During junior high and high school, I went with Mom to Saint Matthews' Sunday morning services. It wasn't unusual for me to wear a long-sleeved shirt, suit, and tie. I mainly went to please Mom, get a donut after the service, and to have some social life. Third Avenue didn't provide much social grouping (and by the way, the United Methodist Church is considered to be an apostate church nowadays). The long sleeves at church always bugged me: tight on one side, loose on the other. I figured that the cheap shirts were poorly made.
After I became a Christian in the 1970s, I attended Melodyland Christian Centers' services. Being a Pentecostal sort of church, they hosted an annual Charismatic clinic during the summer. One night, a healing evangelist named Charles Hunter was speaking, and he had everyone in the audience, about two thousand people, stretch out their arms and/or legs to compare them. My left arm was about 5/8 of an inch or more shorter than my right arm. Dang; it wasn't the shirts that were poorly made; it was me.
Anyway, Charles asked us to hold still, and he asked Jesus to make our limbs as long as they were supposed to be. I held very still, and I watched as my left fingertips grew out to match my right fingertips. I WATCHED them grow out. I didn't move, did not adjust; it was just me frozen, and out they grew. And my arms are STILL the same length, so I wasn't hypnotized or anything like that.
Jim? Jim Spillman was an associate pastor at Melodyland. He left to start his own church, Omega Fellowship, in another city. I visited and supported that church for awhile. We talked about some of the things he had experienced during his time at Melodyland, as he had participated in many of their healing services. He said the biggest shocker to him was when he had been asked to pray for a young woman who was blind in one eye. He dutifully prayed for her, and asked her to remove the gauze patch that was over her eye, so she could see her vision restored. He said he was shocked to see a dry socket where her eye should have been. "They didn't warn me. I wasn't prepared for that," he said. He braced himself, trying to put on a brave face for what obviously wasn't going to work. But as he looked at the woman, he saw an eyeball forming in the back of her dry socket. He WATCHED it grow into its place. She was healed, just as he had asked and, apparently as she had believed. "I'm not afraid to pray for anything, anymore."
Watching my fingertips move to match the other hand is a biggie for me. The experiences of Jesus intervening in a spiritual deception, being baptized in the Holy Ghost, and watching Jesus be crucified were in my imagination. Though they were "other" for me, you and many others would discount such events as hallucinations and/or the influence of stress-induced hormones. It isn't like I am not aware of those things. But my fingers are out there, free of stress and delusion. I don't know how Jesus did it, or even if it was Jesus who did it, but whoever or whatever did it did it at the exact moment Jesus was asked to do it, and it was done. Obviously, SOMEBODY wants me to believe in Jesus, and whoever it is has got a step up on me.
Danny
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