I'll share two, both are related to physical healings.
I was in my chaplain residency when a man came to our LTAC who I believe had had a serious stroke. Regardless the cause, he had a major case of encephalopathy--hardly an incurable illness--but in his case, it was complicated by several other debilitating factors. Further, he had become pretty much comatose.Now, the LTAC I was stationed at has an extremely high acuity rate (given the fact that it was a specialty hospital), with 80% of our patients dying within a year of discharge. Point being, we got very, very sick people. This guy was no exception. So when the nurse practitioner told me the family wanted me to pray for the patient and that, at this point, that was pretty much the only hope they had (we were preparing for hospice discussions), I thought I knew were this was all going. I asked the family specifically what they wanted to pray for. Healing, sure, but what did they need? They said that, for the time being, all they needed was for him to wake up and be able to talk to them. I prayed for healing as well as for peace and for God's will (expecting the prayer to really be answered in terms of the family being able to accept that they were going to lose him). The next day, the NP grabbed me as I walked in the door and said, verbatim, "I don't know what you did yesterday, but you need to get back in there, right now." I walked in the patient's room and he was sitting upright. Still a little confused and not able to speak clearly, but he was awake and responsive. Family was, of course, overjoyed. The doctor and NP had completely switched gears and were now talking about discharging to a skilled nursing facility for rehab. They had cautioned the family, though, that they didn't know how much of his functionality he would get back, and that they ought to expect he would never be much more than he was at that moment. The family asked for prayer again, this time, for a restoration of his mental status. I prayed again, this time more out of curiosity at what God was doing than anything else. When I came to work
the next day, I found discharge orders to the nursing home I was stationed at (I worked both units, in addition to other responsibilities at another hospital). On this day, the man was sitting up and speaking normally. The family told me that the day before that had him in a wheelchair going up and down the hallways of the hospital looking at paintings of individuals we had hung up, when the man saw one particularly famous figure and immediately identified him. After that, he got his cognitive functions back rather rapidly.
He transferred not long after to the SNF, and as it turned out, he was on one of the floors I was assigned to. Again, the family asked me to pray, this time for a restoration of his mobility. I have to admit I felt a bit like Abraham asking God for more and more in the Sodom incident. Already this man was going to be able to spend his life in real fellowship with his family, but hey, God was doing alot, so fine! We prayed, and you should know where this is going. A few weeks later, I escorted the man and his family as he walked completely under his own power to his car as he went home. I was completely floored at his recovery. And I completely attribute it to God.
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Second story is shorter and is from my own life. For over ten years I suffered from a condition called sleep paralysis, which is where you become conscious of the fact that you are sleeping, but at this particular part of your sleep cycle, your brain has released a paralytic agent so that you don't act out your dreams and hurt yourself or others. The result is that you lay there completely unable to move or do anything except look around the room, and if you are dreaming, you get to watch them play out in your room--usually that's in the form of a nightmare (e.g., something holding you down) as your mind is trying to make sense of what is happening.
This was happening to me at least once a week, sometimes multiple times a night. It was a terrifying experience each time. It got so bad that I remember one night in particular that I had an episode. When my body woke up, I was of course a bit distressed. I feel back asleep and the stress caused me to have a nightmare about having another episode. The nightmare, though, caused me to "wake up"
to another real episode.
So that was my life for somewhere north of ten years when one night my wife asked me if I had prayed about it. I was genuinely shocked to realize I had never done so. So I did. And she did. She prayed for me, and the following Sunday, I went to church and asked the church elders to anoint me with oil and pray for me per James 5 (actually, my wife asked them to, in front of the whole church--I was sort of obligated then.
). They did.
That was may of last year, so as of today, about 14 months.
I haven't had a single case since then. Full disclosure, I did have a nightmare about having an episode several months back, but it wasn't a real episode. Again, I absolutely attribute that to prayer.
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I could tell a lot, lot, lot more stories . . . many related to physical healing, many not. But these are the two that immediately popped into my mind, and I thought I'd share. Thanks for giving me the chance. God is good!