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CoffeePods
A series exploring Christian healing in a handy coffee-break sized podcast. Plug yourself in, pick up your mug of coffee, and let's go.
CoffeePods
Science, Saints, and Modern Miracles
The mysterious connection between faith and healing takes center stage in this thought-provoking conversation. Following a successful Healing Academy session that drew fifty participants from across the UK, we dive deeper into the foundations and controversies surrounding Christian healing.
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Coffee Pods, a podcast of the Acorn Christian Healing Foundation exploring what's happening in the world through the lens of Christian healing. Well, hello, we're back.
Speaker 2:I like when you welcome it because you always welcome it with a lovely, energetic hello.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a great weekend and and we've had a fantastic morning we we spent. I feel like I went to northern ireland this morning, so if my accent changes slightly, it's perhaps I've been in carmony. Yeah, but it was lovely. We had a fantastic morning getting some good prayer from from car Reverend Carol, who's up in Northern Ireland and I feel like I'm floating on my chair at the moment because I feel like I've just been soaked a little bit in the spirit and even got a tour of her garden. It was wonderful.
Speaker 2:It was wonderful. It was wonderful, I think, stuff like that, where I'm like I'm really grateful for zoom or similar tech, because we wouldn't be able to connect in that way and god was so present in what we were talking about and it was surprisingly good and and rich.
Speaker 1:I mean I I think when you're no, it was, um, I'm still sitting here. It's kind of like that moment after you've seen an amazing movie and you walk out of the theater and you go, wow, that was. And somebody says, well, tell me about it, tell me about it, and I go. I don't know that I can yet, it just was so good. It just revved me up and made me think I'm so glad I follow Jesus. It was that kind of a feeling.
Speaker 1:So and it's a good I mean it's a good, I mean it's a nice bridge to to our conversation today, which is building on the Academy which we spent three hours on Saturday with, with some of our best friends. Yeah, I honestly, from my perspective, I couldn't see how many people were watching, but there were several groups and then there were bunches of people on the windows on my screen.
Speaker 2:There were a lot, but it seemed like a good morning. It was a great morning and, for those of you who didn't join us, you can join us in October, where we will be starting the second session. But it was so good, chris. So there's probably about 50 people online, wow. Yeah, so good chris like um, so there's probably about 50 people uh online and wow yeah 50, 50, 50 not 15 50 I'm gonna have performance anxiety next time
Speaker 2:I think I'm glad I couldn't see 50 people yeah, it's a bit different when you can see everyone, but it was good people from healing hubs together. Uh, we had just groups of people who were interested in Christian healing. Then we had some vicars from churches all over the UK.
Speaker 1:That was a nice surprise. Yeah, we had a couple of clergy from up north and it gives me great excitement to see the growing interest in healing. And someone said what was your favorite part of the session? I said the feedback at the after the breakout sessions. When we did the feedback, it was so rich and good and yeah, I, I just loved it all really.
Speaker 1:And, um, next month we're talking about trauma and healing and so it'll be more of the same but yet new ground Each month. Hopefully we'll stay with the plumb line of healing, but then we'll explore the different stuff around the constellation of healing and so I'm kind of excited about it. But we said we were going to talk more about the stuff at the end. To go a little bit deeper on the subject of healing, its foundations, the history, and I thought you wake up this morning and you hear about the canonization of a new saint. Hey, well, that's helpful that we were talking about this on Saturday and about the medieval habit of parading bones around and praying next to coffins and things for healing. And then this morning we see images from Vatican City and the final canonization of St Carlo Acutis, who is the first millennial saint. They're calling him and I think it's kind of of cool, but also a little bit strange, and I'm thinking for non-catholics. They might go. What the what the?
Speaker 1:heck is that about? And uh, so well, that's a nice starter for us today yeah, definitely, because I remember.
Speaker 2:I was just scrolling on instagram last night and I saw the picture of his Carlo Acutis.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Get the name correct and I was like whoa, like even like you know you shouldn't be probably reacting like that. I was like whoa, this is really interesting and it did make me think. What you've just said, what will other people think? But there's been healing miracles attributed to him. Could you maybe just talk through them a little bit?
Speaker 1:So to become a saint there's actually a pretty rigid process. So I think you know I'm not a Roman Catholic, but most Catholics will tell you that you go through all. It's gotten shorter in recent years, but it used to be this long process of making a case for a saint, and part of the process of canonization included verifiable miracles.
