Christopher’s Storyclick here to skip to short version on Chris' Prayer Beads page
(Highlighted
sections are most important parts, yellow
highlight begins the list of miraces.) When
you see Chris for the first time, you'll probably notice 3 things right
away. First you notice that
he is a little different than you, physically.
You can see he walks slowly, and he uses mostly his right arm, so
you know right away that something different happened to him than what
happened to you in your life. Secondly,
you'll notice that the two of us are not very far away from each other.
When we pray, and when we sing, or walk, or when he needs to use
the bathroom, get dressed, etc., you’ll see the two of us working
alongside one another. But
thirdly, if you get to speaking with Chris or watching him, I believe
it’s not long before you notice that Chris is very special inside.
He has a connection with and love for God that is pure and
springs from the depth of his being.
Chris
has been where few of us have gone.
I’ll tell you in a moment his story, about his medical problems
and fight for life, and how Jesus surrounded him with angels and how God
has ministered to him without ceasing all of his life.
That may strike you as a strange word, to say that God ministered
to Chris, it’s usually people ministering to people, or people giving
worship to God.
No, I meant that, God has ministered to him, comfort, healing,
companionship and truth, throughout his childhood. When
Chris speaks of the Lord, he’s not talking rhetorically, or
theoretically, or any of those big words that cover up the fact that
when we say it, we don’t really understand what we’re talking about.
Chris is telling you of someone he has met.
Someone he knows as well as you know the brothers and sisters you
grew up with.
Chris
told me when he was very young, that God told him he had a green house
waiting in Heaven for him, and when he got there, he was going to be a
judge. Believe
me, he didn’t hear that from me.
I could have told him about mansions waiting in Heaven, but I had
no knowledge of the verse that says we are to judge the angels. He
called me into his bedroom one night about that same time period in our
life, to “see all the wings in the room”.
I couldn’t see anything, but he was transfixed, looking around,
telling me the room was filled with wings. This
was at a time when someone had been very cruel to him, and his spirit
was hurting.
God not only heals our bodies when we are born with deformities,
people.
God comforts our souls when we are oppressed, and when others
treat us badly. God’s heart breaks over every
harsh word we speak to each other, and every blow we receive from this
ugly world. This world He
created for us out of His deepest love that we have allowed the enemy to
twist into harm for His people. We, brothers and sisters, as
children of Adam and Eve, who handed over their allegiance to the enemy,
who broke God’s heart the first time.
And we, who even now, with our understanding of Christ and His
sacrifice, still at times, turn aside and play with things we know we
shouldn’t. Chris
was born a month early by induced labor, so the doctor could go on
vacation as planned.
He was born blue and lifeless from lack of oxygen as the doctor
and nurses did everything they could to force the delivery.
His head had been forced into a cone shape and his skin was
bleeding from the forceps. Chris was handed to me that
first night, with his eyes open, and with the face of a man, not a
child. His expression, the
hurt questioning of an adult was in his eyes, as if he were asking me
why did we do this to him. I don’t believe that was
something from my imagination, for a couple of reasons.
One, I didn’t care. I
was all too happy to have it over with, and I had been convinced that he
was dead as he was born anyway. He
didn’t move, or cry, and he was a strange color.
When the doctor said, “Congratulations, it’s a boy,” I
thought he had the sickest, cruelest humor I’d ever seen, to say that
about a dead baby. The
first week of Chris’ life he had jaundice bad enough to cause more
brain damage.
The doctors sent him home as if he were a full term baby, with
nothing wrong with him.
It was 3 months before we found out Chris was in trouble.
He had been crying steadily with a monotone cry.
We found out later that was a sign of seizures in babies.
He kept his head turned to one side, and he didn’t smile or
move his arms much.
I had never been around a baby, so I had no idea this wasn’t
normal.
Finally
the pediatrician told us that his head had grown 5 centimeters in 5
weeks and that he was in serious trouble and might not make it to the
hospital.
We had 50 miles to go to take him there. The
doctors drilled holes in his skull and relieved the pressure from the
spinal fluid building up inside his brain.
Blood clots covered the brain tissue and had choked out the
oxygen to most of the brain cells, and by the time they x rayed his
head, they saw that he had only a small ring of brain material left and
a huge hole in the center filled with fluid. He
spent 5 months in the hospital, having constant seizures and being
worked on daily to keep him alive.
The first tube they put in his brain to drain that fluid,
introduced a germ that lead to spinal meningitis. He
remained partially comatose for 2 years.
During that time my husband and I lost our place to live and our
jobs. I
stayed by Chris’ bed, already pregnant again, not knowing anything but
the daily search for food.
