The Prayer That Heals

In 2008, Jordan Rubin says he was told he had ninety days to live after surgeons found cancer already in his lymph nodes. Years earlier, as a teenager with a failing digestive system, he had promised God that if he lived he would help others. Facing the diagnosis, he set aside forty days and prayed three times a day — the account that opens this book.

On Christmas Day 1987, a drunk driver left gospel singer Delia Knox paralyzed from the waist down. For twenty-two years she sang from a wheelchair and, by her account, gave up on walking again. Her husband never stopped believing. At a revival meeting in 2010, before a crowd and cameras, she rose and took her first steps.

A champion Bible quizzer, Barbara was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis by nineteen. Over the years the disease took her ability to walk, then much of her breathing. While hundreds of people — four hundred fifty cards’ worth — prayed for her, she reported that she heard a voice tell her to get up and walk, and she did.

After his first heart attack at forty-six, Marvin Bird was hospitalized seventeen times in sixteen years. His angiogram showed one artery completely blocked and the others half closed, and he refused bypass surgery. Not a believer, he ended up at a healing meeting anyway — a case later studied by a physician.

Pastor Philip Dunn of Charleston, West Virginia, was blind for fourteen years from macular degeneration, a disease medicine regards as incurable. He missed seeing his daughter on her wedding day. The evening after eye surgery, he pried his swollen eye open — and for the first time in fourteen years saw his wife’s face.

At twenty-six, Ginette Nouvel of Carmaux, France, developed Budd–Chiari syndrome, a rare thrombosis of the liver’s veins. Operations and treatments failed, and fluid had to be drained from her abdomen every ten days. She traveled to Lourdes in 1954; her recovery was later examined by the Lourdes Medical Bureau and recognized by the Church.

Born in Sicily in 1931 and orphaned at ten, Elisa Aloi spent a decade fighting tuberculosis of the bones and joints, through thirty-three operations. Sealed in plaster from pelvis to foot, she went to Lourdes not asking for healing. Her recovery after the 1958 pilgrimage was examined by doctors and recognized as a cure.

Five-year-old Kaylee collapsed at home in Arkansas. A CT scan showed bleeding covering about a third of her brain, and she was flown to Arkansas Children’s Hospital. As her mother called and texted everyone she knew to ask for prayer, a family’s worst night became a story of a child’s life placed in God’s hands.

From age thirty-four, Danila Castelli of Pavia, Italy, suffered sudden, life-threatening surges in blood pressure that years of surgery could not stop. In May 1989 she chose Lourdes over a last-hope trip to America. After bathing in the sanctuary’s waters she felt a peace she hadn’t known in years — a recovery the Church recognized in 2013.

For fourteen years Delores Winder wore a body cast and neck brace because of osteoporosis of the entire spine, after fusions and cordotomies left her legs without feeling. Raised to believe miracles had ended, she reluctantly attended a Kathryn Kuhlman meeting — carried in by a friend — and an overwhelming peace settled over her.