doctor. He would then give us a copy for our records. I would recommend doing that for anyone that is sick. Doctors do not always check the blood tests that closely if at all. It was 6 months before Hannah's blood test showed a normal liver count. That was the third time that we had disagreed with the doctors and saved her life.

Instead of medicine to destroy her immune system we gave her supplements to boost her immune system. The first thing we tried was something called "Ambrotose". Someone donated a jar of it to us, as it is quite expensive to buy. The doctors had said that she would get worse without the medicine, but she did not get worse. However she did not improve all that much either. She was only able to get around in a wheelchair and she could do little if anything for herself.

Miracles do happen

By the time the doctors were done trying to help my daughter she was crippled and using a wheelchair. They had done all they could and there was nothing more they could do. Several of her joints had stopped working. She became so sick of medicine that today she will rarely take anything at all. I have seen others like that, there are good medicines. However our medical system has pushed some bad ones to the point of causing the rejection of all medicine.

In 2000 she told us that God had told her to go to Bible School. That was a difficult request as it was a lot of work for us to get her dressed, fed, into her wheelchair and off to school. It took hours to get her ready. She still spends over an hour in the bathroom, but that is normal. We had to tell her "No" she could not be a full time student. We did agree to let her take one or two classes for that semester.

On a Sunday in early January 2001 I was greeting all of the new midterm students. My daughter walked into the new students meeting to everyones amazement! After teen church, the teens had gathered around her and prayed for her. God touched her and after prayer she got out of her wheelchair and started walking. Everyone was amazed. She had been essentially bedridden for years even before resorting to the wheelchair. She had spent many days on the couch moaning in pain, and now she is walking! She enrolled at Elim Bible Institute and graduated in 2003 after only 2 and 1/2 years.

Recently she has started working for Sylvia Evans of an international ministry called "Creative Word Ministry". There Hannah has been upgrading their computers and converting Sylvia's messages from cassette tapes to digital CD's. She also works on web sites and sometimes is the substitute receptionist at Elim Fellowship.

The Future, My dream

Malachi 4:2

"But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings;"

A few years ago I had a very exciting dream. In this dream I saw a revival of healing in the church. Thousands were being healed of all kinds of diseases such has not been seen since Jesus walked on this earth. It got to the point that the hospitals were being emptied and the medical system was loosing lots of money. They even went to the point of posting armed guards in the hospitals to try to keep the Christians out for fear of loosing their last customers!

The time for this healing revival is getting close. Millions are disillusioned with the medical system. Like the lady with the issue of blood they have spent all that they have and did not get any better. In fact the opposite is happening. As this country has spent more than twice what any other country has spent on medicine our health has gone down the tubes. We have a plague of over 100 "autoimmune" diseases that is sweeping the country. Recently they have announced that people are dying of diseases that they never used to die from.

Could conventional, evolution based, medicine be our problem? Are doctors the Number 3 cause of death as many have documented? Some are even speculating that doctors and medicine are the number ONE cause of death! Is there any hope? YES! The church is going to rise up and we will see a wave of healing like never before!