I became obsessed with eating, and searching for some kind of
meaning, but I felt nothing. The doctors felt comfortable with my attitude and let me
remain with Chris while they did procedures on him, because the hospital
was short of nursing staff and they needed my hands. They
finally told me that he was going to be severely retarded and a burden
on us, and that their recommendation was to let him die.
Thankfully I didn’t know what they meant, so I told them no. We
brought Chris home, began giving him shots every other day for the
seizures and he ballooned up to 36 pounds from the cortisone injections.
He was blind in the left eye, paralyzed on the left side and
couldn’t even hold his head upright.
He was as they say, a vegetable. I
had the new baby and tried to settle into living with my in-laws.
I was up with Chris all day and Matt all night, as he cried for
hours with colic.
For another year I really didn’t have an anchor, or care what
happened.
My husband and his family fought constantly and I turned over and
over in my mind how I might be able to kill my children and myself so we
could be out of our misery.
Praise the Lord I didn’t have the courage to do it. Our First Big Miracle
Then
one night I was up late and watching a TV minister saying if anyone had
a paralyzed or retarded or blind baby, to put it up against the TV and
pray with him.
I did, and then forgot all about it.
Three days later Chris woke up from the coma and smiled at me.
He moved his paralyzed left arm and plopped it into his bowl of
cereal.
In
that first month, he learned to sit up, crawl, eat table foods, and
play. But
his left eye still didn’t work, and his left leg was paralyzed. It’s
important that I tell you that we had already moved out into our own
home again, and made a conscious decision to live for the Lord.
I thought long and hard about what kind of life I should be
leading my family into, to find something where people wouldn’t make
fun of Chris or where he could be useful and a blessing. I
knew the only answer was for us to be evangelists.
We began watching the TV preachers and reading the Bible.
I was isolated from traditional churches at the time, and that
was a good thing, because I took the word of God at face value and
hadn’t heard anyone debate whether miracles still happen.
I believed with all my heart, and God rewarded my trust in Him. At this time too, I began
angering the enemy. Before
I had Chris I was playing around in witchcraft and fortune telling.
I had my first vision when I was 16 so when I began having dreams
that came true and was told in a dream that I was being given the power
of a seer, the enemy used something natural along with my pride, to make
me work for HIS kingdom. For me now to be telling people
about God and showing the miracles that He was doing in our lives made
Satan very angry. Demons
began appearing in our home that only the kids could see, and that
showed up in our photographs. The Second Miracle
We
lived 50 miles from the hospital and clinics where we had to go 5 times
a month and we had no car. I
had to beg rides for each of those various clinic visits.
At the eye clinic, they put a patch on his good eye and glasses
over both. We struggled
with that for a year with no improvements.
Then I said a prayer, and the next month showed improvement and
by the second month after the prayer, his eyesight was equal in both
eyes. The Third Miracle
He
wanted me to hold him under the arms and pretend to walk him around the
room, but his left leg wouldn’t move, so I prayed one night for him to
be able to walk. The next
morning, both legs moved equally. You
couldn’t tell which had been paralyzed. The Fourth Miracle
In
December, three months after our first big miracle with Chris, they
repeated the cat scan and showed his brain tissue had grown back in!
What had only been a small ring of tissue was now a completely
formed brain and the only abnormality was the shape of the ventricles,
the openings for fluid in the center. He
learned to talk at 3 from listening to his brother Matt. He
learned to walk when he was 9 from watching his youngest brother Daniel
learn, but it was only about a year after that we saw that his left foot
was turning sideways causing him to walk on his leg bone.
The Shriner’s hospital operated on the left ankle and he healed
well. Chris
learned to read three letter words from the Nintendo game Sesame Street. Time went by, we moved to
Georgia, had a third child, (Daniel), and struggled with other problems.
Both of the other children had problems. Mathew was hyperactive and suffered from being in Chris’
shadow. All the doctors and
physical therapists and their grandparents’ attention on Chris made
Mathew feel left out. Daniel was born “as an
adult” also. He never
played, rarely smiled. He
was so shy that he would only speak to me, not even to his father.
Daniel was also able to see the demons around us and in our home.
All three children were telling me about them, and I saw their
effects but couldn’t see them. The Fifth Miracle
This miracle concerned the
children’s father, my husband. I
have decided since I wrote this, to keep it private.
He died in 1996. Two
months later, the house was struck by lightning and set on fire, and
Rodney (a hired carpenter there to fix our house) came in and saved us.
Four months later we met again and both of us instantly felt a
deep commitment to each other. The Sixth Miracle -
October 2003
We’ve helped each other over
many hurdles since then, and the miracles didn’t stop, they just
increased and included Rodney
too with a fantastic 3 week healing of throat cancer in 2000. The Seventh Miracle -
June 2002
Since
then, Chris has faced surgery on his left leg to release the tension in
his tendons.
