An infant was hospitalized with uncontrolled violent vomiting just days after his birth. He was diagnosed with gastroparesis, or stomach paralysis, an incurable condition that impairs the moving of food from the stomach into the small intestine.1 Two feeding tubes were inserted — and they helped keep him alive for the next decade and a half.
"Living with feeding tubes was a struggle, to say the least," the patient said years later. "Growing up being an active child, it was difficult to get the hydration and nutrition necessary."
On November 6, 2011, when he was sixteen years old, the patient went with his family to a Pentecostal church. The speaker described how his own life had been spared when his intestines were severed in a serious accident. As the pastor recounted his healing, the teen reported feeling a "pulsating sensation" in his abdomen, "as if God was preparing me."
Afterward, the pastor laid hands on the teen and prayed for Jesus to miraculously heal him.
- "During the prayer, I felt an electric shock that started from my right shoulder and traveling down through my stomach," the teen said. "That was the moment that I knew I had been touched by the Holy Spirit."
Indeed, doctors confirmed he had been spontaneously and totally healed. They removed the two feeding tubes, and the patient has been able to eat normally and has been completely healthy while free of any medications for more than a dozen years.
"Since I have been healed of my illness, I have had more energy than ever before, and have thoroughly enjoyed the new adventure of trying all different types of foods," he said. "I have entered into the medical field in search to help the sick and needy, and to give back the great care I received as a patient."
Three medical researchers investigated this healing and ended up publishing the case study — the first reported instantaneous healing of this otherwise hopeless condition — in a peer-reviewed medical journal.2
Are there miracles today that point toward a supernatural power and presence? Yes, there are.
While there are cases of fraud, confirmation bias, the placebo effect, and medical mistakes, there are also authentic healings that are medically well-documented and give us confidence in the existence of a loving God.
The late philosopher Richard L. Purtill offered this definition of a genuine miracle: "A miracle is an event (1) brought about by the power of God that is (2) a temporary (3) exception (4) to the ordinary course of nature (5) for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history."3
Some of what we casually call miracles are probably no more than fortunate "coincidences." But when I see something that is absolutely extraordinary, has spiritual overtones, and is validated or corroborated by an independent source, that's when the "miracle bell" goes off in my mind — for example, a teen's spontaneous healing of an otherwise incurable condition as prayers for his recovery were being offered to Jesus.
In my quest to document the supernatural, I flew to Lexington, Kentucky, and then drove twenty minutes to the two-stoplight town of Wilmore — whose municipal water tower is topped with a giant white cross — to question the author of a landmark study on the miraculous.
Read the interview & full excerpt on our blog ►
