My Miracle Healing
On the 16th April 1994 my world fell apart – literally. I was on a night hike through the Blue Mountains. I missed my footing, fell off a cliff and began to fall through open space.

I was totally terrified. I can’t actually remember hitting the jagged rocks, 35ft below. I had blacked out on the way down. But when I came round, the terrible agony I was in told me something catastrophic had happened. I had pain all over my body. My right elbow was broken, I was seriously concussed, my eye socket was fractured and though I didn’t know it at the time, my back had been fractured in four places.

My world had come to an end
I was unconscious for maybe two minutes, but when I came round I was lying in a pool of blood and the world as I knew it had come to an end. I was a nurse and I knew only too well what these sorts of injuries could mean. Others, who were with me on the hike, had seen me fall. They told me I landed on my right side and then bounced forward landing face down, unmoving. They shone a torch down from the top of the cliff and seeing blood all around my head, they thought I was dead.

I awoke to the sounds of yelling and shouting and lights flashing all over the place. I was lying on my right side trying to make sense of the scene. I was going through hell. I had hit my head, there was blood all over the place and I had pain all over my body. I vomited a number of times.

A fellow hiker, John,  took charge and decided not to move me in case I had a spinal injury. John and Tim stayed with me while the others went for help. We were in a remote place, so they built a huge bonfire to signal our location to the rescue team.
A friend David returned with the paramedics after four and a half hours. It was now the middle of the night. My system was going into shock and I urgently needed some intravenous fluids to keep me alive. Needing to assess my injuries, the paramedics cut off nearly all my clothes. I understood they needed to, but I still felt very embarrassed. As the night wore on, the physical pain intensified, but because I had suffered a head injury the paramedics couldn’t give me any pain-relieving medication…it was the worst pain I had ever known. The location was so densely covered with trees that a rescue helicopter couldn’t come till daylight.

Rescued!
I’d been lying there for ten and a half hours when the helicopter finally arrived and I was winched to safety and off to hospital. By the grace of God I had survived. As the helicopter buzzed through the sky towards the hospital, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The nightmare was over. I’m going to be OK…

What’s the point of living?
Over the course of the next week my injuries were gradually diagnosed. I had a massive soft tissue injury to the right side of my lower back, which had taken the major impact of the fall. The force of the fall was so great that four vertebrae were fractured. After a few days I managed, with the help of a nurse, to get out of bed and be wheeled into the shower. I remember looking at my back in the mirror for the first time – it was scary. The swelling was about 30cms out from my back! I had never seen anything like it before, even in my nursing experience.

The doctors did everything they could for me, but by the end of that year I had come to the end of myself and considered suicide, just to end the pain. What was the point of living? I was in constant pain, was very limited in any physical activity and was in need of permanent medication, which was having terrible side-effects. I had lost all hope of ever living a normal life.

Could God heal me?
Every young woman’s dream is to marry and have a family. My dream was shattered, with my body, on those rocks at the foot of the cliff. I knew that my health would never be the same again. And the government agreed, for their doctors believed that I had a long term disability and only a limited capacity for work.  So I qualified for a long term disability pension. I was officially on the scrap heap!

As a Christian nurse, I was a member of a Christian medical association called ‘Health Care in Christ’ headed up by Dr Ken Curry. I decided to go to their conference, but had no idea what God had in store for me.
One night…

A team from Ellel Ministries in the UK had been invited to teach on Christian healing. I had already been prayed for many times, but healing never came. So I had almost given up on God ever coming through for me.  It was quite a surprise when Peter Horrobin, who had founded Ellel Ministries as a Christian Healing ministry in the North of England back in 1986, asked what had happened to me.

Doubtful of prayer
When he and his wife Fiona heard the story, they asked if I wanted to be prayed for. My first reaction was very negative – I’d been prayed for so many times already, without success, that I didn’t want to find out again that God didn’t seem to love me enough to heal me!