We prayed for this to be healed instead of needing surgery.
I knew it could set him back from walking and that we didn’t
have a way to get him up the house stairs and into our home again after
the operation if he were in a wheelchair with a big cast.
We had been told years back that when he reached about 12, he
would become wheelchair bound and give up some of his mobility in
exchange for the energy to talk to people. This
hasn’t happened yet and I was really resisting it. We
prayed about 6 months and put off the surgery.
We were prayed over at church several times, but nothing seemed
to change. I kept insisting
that God’s word was true though.
I know Scripture says, “by His stripes we ARE healed”, and
that anything we ask for in Jesus name we will receive if we don’t
doubt. I
went to several churches and spoke with the pastors.
I believe they felt put on the spot and uncomfortable with my
insistence that Chris should be healed.
It’s one thing to say you believe in everything in the Bible,
and another to dare live it.
Some people say there’s some question about whether every
healing is the will of God.
I can’t accept that there is any wavering in His Word.
I have never seen any scripture that says sometimes we have to be
sick. Then
I heard someone say maybe I had not surrendered my will to God and that
was the problem.
Here was a possibility, because I was so frightened of the
consequences of this surgery.
So I finally surrendered it all to Him and agreed to the surgery,
trusting that Chris would be ok either way.
At the same time, Lucy loaned us the money to make a wheel chair
ramp and although it wasn’t done yet, I believed He’d make a way to
get Chris into the house. We
went for a last minute checkup on Friday and the doctor said Chris still
needed the operation. Monday
morning we had Chris at the hospital and I had a big bag of books packed
to spend the night. They
were going to cut the bottom of his foot to release the tendon to one
toe that pointed down, and cut at the back of his leg to release the
heel cord tendon. That one
was going to be the problem, because it was going to have to be cut down
the middle and the ends of both halves sewn together.
This would make that tendon weak for months. I
had just sat down in the waiting room and opened a book, when the doctor
came bouncing out and told me they were all done and we could go home.
I asked him why it was so fast (like 15 minutes), and he said
that when they had cut him open, they saw that he no longer needed the
surgery. So
they only nicked the leg tendon and cut the toe tendon as planned.
Since they hadn’t had to damage his leg so badly, we didn’t
need to spend the night. It
took longer to get a message back to Warwick and have Rodney come back
down to get us, than it had for the whole surgery to take place! I
realized with this miracle that I had to totally surrender my will to
God, and let Him take over with the plans.
I am a real general when it comes to making plans and despite my
strong faith, I’m a natural worrier. My
faith was not disappointed, He was still as good as His word, and all of
the promises of the Bible are true.
But God will work
out the solutions to our problems in His time and in His way. The Eighth Miracle -
April 2003
Chris had been having tremendous
toothaches for months through 2002, and we took him to dentists and
sought one that would treat him. He
had gotten older and his gag reflex is still so bad, he has to be put to
sleep to be treated. There
is only one dentist in Georgia who will do that and one clinic, and both
are in Augusta, GA. We
finally got an appointment at the clinic at the MCG dental college in
Augusta and they did x-rays on Chris’ mouth and told us that he was in
danger again. Four of the teeth on the bottom
jaw that hadn’t ever come through, were laying sideways, stacked two
high, and laying in the nerve channel to his bottom jaw, on the nerve.
He was continually getting infections in them and suffered pain
as the teeth tried to move, but couldn’t work themselves free. There were also his wisdom teeth
to remove now. He had 8
teeth that had to be cut out of the jaw, and taking the bottom 4 out of
the nerve channel was most likely going to damage the nerves to his
face, and cause permanent, constant itching and crawling sensations on
his chin. They said we had no choice but
do the operation, or he would keep getting sick with infections and
possibly die from them. Another
problem was that in taking those bottom teeth out, they were almost
certain that they would accidentally break his jaw.
He would be wired shut for a month and have to drink from a
straw. The straw I had no
problem with, but not being able to open his mouth was another matter! For 4 months we had been
fighting a combination of strange problems that I knew were related,
although the doctors never admitted it.
He began suddenly wetting the bed, and waking up in the night
coughing and vomiting. Several
nights I sat up with him, and we prayed and struggled, not knowing what
was causing it. Finally, we found out he had
what they call reflux, or heartburn, and I told the dental surgeons that
to keep his mouth shut and have him wake up vomiting, could cause him to
die before I even woke up and got to him. They couldn’t promise us
anything, but we went ahead and planned the surgery asking God to heal
this problem and fix it for us without a need for their help.
We prayed! People, I
mean we PRAYED. We were
prayed OVER, and UNDER and from a distance and we sang and rejoiced and
we fought. During that time of waiting for the surgery, Chris continued
to be in excruciating pain. He
was on around the clock pain medication that was almost keeping him
knocked out. He asked me
every day, why he had to feel that way, and what could we do about it. My heart was breaking.