Speaker 1:So, you actually had to show miracles that could be attributed directly to that saint, or intercessions to that saint to that saint, or intercessions to that saint. And so this process started under the previous Pope, and so I looked online because I was kind of curious and I thought, well, what are the miracle stories attributed to this young man, who actually is probably the age of my son, and he died of leukemia, I believe. But there were two miracle stories that were verified. One in 2013,. There was a boy in Brazil named Matias, and he was suffering from some problems with his pancreas, which caused him not to be able to stop vomiting and he couldn't eat properly. And he was four years old, he only weighed probably 20 pounds and he could only drink. He wasn't able to eat, and so, supposedly during a prayer service, Matthias touched a relic of Carlo now St Carlo and shortly afterwards his symptoms disappeared and it said that he began eating solid food, and medical tests confirmed that his pancreas had returned to normal, and so the healing was deemed instantaneous, complete and scientifically inexplicable by the Vatican Medical Council. Yes, there is such a thing, and Pope Francis actually recognized this miracle back in February of 2020.
Speaker 1:And so that kind of started this process and then, in 2022, Valeria Valverde, a 21-year-old Costa Rican student, suffered a severe head injury having had a terrible bicycle accident in Florence.
Speaker 1:She underwent surgery with a very low chance of survival and her mother traveled to Carlo Acutis' tomb that is in Assisi and prayed for his intercession. And on that same day, Valeria began breathing on her own and the next day she regained movement and partial speech and within weeks, the scans showed that the hemorrhage had actually vanished and she made a rapid recovery. And Pope Francis again recognized this miracle back in May of this year or sorry, last year. And, of course, these two miracles that were considered verifiable made him a front of the queue for canonization. So that's why there's this huge celebration is that people believe that they have this theological belief that the saints can intercede for the living and so holy people who have lived and walked the earth that they still have the ability to pray for us. You often hear people lift up names and then they say pray for us, St Francis of Assisi, pray for us. And the idea, theologically, is that there's intercession. I told someone who was asking me about this.
Speaker 1:I said imagine on your telephone, you have certain numbers on your telephone and there are people that you can call and so if you knew somebody who was really good friends with taylor, swift yeah you could say well, I'm gonna send a text to my friend, joe, because I know joe is friends with taylor swift, and so I'm gonna say joe, you know, my niece, who's in the hospital, is a big taylor swift fan and just loves taylor and it would be so cool if Taylor could send her an autographed picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then Joe sends Taylor a message and says, taylor, would you mind sending an autographed picture? And then this child in the hospital gets a picture from Taylor Swift. And so the idea is that you know, if this happens with the divine, that St Francis of Assisi speaks to Jesus and Jesus does a miracle because of the petition that came from the saint.
Speaker 1:And so that's the notion that is being the canonization process is because they believe St Carlo is speaking to God and God is healing because of the petition of the saint. And I know that might get some of the Protestants who are listening. That might get their backs up because they go wait a minute, come on, are you talking? How can anybody stand between us and the living God? And we can make all sorts of interesting arguments about that, but um, you know I think.
Speaker 1:I think it's. It's a good story to have had the academy, and then today we wake up and go. So what do I think about?
Speaker 2:god's ability to heal people because it really does make you question, like modern day miracles and whether you need somebody with a specific role to be like an intercessor or not. It really makes you question a lot. And then you gave us lots of examples of historical healings Saturday at the Academy and I think, my goodness, there's so much to think about. But I'm just grateful we can bring it to God and not grapple on our own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And it's when I read those two verifiable miracles and I'm sitting there going holy cow. I've got like 15 or 20 of those that aren't verified and they're not, you know, but the difference in the stories that I've had of being in the hospital and actually seeing things happen that didn't make any sense scientifically. I don't have like a saint that I interceded with, it was prayers directly to the Father.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I mean, I have seen, you know, a boy healed from a cancer. I've seen someone with glioblastoma who was healed. I've seen a girl who was technically considered dead and then came back. And you know, these things are strange when you see them and you just scratch your head and you say I part of me wants to know the the how and the why. But then there's another part of me that's found a way to be okay with not knowing and just simply having uh, having faith, yeah and faith is really the thing that drives the behavior.