Then Peter and Fiona explained that God had been showing them some important keys about praying for people who had suffered accidents and traumas. They told me that we have a spirit, a soul and a body and that when our bodies are traumatised, our inner being also suffers and is in need of healing. And that if the inner being remains unhealed, then the body will continue to reflect the inner pain and remain unhealed also.

An inkling of hope
That night Peter taught on how to bring healing to those who have suffered accidents. As I watched the dramas they used and listened to the teaching, I gained understanding of what might have happened to me. For the first time I began to have some hope that maybe, just maybe, God could heal me after all.

At the end of the evening, Peter invited me to come forward for prayer in front of 150 medical professionals! I hadn’t planned on being prayed for in front of all those doctors, and every single one of them was intent on seeing what God was going to do. They had heard the teaching, and now as good scientists, they wanted to see if the teaching really worked!

A huge leap of faith
I had never actually known anyone who had been healed by God. I had read about it in the Gospels when Jesus healed people, but I had never seen it for myself. So it was a huge leap of faith for me to step up on that platform. Everyone was praying for me, the presence of God filled the room.

The atmosphere was electric as Peter and Fiona began to pray for the part of me which was still broken on the inside. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit and I fell to the ground, lying in precisely the same position as I had been in at the foot of the cliff. And that’s exactly how I was feeling on the inside – it was as if I was 23 again.

The prayer was ever so gentle, but it went so deep into my spirit and soul. I was able to forgive the people who had led me into the dangerous situation I was in when I fell. I was in captivity on the inside to the terrible fears and traumas I had experienced when I fell and hit the ground. The Bible tells us that Jesus came to set the captives free – and that’s exactly what He did. He came and set me free. There were many different things they prayed about – and after each stage I felt more and more healing deep on the inside.

Obeying Biblical commands
Finally when all the praying was over Peter simply took some oil and did what the Bible tells us to do, anointed me with oil for healing. No-one was touching me, but suddenly I was aware that God was healing my body. The room was full of the amazed sounds of the doctors as they watched what God was doing. They said it looked as though angels were stretching my body into positions that I could never have achieved on my own. I felt as if I was receiving supernatural massage – I could feel my body being pulled and stretched (although I didn’t see it as my eyes remained closed throughout the ministry).

At one point, as I lay on the floor, my arms were pulled back behind me and my legs were pulled upwards, so that I grasped my ankles with my hands – it was incredible! These were things that just a couple of hours previously, would have been totally impossible for me to have done. My body felt wonderful for the first time in a very long while.

Exploding with praise
At the end of the evening all the doctors burst into song, singing the old hymn ‘Praise my soul, the King of Heaven’.  We gave God all the thanks, praise and glory for what He had done. I could not wait to get to a phone, even at 11pm, to ring my parents and tell them I’d been healed. I only wished they could have been there to share it with me. On 18 September 1996 Jesus totally changed my life and many of the lives of those who were there.

The next morning I woke at 6.10 am. I’d only had about six hours sleep, but I felt wide awake, my mind was reliving the events of the previous evening. It was a beautiful, spring morning, with clear blue skies, with the sun rising over the hills.

At the top of a hill nearby was a Prayer House and I thought I would try to make it to the top. That was the first step I took in walking out my healing. It was a step of faith, doing something I could never have attempted previously. I walked right to the top of the hill without even one twitch of back pain! I stopped only once to give my lungs a break as I was a bit out of condition, but my back felt great.

My heart was ready to explode with joy. A healing I had hardly dared to hope for had happened. There was an ease in my body I had not experienced for such a long time. I had never felt so released and so free in all my life. I wanted to hop, skip and jump for joy, but for now I contented myself with walking at a nice steady pace. My heart danced as I looked across the magnificent green hills, lit up by the morning sun. I felt alive again for the first time since the accident, really alive.

A note from JOY!
If you are battling with healing, you too can be set free and made whole by God. Study His Word and seek counselling from a trusted Christian or ministry. “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities…and by His wounds we are healed.” Is 53:5