Praying and Seeing Healing!

Testimony by Brad Ettore

A while back my mom asked if I could pray for a friend of hers that had been bedridden for two months. She has Guillain-Barre syndrome, which attacks the sheath around the nerves and eats those sheaths away so the nerves are not able to operate correctly, causing the muscles to fail and often resulting in complete paralysis. She had been basically paralyzed in a bed and couldn't even feel her legs. For example, if she couldn't see her legs, she didn't know where they were. She had just had a major physical therapy breakthrough in that she could now just barely raise a glass of water to her mouth with two hands.

I was on my way to meet with my mom's friend, Erin, in the hospital. It is worth noting that I felt utterly exhausted due to only having about four and half hours of sleep the night before. I was feeling about as anointed as a dead fish, but I knew healing has nothing to do with my physical strength.

So, I thought, “OK, so I'm tired? So what! So I feel nothing. So what! How I feel has nothing to do with it.

My mom’s friend, Erin, basically believes in a universal power or force - a good force but not a personal God. Since she is not a believer, I wanted to begin at the beginning with her but right as I was ready to start sharing about Jesus and the healing He has afforded us, we hear a knock at the door. It’s her friend. I was bummed because the timing was not the best. Nevertheless, her friend came in and sat down and the lady I came to minster to tells her, “Hey this is Brad he is going to talk to us about healing. What do you think about that?” Her friend didn’t even look at me, instead she just looked at Erin with a look that seemed to say, “That is not what I came for!”

There was definite resistance in Erin’s friend. There was definitely an opportunity for me to get down and let negativity come into my thinking, but I resisted because I knew I would have an opportunity to minister to Erin. I did, however, think about doing this at another time so that I didn’t have unbelief in the room while I was going to be ministering to her. So I turned to my mom and said, “Hey what do you think? Maybe I should just come back another time?” I also didn’t want to interrupt Erin and her friend’s time together as I could always come back later.

After my mom thought about it for a second, she said, “I think we should just go for it.” Since she has known Erin and her friend for years, I agreed. I began talking about how God heals. I showed her scriptures on healing and had her read the scriptures out loud. I thought I did a pretty good job explaining that healing is real and it is for today. I also gave her some testimonies of people I have prayed for and the healing they had experienced. This lasted about thirty minutes.

I then asked her, “Are you ready? Can I pray for you?” To which Erin replied, “I can't say that I really believe like you believe.” I assured her saying, “Well that is okay that you don't believe like I believe, but first I just want to tell you God is a real person. He created you, He’s your maker, He’s real. Here’s what I need from you to move forward. I just need you to have a ‘yes’ in your heart that you will receive healing if it is real. If your heart is like ‘no I don't want anything to do with that,’ I can't minister to you. 

 Then I asked her “are you open to the idea of receiving it?” Erin said “well yeah, I mean yeah.” And I said “duh right?!?” And Erin said “well yeah duh, yeah I'll receive it.” So I said “OK cool that’s all I need, I'll do the believing, I just need you to be open to receiving.” Erin said “okay I can do that part.” I said “alright.”

So, I was getting ready to pray when she said “wait, wait one minute my shoulder is just really hurting could you just put the pillow under my shoulder?” After we got that pillow situated for her she said I could go ahead and pray for her. So I lay hands on her and I speak to her body. I command the nervous system to be corrected and to be healed completely. I just commanded healing into her body. I won't go into all what I was praying, I just prayed for two minutes or so.

Now, when Erin’s friend had originally come in the room and Erin said “He is going to talk to us about healing what do you think about that?” Erin’s friend said in an almost condescending way “well I've got a knee sore if you want to pray for that.” I don't mean to put her down. She doesn’t buy this. So, after I prayed for Erin, I turned to her friend and said “what do you think if I prayed for your knee?” She looked at me like “are you serious?” And then she said “sure why not?” Her tone said “whatever.”

I said “can I touch your knee?” and she said “sure.” So I said “how long has your knee been hurting?” She said “fifty years.” I said “are you serious?” She said “yeah, I injured it when I was pole vaulting in high school.” 

 I turned back I start talking to Erin. We were talking for about three minutes and her friend completely interrupts our conversation and says “Brad you fixed my knee!” She says “oh my gosh!” and she stands up and again exclaims “you fixed my knee, oh my gosh, Erin, I don't have any pain in my knee!” My mom told me she that now Erin’s friend has been asking me all kinds of theological questions! She has never done that before. Her knee still does not hurt. God is awesome!

Now, when I had originally finished praying for Erin, she said “well I can't say that I feel any different.” And I said “that’s OK.” (If you pray for someone and they say they don’t feel any different, do not get into unbelief.) So I said to Erin “I promise you, you will, the anointing went into you and it was doing its work now and you will feel different. My guess is tomorrow morning you are going to be shocked at your level of recovery. Like you are going to start doing things you can't even imagine. It will defy logic what you will be able to do tomorrow and it will get better and better and you will heal rapidly, alright.”

Having prayed in faith for Erin and seen her friend’s knee healed, I was getting ready to leave, but I kept getting a reminder from the Lord about Erin’s shoulder. So I asked Erin “how is your shoulder by the way?” And she looked at me as if to ask “should I test it?” and then she started to move it. She was like “oh my gosh!” My mom said take the pillow out from under her arm. So, I went around and pulled the pillow out and she starts moving her shoulder.

Her physical therapist came the next day and apparently said no less than five times “this is amazing!” about everything she could do, she could lift her hands 180° above her head the next day! Remember she could barely lift a water glass with two hands the day before! As for the foot that she couldn’t even tell where it was if she could visually see it, she was now resisting the physical therapist with her leg, resisting with her leg! Then, three days later, she was starting to stand up! Glory!!!

Healing is real and there are many many more testimonies that Brad could share - and ones even more powerful than the ones that we just heard. Powerful in the sense that they are really radical to our minds. But they are not any more or less because they are all the same level of power.
They are all supernatural events, and they are available to us.