Part VI – The Scooter-Rider’s Head Injury

When I was about six years old in the Lord – a couple of summers before the events of the previous testimony – our family of four visited my parents in the mountains. Early one morning during a delightfully long time alone with the Lord in prayer and in the word, He impressed upon me that a member of my family would suffer a health-related issue that day. It was not a concern, though; I had His astounding peace about it, and I soon forgot the matter as we continued along together with other topics.

After supper, while it was still light, my daughter was having a blast riding a child’s scooter down the quiet mountain road in front of my parents’ house. She was wearing a helmet, of course. My husband, 57 years young at the time, decided that he’d give it a go – without a helmet.

Soaring down the moderately steep decline far faster than he’d anticipated, he quickly realized that he must bail off the scooter in order to avert certain death at the sharp curve at the bottom of the hill. Having witnessed his accident, our daughter was terribly alarmed. She ran to the house yelling for help, reporting that he had landed very hard on his head and had lost consciousness for a bit; he also had fractured his arm trying to break his fall.

So this was the health issue and he was the family member that the Lord had informed me of 14 hours earlier!

Having His peace which passes all understanding, my lack of panic must have struck my family members as most unusual, as they were in full adrenaline mode. As I write this, I truly marvel that simply by knowing and trusting Jesus we are divinely enabled to relinquish control and REST as He moves us in accordance with His will and power for His glory…

The head injury was the pressing issue, and my walk of faith at that stage of my spiritual development centered about it, not his arm. As a physician, I knew that his impaired mental status was indicative of either an intracranial bleed or a considerable concussion. Now I’ll explain a bit about this for those of you who may not know: intracranial bleeds can be due to either rapid arterial bleeding (in which case his mental status would decline quickly over a couple of hours), or slower venous bleeding (which could take a few days to declare itself clinically unless it was spotted early via a CT scan of his head). Both types of bleeding ordinarily require neurosurgery to stop the bleeding and keep the brain from being compressed by the accumulating blood. A concussion, on the other hand, resolves slowly on its own.

Since the Lord had called me out of practicing medicine by that time, my husband was the sole provider of our family, and he was working only part-time at that. Furthermore, essentially all of our family’s financial matters were known ONLY to him at that moment in time; if he had died or required neurosurgery, I’d have been in a difficult situation, to put it mildly.

Oh yes, and one more thing: our family no longer had health insurance as most people know it. Jesus Christ and my faith in what He accomplished 2,000 years ago on our behalf was our family’s Health Insurance. (Please stop and read my partial testimony in Part IV now if you haven’t already; you’ll be glad you did! 😊)

Praise God, it is my testimony that although I cared VERY deeply for my dear husband, I remained supernaturally calm the entire time because THE LORD IS FAITHFUL: He had adequately prepared me to endure such a trial of faith. During this trial, I was acutely aware that He was placing me in the fire as a piece of iron and hammering me on His anvil to render me an even stronger instrument of priestly and kingly intercession (see Isaiah 54:16, 62:6-7). (Priestly intercession is lifting specific people and situations up to the Lord; kingly intercession, also called prophetic intercession, involves quietly discerning God’s will on specific matters, then decreeing and declaring it be accomplished on earth as it already exists in the heavenly realms.)

We spent a long time in the Emergency Department (ED). It was not until the wee hours of the morning that his arm fracture was adequately reduced; since his mental status had not deteriorated, it was clear from a clinical standpoint that he didn’t have an arterial intracranial bleed.

Meanwhile, I had been pressing into the Lord as to whether He wanted for us to get a CT scan of my husband’s head. If the scan was normal, this would have assured both the ED physician’s assistant treating him and the physician ingrained in me that he did not have a slower venous bleed, however a normal CT scan clearly would NOT grow me in faith as much as NOT having the visual picture of the inside of his skull would!

As the Lord would have it, the ED physician’s assistant treating him actually honored my request not to get one. He admitted that I was the first physician he’d met who sought and was determined to follow the Lord’s direction instead of following my own very conservative medical judgment on such a matter. In this manner I got to witness Christ to him!

My husband was finally released a couple of hours before dawn. Of course I was specifically instructed to bring him back to the hospital if his neurological condition deteriorated…

Trusting God’s glorious word on His care for us and His healing of my husband’s head injury purely by grace through faith ended up being an intense 3-day long trial of faith. This was because the Lord saw fit to allow his condition to deteriorate the next day with a new onset of severe vertigo, meaning that he was so dizzy and nauseous that he could not sit or stand. This, of course, raised the possibility of a progressing slow venous intracranial bleed. (You saw it coming, right?)

It was this tribulation of my husband’s severe vertigo which led me to overcome a subtle demon or two of my own: intimidation and doubt. (Be sure to return and read This Kind Does Not Go Out Except by Prayer and Fasting another time regarding this key matter.) Regarding the intimidation, my Christian husband had not understood my intense Paulean-like conversion and unusually intense course with the Lord. He had often mocked my child-like faith, which, given my academic and professional accomplishments and societal standing (spelled p-r-i-d-e), was in itself a powerful testimony of God’s grace 😊. My husband also had expressed that he did not understand why I’d quit practicing medicine, and why I was spending hours in intercession with multiple prayer groups each week instead.