Speaker 1:Because we move forward in faith, because we believe in what God can do, rather than having scientific proof of what God has done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Different ways of living your life. So there's a lot of young Catholics today who are kind of excited, thinking that a guy who played Xbox on the internet and is now in a glass coffin you can. It's a bit spooky. You can see there'll be images on the TV news, probably tonight, showing people looking in this glass box, at this handsome young man clutching his rosary and, you know, looking like someone else's child who's just finished playing video games and he is now saint carlo and um. So it's a.
Speaker 2:We live in interesting times for real we do, and I mean he's definitely going to have an impact in the world. Like now that we're very digital world, it makes you ask lots more questions that we wouldn't have maybe been asking many years ago, um, but I just wonder if we could touch a little bit on what it means for a digital age saint um to be associated with healing yeah, I think it really brings into sharp focus the idea that Christianity is not an ancient religion, it's not something of the past, but that younger people today can suddenly have this intimate awareness of the presence of God in their story, of the presence of God in their story.
Speaker 1:And so I'm kind of excited because that matches up nicely with some of the new statistics that are coming out which are showing a huge rise in faith and activity in Christian churches around the world of young people. And so we're in a time when older people are running things and there's fighting and wars and controversy, and younger people are getting more and more excited about religious faith. People will go. This is relatable. They may not relate completely to the story of canonization or they may not understand, kind of how this big thing called the Roman Catholic Church works in terms of the way they do things. But from Protestants to Catholics, from fundamentalist Christians to high church Anglo-Catholics, they all can find common ground in this centerpiece, which is the power of God to come into the world and be present fully and make things change. It's amazing and it's like this morning we had Carol telling us of a dead plant that she decided to take out into her back garden and there's new life on this plant that she showed us. And I thought well, isn't that a metaphor for the whole story of how we dare to replant something that we don't understand? We planted a new soil and God somehow does something with that and brings new life to us. And do we understand why there's leaves growing on this dead plant? I don't really get it.
Speaker 1:I'm not a botanist, but I'm thrilled I can enjoy that and it makes me. You know. It's like Martin Luther once said even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. It's something about faithfulness, in spite of the rest of it, that we're called to just embody the love of God and Jesus Christ in this crazy world. And it's not about trying to figure out the return on our investment, because so much you know. Oh well, why would you do that? Because it's not going to produce a return. No, just do it.
Speaker 1:Just do it, because it's the right thing to do and maybe it will bring you a blessing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's such a good point, chris. I think sometimes we feel maybe like fools, because you know other people are thinking well, why would you like, why would you lay hands on someone and ask for god's healing? And yeah, and we're going to look at some stories now.
Speaker 1:Um, bring a bit of inspiration and hope, and I just let's talk about the controversies then, because I think I think there are a lot of people that, um, when they, you know, they hear of a faith, a healing academy talking about faith and Christianity, immediately the back comes up and they go wait a minute, this is all a bunch of rubbish and I don't believe in any of that nonsense.
Speaker 1:And so let's talk about the big controversies. I've listed three kind of as a catch-all, for I mean, there's tons of other different controversies, but I kind of listed three because I think the primary struggles and let's just do each one, and I want to hear what you think about the differences. So so you have some people that, um, believe in divine intervention. So when we talk about saint carlo being beatified, we've talked about a belief that there is divine intervention, and so these people who had problems were made well because of the healing power of god intervening okay and then there are other people that would say this is psychosomatic healing, so basically the healing is not coming from outside.
Speaker 1:Okay, but we simply see someone whose faith is restored in an unexplainable way. Faith is restored in an unexplainable way. And so we have created a narrative to try and explain, with divine labels, what is happening in the natural order of the world, and so there are people that look at a story like St.
Speaker 1:Carlo and the examples of healing in Brazil. And they'll go well, that's God at work. Ill, and they'll go well, that's god at work. Yeah, they'll look at that and they'll go well. The swelling went down and clearly she the pressure stopped on the nerve and things changed and she got better, because the body's amazing and resilient so which? Which school do we find ourself in when we hear stories of healing?
Speaker 2:that's's a really good question, because I think sometimes I find myself in both. Yeah, what's wrong with skepticism.
Speaker 1:I think people are scared of being a skeptic, because then they say, oh, you don't have enough faith. What's wrong?
Speaker 2:with your faith.
Speaker 1:I think some of the strongest faithful people are the ones that have the ability to embrace the possibility of doubt. And then you kind of go to another place. Where you go doesn't matter. The person's healed At the end of the day, the person that had the head injury is alive and doing well. Isn't that to be celebrated? How it happened, I'm not really sure, but boy, wouldn't it be cool to think that God actually can do a miracle.