I wanted so badly to help him.
I slept on the floor beside his bed, many a night, and in the
chair beside his bed. Finally I felt in my spirit as
we prayed once more, that something HAD to be done.
I got bold and told Chris that by morning when he got up, the
pain would be gone. By
God’s grace, he got up and didn’t hurt for two days.
We were now about a week away from the surgery and I was certain
God had removed those teeth. I
reasoned that it’s no more difficult to dissolve tooth matter than
cancer, and we had certainly witnessed cancer disappearing! I looked at his teeth constantly
and even saw that the teeth were moving in his mouth, and I took that as
further proof of a healing. When the day came for the
surgery, Rod, Chris and I went to the hospital.
I made the doctors do another x-ray, because I was so sure he was
healed and we could go home. They reluctantly did the x-ray,
as they admitted him, and said that although the
teeth were now NOT in the channel on the nerve, they were still
there. So we continued with
the surgery plans. When
they took him in for the operation, and Rod and I prayed, the nurses
told us to go and get some breakfast.
We had always visited a diner two blocks down the road, so we
headed off in the rain around the corner in our son’s new car we had
borrowed. We
had only made it one block when a nurse coming to work slammed into the
driver’s door of our car hard enough that I thought Rodney was
probably killed. All at once I was thinking, oh
dear Lord, my son’s new car, not much money, and we’re stranded 4
hours from home, with no one able to come help us.
There were a few other things I was even more worried about, but
I’ll keep them to myself at this time. I
feel so strongly about God’s grace at this time, I can’t express to
you what a miracle it was, that although we couldn’t open the
driver’s door, the car was still drivable and we were not injured or
in trouble. We went on to the diner and then back to the hospital. Chris
was going home that same day. He
was barely out from under the sedation, and it was quite difficult for
us, but God worked some fantastic miracles for us so the enemy’s plans
didn’t work. Two of those
miracles were that the doctors removed the teeth without breaking his
jaw, and he was able to eat soft foods in a week. That summer, Chris was plagued
with an ingrown toenail. The
podiatrist removed part of it, and infection set in.
He suffered through 3 operations for it, and constant pain.
He lost muscle strength and the courage to walk as freely as he
had been. He could no
longer go to the bathroom by himself, or stand up while removing his own
clothing. He became much
more dependent on me and we both became more homebound. Fear set in, the fear of trying
to keep good clothing and be seen in public.
We were dieting off and on, trying to help Danny with his fears
and depression, and I think depression just settled down over all of us. Even
though we had problems, we were still working on our faith, and praying.
Our computer contacts increased and we were ministering to others
online who had problems and praying for them.
We began making little bead necklaces and bracelets, praying over
them and sending them out in the way Paul blessed his apron and sent it
out to those who needed healing. We
have gotten reports of illness and pain being lessened or removed and we
receive calls from several states and Canada. When
Pastor Mathis was here a week ago, I asked him for prayer about our
fears, so we could get back to church.
On the night of the church service, we had no trouble getting out
and attending. It had been
over a year since I had been able to do that, despite many prayers being
said for us, and by us. I
had tried all kinds of tricks and preparation, and psyching myself up to
do it. I can only assume
that God moved on us that night and removed the demons who were keeping
us afraid. And there were many more
miracles in between these larger healings that are written here.
I would have to type forever and attempt to remember daily things
from 24 years ago that showed God’s love for us. A
couple more incidents that stand out in my mind were once when we were
very broke and cold weather was coming on.
I needed hats and scarves for the 3 children who were going to
school at the time on the bus and were cold.
I had no idea where I could get the money, but I knew I needed
$13 for them. A
few days after I thought the first thought of need, a check arrived in
the mail unexpectedly for exactly $13. Recently,
I needed food and it was going to be a long time before another check
came in. I remembered that
my mother always said when she needed a miracle for groceries she would
sit down and write out a grocery list, so I did that too.
I didn’t worry or feel anxiety, I simply wrote what I needed
and committed it to God. I
also had written beside each item exactly what it cost, and totaled it.
It was $30. A few
minutes later I remembered that I needed another dollar item, and wrote
it in, adjusting the total. That
day in the mail, a check came unexpectedly for exactly $31. Chris’
miracles continue daily, and there is so much more to tell about the
angels he has seen. For
instance, “The man at the window, the man who is always smiling,”
and the bad man who came and gave him a stomachache.
In each room of our old house, he would greet someone else.
I have heard him saying “Oh, hello!
I haven’t seen you in awhile!”
And whenever I’d ask him who he was talking about, he seemed to
forget and couldn’t answer me. I hope Chris’ story and our testimony will be a blessing to you! |