A Healing Testimony
After briefly sharing during service several weeks ago, I have been asked to expand upon and share my testimony regarding the events leading up to and during this years’ Men’s Retreat. And to this day, I continue to struggle to wrap my head around what happened, it is helping to write this down to share.
For those who don’t know about my physical struggles, the short story is that in 2008, I fell 14 feet from the roof of my house and shattered my foot and ankle along with unknowingly breaking two vertebrae in my lower back. The surgery to repair the leg damage was the most urgent matter and since I was immobilized, the back pain was not addressed at the time and the vertebrae healed incorrectly. Fast forward several years to 2018 when I had another severe back injury that led to several ruptured discs in the same area of the previous breaks. This caused spinal cord damage and left me with partial paralysis in my left leg and in constant pain. This injury led me down the path of a series of treatments and surgeries to chase the continually evolving issues and severe pain for the last 6 years. A total of seven back surgeries later including two fusions and a spinal cord stimulator for the paralysis, has still left me with permanent nerve damage and 3 additional herniated discs. The last fusion surgery in June was supposed to alleviate the remaining nerve pain, however, it left me with increasingly worsening pain in my hip. After several doctors searching for the cause, it was determined that with everything being fused and unable to move, there was added pressure being pushed into my hip joint that was previously found to have arthritis and bone on bone impingement in the joint. It was never a big enough issue as there was enough movement throughout the remainder of the joints to compensate. Now, this surgery had left me with no way to get relief from the hip pain. I was being told that the only option would be to replace the hip as there is no way to cure the arthritis and the damage to the joint.
That all is just to understand the events leading up to this testimony and my desperation for relief from the constant pain. Roughly four years ago, a good friend of mine received a word from the Lord and shared it with me written on a note and handed to me after Sunday service. It said that God wants to heal me, however, I was standing in the way. For three years, I had no clue what that meant and I carried that piece of paper in my wallet everywhere I went. I fasted and I prayed but still did not understand how I was standing in the way. That led to the 2023 Men’s Retreat where it was revealed through a message from Pastor Nathan that I was not fully submitting in prayer. My prayers for all of those years, asked God for healing but always inevitably ended with the caveat that if healing was not meant for me, I would always continue to praise Him regardless, and would be content in my pain. Last year, I threw that paper away and vowed to be bold enough to believe that I would be healed without leaving an “out” if it didn’t happen. Not that I wouldn’t continue praising God or be angry at Him if the healing didn’t happen, but to work on carving out the “unbelief” in my heart that it could and would happen. That proved way harder for me to do than I realized. I would like to say that I truly believed that God heals but can’t say that I’ve ever seen a truly undisputable case of it happening to someone I’ve encountered. So, me saying that I believed was shown to be different than truly believing in my heart. For the past year leading up to this year’s retreat, it has been an internal battle in my prayers and time of fasting to break this “unbelief”, but I hadn’t been successful.
As we arrived in Payson this August, I was in unbearable pain all weekend, so much so, that I could barely make it around camp. Just the short walk to the meeting hall or even the short bit of standing in line for food had me drenched in sweat from the pain. Men were praying over me all weekend; I was praying for myself all weekend. Nothing changed and no relief came. Sunday morning, Pastor Douglas starts the message off by saying that he wants me to come to the front. I’m dreading being in front of everyone. One, because I dread the attention and two, because I am in excruciating pain. He then called up all ~130 guys to lay hands on me and pray for my healing. As soon as people started putting hands on me, just the weight of their hands instantly intensified the pain. As the men started praying for healing, I broke down and prayed against this spirit of unbelief in my heart and cried out to God that I was ready to truly believe this healing could happen. As many times as I have shared this story, I feel words cannot express the physical feeling I experienced. I literally felt the weight lift from my shoulders and felt like I was being lifted upwards. All the pain in my hip released, and I felt upright and strong.
Keep in mind that earlier in the morning, I had brothers helping me to load my truck as I couldn’t make it the 100 yards to the parking lot. Now, I was walking all over camp like the pain was never there. I felt amazing all afternoon. I woke up Monday morning feeling great, and as I went to go down the stairs, which is one of my more painful activities, I twinged and prepared for the pain as I took my first step. No pain came. I almost ran down the stairs. Later that morning, I had my appointment with the hip specialist to discuss options with the replacement hip that they’ve been talking about. They took new x-rays and an ultrasound of the joint. The doctor said my cartilage had actually increased in size from the previous imaging, which from what he explained, doesn’t happen. He said the joint now looks healthy and sees no need for hip surgery. That same afternoon at physical therapy, as the doctor started stretching me, he was amazed to find that my hip was able to rotate an additional 15 degrees more than it did the previous week. For the past month, we’ve been lucky to get a couple degrees of increased movement a week. That following Wednesday, the therapist measured me at 75 degrees of rotation. 30 degrees of improvement in a single week. It has now been a month since this miraculous gift from God and I feel great. I have been able to climb stairs and ladders at work with little effort and no pain. This past LifeCare workday I was able to do more than I have in years and not be in excruciating pain for the week following. My doctors and surgeon have no explanation, my physical therapist has no explanation. I know the explanation and it is purely a gift from God.
I read in Scripture the story of the woman who merely touched Jesus’s robe for healing, and about the Roman Centurion that had such resolute faith that Jesus could and would heal his child without so much as stepping foot in his home. I read these stories of unwavering faith but still had doubt in my heart that I could be the one being healed. I don’t know why it took so long for my heart to be unburdened from that unbelief, but I praise God for my family and my pastors that walked this journey with me regardless of how long it took.
David Noel