Speaker 1:I mean that's a cool thing. So the next controversy is you have exploitation, and exaggeration in some healing ministries is a real source of controversy, because what I've just said then becomes something that you can exploit in people.
Speaker 1:So a thousand people come to your church, they gather together and then you find a way to take every situation and make it into a divine healing thing. It almost becomes a commodity. And you come to the church and of course they're going to pass the chicken bucket to get some money so they can make money. And then you use the possibility of God's divine healing as a way of of creating this buzz.
Speaker 1:Now it all, on the surface, looks like a real, healthy, vibrant, wonderful thing, because you're wanting people to be well, but there's a transactional thing that has happened between you and god, and so you give your money, you come up and I lay hands on you and then we, we figure out whether divine healing is is happening or we, uh, we project healing into that person where there is no healing. But we, we sort of decide hey, you're, I can see difference in you and the person's going. You can. Yeah, I can see difference in you and the person's going, you can. Yeah, I can see God has already worked a miracle. Are you seeing better? Are you hearing better?
Speaker 1:Because the Lord has just told me that he has opened your ears and the person's sitting there going. I don't think anything's changed, but yes, I can hear better and suddenly the whole congregation's going. Oh, the Lord has worked a miracle. Yeah, and you, you got everyone going and they pull out their money and put more money in the chicken bucket. So again, when you talk to people who have a bit of suspicion about the church, they look at that and they go. This is why I have trouble embracing the possibility of healing, because so many people abuse it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They abuse it, and it's not just Pentecostal revivalist types. You better believe that the Roman Catholic Church today will be selling St Carlo merchandise around the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There will be things with his picture on it in every square inch of the planet earth in the next week yeah and there will be people with saint carlo keychains and a rosary with saint carlo.
Speaker 1:I mean it. It's a highly marketable thing when you can take healing and distill it into objects and things. There'll be St Carlo statues and icons. I've already seen some amazing creative art online that you can buy and download a St Carlo icon. It's not something that only the Pentecostal preachers have a corner on the market, it's. Every square inch of Christendom has this tendency to be very human.
Speaker 1:And then I think the last thing that I put was that there's a real tension between the scientific community and the faith community. So one of the most interesting things I used to do was we'd have lunch in the senior common room and you would sit there with physicists, scientists, biologists and a few theologians and you'd sit at a table. And then we had one psychology professor. I remember one lunch in particular. He looked at us, lisa, and he goes so Chaplain, what do you make of mindfulness? And then he began cutting his potato and I went oh no, and I'm surrounded by really highly intelligent people and of course, what he was trying to do was sort of bait everyone into a conversation about unscientific things. Let's wander into places which are beyond the reach of science and let's talk about issues of divine intervention and the possibility of faith, healing and all these, and so there is a real tension in some aspects of the scientific community when someone starts talking about healing in a hospital.
Speaker 2:I imagine.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the thing that stands out the most from what you've just been sharing is how maybe not easily, I'm going to use the word easily, because I can't think of anything at the moment but how easily our theology and people's theology can be impacted.
Speaker 2:Um, so I'm just thinking, like, let's take the exploitation or the exaggeration that can really make people think, well, god heals, if you give money to the church or like you know, that's just an example, um, and then that shaped somebody's theology about god and I think, oh, that like that worries me when you think about that sort of thing. But all of these, even the tensions between faith and science, again, you know, it just is highlighting that we need good, solid teaching. We need people who are faithful, who can journey alongside people to guide them towards God, and that's really hard in the world that we're living in, because we live in such a rich world of different culture, different beliefs. Yeah, I mean, there's not really much more to say. That's kind of the thing. I just think, blimey, we really need to provide for people.
Speaker 1:And I know we talked at the academy about the NHS and of course it would be totally irresponsible to say we want to encourage people to go and experience healing prayer instead of going to the NHS when you're sick. That would be just grossly irresponsible. But the thing that I wanted to respond at the academy I didn't get a chance to was to say that we did a study in the United States. Well, there was a study done I think we were a small small part of it and they were looking at the impact on the well-being of patients those who received chaplaincy care, those who received prayer and those who didn't and so there was this nationwide effort done to look and see about outcomes. So there were two different outcomes they were looking at. One was patient satisfaction, which, in a medical system in America where most is very much involved in you want people to be happy with their experience because they go away and they go.