By the grace of God and my utter child-like dependency on Him, I thus overcame intimidation and doubt. The Lord then immediately transformed the nature of my intercession for my husband from prayer behind closed doors to kingly intercession. KNOWING and BELIEVING His word, I ACTED and SPOKE IT FORTH: I surprised by husband by anointing him with oil (not a common practice among Baptists), laying my hands on him, and declaring the truth over him (not openly done by most Baptists). You probably see that that was the turning point. Praise God for such gracious workings within us as we press into Him!

I don’t recall all that I spoke forth under the Holy Spirit’s blessed anointing, but it included much of the following:

Your word is truth, Father (John 17:17b). Through your prophet Jonah you told us that he who regards lying vanities forsakes his own mercy (Jonah 2:8 ASV (1901)). Well, despite the very real symptom of severe vertigo, we know that it is a lying vanity, for your word is that Jesus was pierced for our transgressions, and by His wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). According to our faith, it is done unto us, and just a mustard seed of this faith suffices (Matt. 9:29; Luke 17:6). Well,  by Your glorious grace, we believe You and Your word. You are our Jehovah Rapha, the Lord who heals us (Exodus 15:26)…

Jesus has given us His peace; He has left it with us. We receive it, and therefore we do not let our hearts be troubled – we are not afraid. (John 14:27). Our minds are controlled by the Spirit, and therefore they are life and peace (Ro. 8:6). The same blessed Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in [my husband], and therefore we speak forth Your omnipotent word that He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to his mortal body, through Your Spirit who lives in him (Romans 8:11). Hallelujah! In Jesus’ name it is hereby declared and received. Amen.

My dear husband and I then shared a wonderful short time together in which he let down all defenses and confessed that he did know my relationship with Jesus was genuine and that I was obedient to His call on my life… Brothers and sisters in Christ, this was a most precious moment – a tremendous victory in Christ for us individually and for our marriage! We were treading on the lion and the cobra, trampling the great lion and the serpent (Psalm 91:13)!

So now comes that humbling “I-can’t-believe-that-I-did-that” part of the story. Within 15 minutes of this tremendous spiritual victory, his symptoms suddenly worsened. Just what do you suppose I did? I asked whether he wanted me to take him to the hospital!

Praise God, my husband, the patient, was stronger in faith than I was at that moment: “No!” he insisted, “God has said that I am healed by His wounds, and we are going to continue to stand on this ground of faith together.” Whoo-hoo! Praise God, another tremendous breakthrough! The vertigo and nausea had been preventing him from standing, but not long after speaking this forth into the heavenly realms he was able to stand up and walk into the bathroom with assistance despite the vertigo. Victory in Jesus, indeed!!

I packed all our bags that day, and the next morning we began the two-day drive back home with my husband, STILL debilitated by vertigo, having to lay down on a makeshift bed in the back of the large SUV adjacent to all our luggage. Mind you, I was greatly bothered that he was not protected with a seat belt, but he absolutely could NOT travel otherwise. Praise God, He had our two daughters riding by faith with us in that SUV as well, KNOWING that angels were protecting the vehicle from any harm (Psalm 91:9-11).

Please understand that the first few hours of the drive were nevertheless VERY challenging for me, requiring everything within me to simply STAND and REMAIN STANDING where our heavenly Father had us: in the heavenly realms at His right hand in Christ Jesus (Eph. 6:13, 2:6). Do I have an amen? This part of our spiritual battle – standing firm, persevering in the faith – is essential if we are to overcome the powers and principalities, the giants we must displace from our Promised Land as Joshua and Caleb did, in order to receive our inheritance. Recall that of the millions of Hebrews who crossed the Red Sea, Joshua and Caleb are the ONLY two over the age of twenty who crossed the flood-stage Jordan River 40 years later and THEN successfully fought off the Nephilim giants in Canaan, thereby receiving their inheritance (see Numbers 13:33; Numbers 14:29;  Judges 1:20)!

By the end of the first day of the long drive back to Texas, my husband was finally able to sit up in the back seat next to one of our daughters with his head cushioned against a window: the vertigo had ceased. Of course the victory, already obtained in the heavenly realms the moment that God’s omnipotent word was spoken in faith through our lips, eventually became fully manifest in the physical realm within a couple of days. The very real and nasty physical symptoms HAD to bow down to Jesus’ authority.

Our unwavering faith in His faithfulness to sustain us was key. I note that our whole family would have missed considerable spiritual growth if the miraculous healing of the head injury had come immediately upon speaking forth God’s truth on the matter…

I’ll close this testimony of Jesus with this word of encouragement: the strongest Man ever to walk this earth did so by endurance, not physical power. Strength for all Christ-followers is measured by what we can ENDURE by grace through faith in Christ alone.*

This ends our six-parts series. Thank you so much for reading this very long account! 😊

So very much love in Christ our Healing, your sister deanna 

*See Endurance as Power for the Christian