Speaker 1:Oh, that hospital was great yeah and so you know it was expensive but it was worth the money, yeah, and so they want good outcomes where the patients are happy. And then there's another study that looked at the outcome of the patient's health, and so they're looking at the amount of time it took for them to go home from the surgery, the outcome in terms of success or failure after surgery or of a condition, and it was directly related to those patients who received prayer and those who didn't receive prayer. Both of those studies determined and I've kind of jokingly talked about this is that if you want a really good outcome in the hospital, in the American context at least, let a chaplain come and visit you, because the studies showed that there were great benefits in terms of your happiness quotient, that if you have a chaplain come and play a role in your recovery, that the likelihood is that your experience in your medical care will be better, much better. The other thing is that scientifically it is a proven fact that those patients who received prayer and visits from a chaplain didn't matter what kind of chaplain, of any brand those patients had a better medical outcome. So the idea is that science tells us the hard facts, tells us, at least from this study. In the American world of medicine, science tells us that the best way to get a good outcome from a hospitalization in the American system is to have prayer and a chaplain, which that's why, if you go to a lot of big hospitals in America, they actually are paying for chaplains to be on staff because they even the most skeptical and humanistic hospital administrators realize this is probably good for the product that they're offering, which is health care. This is starting to spread around the the world and people are starting to realize that having religious people in health care settings is actually a good idea, not just because it gives you somebody there when people are dying, which during COVID was kind of.
Speaker 1:My role during COVID was to go room to room and be with people while they died, and it was a horrible, horrible stretch of my ministry and life, but a blessed one just the same. But then there were cases throughout that time where people who should have died from COVID didn't. And should we be canonizing somebody else for these miracles? That's the thing. In the presence of the ordinary there's always the miraculous if we look deeply enough, and I think that's where my conversation were I to have one today in Oxford at the senior common room table. If they started with, what do you think of mindfulness? I might respond by saying well, what do you think about the fact that people who get interaction with faith, people in a hospital setting, have better outcomes? And look at the face of the biologist or whatever. They would have a really good response to that, but it would create some nice banter.
Speaker 2:It definitely would.
Speaker 1:It would joke at Oxford that the physicists always seem to have the least amount of difficulty with faith, and the biologists always used to struggle the most. And the chemists? And so you're like why is that? Is it because they're at subatomic level?
Speaker 1:They got so deep that they found the God particle and the others are kind of in a different way of thinking, but there are some biologists who've become priests. I have a friend that is a great microbiologist and he is now a Church of England priest. So it's not that you can't have faith and be a scientist.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, you don't have to go one way or the other. And something we talked about at the Academy on Saturday there was a guest who said how she thought that the healing ministry should be more prominent in the church, as in like service services, regular part of the life of the church, and that kind of gets us questioning why the contemporary church might struggle with healing and I wanted if we could just go through some of those um struggles.
Speaker 2:I know we talked about some of it in the academy, but we can talk about it here as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that question was. I think that was at the heart of the academy. It was a great question too, because I was like, yeah, why what happened? And you know. All I can think is you know and all I can think is I listed a few things the fear of fraud and scandal and disappointment.
Speaker 1:I think, that's really probably at the heart of it, and also, I think the modern church has, I guess, what could be described as a theological ambivalence, that they're just not. They're not. People in leadership aren't sure, and I'm not sure if that just is. Their faith isn't strong enough broad enough, deep enough to say does God actually heal miraculously, or do we just say, well, God heals through medicine and the community care, but God's not doing miracles anymore? How you can preach a sermon on the redemption of a person's very soul when you stand up and talk about a God who died and conquered the grave on Easter morning? How does that impact your life? And so maybe the church has sort of fallen away from this understanding and has become a little bit discouraged and in a posture of doubt instead of a posture of faith. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:It almost sounds as though we like the safer option, and the safer option sometimes feels like not dealing with the fraud, not the fraud, the fear, or we don't want to create any opportunity for disappointment, either in god or in other people, or in ourselves. So let's just stay away from it. And I remember once I, uh, I was working for a church and um they, one of the young people stood up and started speaking in tongues in the service. There were some other people, um ministry was taking place.
Speaker 2:It caused the biggest ordeal because oh yeah, a he's a kid I think he was about 13 at the time and also we don't stand up in church and start speaking in tongues, and it suddenly woke the church up to go. What do we believe about this? And that that's kind of what I feel like sometimes with healing is, if you don't know, it's okay to not know, but it's important we also do talk about what we believe about healing and not talk about it.
Speaker 1:Right, right, I think the churches that have come to terms with their own identity and just sort of courageously step forward in who they really are and who they're called to be as a Christian community, they're the ones that I don't think have major issues with this word healing, which, again, it's a funny thing that all of us have appointments to go see our GP, we all have appointments to go and check on this, and that I went to see a doctor about my hip only a week ago, and so the idea of engaging with healing thinking and healing actions, they're not foreign to us, it's very much a part of who we are. But the really weird thing is that modern day Christianity has sort of separated the medical side of our lives not the medical side, but the reality of our own frailty and our health and we've sort of separated that so that we go to the GP for our bodies and we go to the church for our souls. And why is it that we can't also go to the church for our bodies and our souls?
Speaker 1:And why is it that we can't find God with our GP? Because that's the other thing. My doctor back in North Carolina was a wonderful Christian doctor and such a blessing to go to a doctor and he had the scientific expertise to help me be the healthiest person I could be. But he also spoke the language of faith and so together we could pray, together. He could give me the medicine I needed if I was sick, an antibiotic or whatever. But then in church the same thing could be true. Someone's having a struggle and an ailment, and to pray for that and to offer holy communion and to sort of live into the wholeness of who you are in the faith community as well as when you go to the doctor. I I just hate that we compartmentalize ourselves rather than seeing um, the healing mission of the church as being something that we've sold off to the hospital world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1:You know we're not in that business anymore. You know we're in the business of praying, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.
Speaker 1:We're not into justice, we don't advocate things, we don't march anymore. All the tough church of the past seems to have. You know, we've gotten a wee bit on the soft side in some places, but again I think young people are kind of bringing us back around to a stronger position. Let me share another personal story because it popped into my head. Um just to and I don't know how relevant this is, but the um when we moved from florida and uh, I had a really good doctor in florida that I went to see for my own health and and um, we got to north carolina and and I needed a new doctor and I think I I was having a fever, and um needed to go see a doctor and I didn't have one, so I needed to sign up for one, and I'm not a big fan of going to the doctor.
Speaker 1:I just don't like it. And so I found myself praying and I said well, lord, I know I need a doctor because I need some antibiotics. I'm not going to kick this thing on my own. So please, lord, would you just give me a doctor who I can trust. Amen, and honestly, this really did happen. I'm not making this up and so I made an appointment to go see Dr Anderson and I don't know if Dr Anderson will ever see this podcast, but he knows this is true. So I saw Dr Christian Anderson. I saw his name. That sounds like a good doctor. And so I get to my appointment and in comes this doctor and he looks at me, greets me, shakes my hand, and I looked at him and I said are you from Africa? He goes oh yes, I'm Christian Anderson, I'm from Ghana. And I went. We're in the middle of North Carolina.
Speaker 1:There are not that many Ghanaians in North Carolina and I said, well, where in Ghana he goes? You know ghana? He said yeah, he said I'm from north of accra, where north of near kumasi. Do you know kamasi? Yes, I've been to kumasi. I had dinner with the king of the ashantis. You've been to the their palace. Yes, where are you from? He goes. I'm from a little village north of kumasi. Um, I said where where? I said I've been north of kumasi and he goes. I'm from a little place called mampong and, of course, for me, tears came to my eyes and, uh, because I've been involved with the mampong baby home for 30 some years. It's an orphanage in Mampong. The Bishop of Mampong made me a canon of Mampong Cathedral many years ago, I'm assuming, because we gave a lot of money to support the baby home and if you're listening to this, it's a fantastic charity worth supporting is Mampong Babies Home. They have 40 babies all the time and they raise them and send them off to school.
Speaker 1:It's a wonderful Anglican mission. But he is from the village of Mempong and there I am in North Carolina and I looked at him and I said I'm a canon of Mempong Cathedral and he knew several people that I knew from Mempong. And he started laughing and he goes well, I'll take care of your body and you take care of my soul.
Speaker 1:Oh so he became my doctor for six years that's incredible and I said well, thank you, lord, for hearing my prayer again. The skeptics amongst us will say, oh, come on, it's just a coincidence. He's the only doctor from Manpong in the entire Southeastern United States, and that's a big place, and he was in my little town in rural North Carolina caring for patients and he became my doctor and I. I still think it was a great miracle.
