This week I was healed in India by a man in Batman pajama pants. For our first free day of the race, my team and a few others decided to walk to a local market and explore. Being led by our liaison Soma, we walked down a road we had many times before when suddenly, I fell; go figure. If you know me at all, you know that I am horribly clumsy and that I fall often, so this is nothing unusual. But this time when my ankle went sideways, I heard a loud pop and immediately felt the shooting pain and flashed back to wearing a rehabilitation boot for a month. My friends helped me to the side of the road to sit and as I began crying from the pain, Soma walked up to me and said, “Let this man look at it, he is a healer.”
The man looked no different than any other I had seen: he had dirty Batman pajama pants and hands weathered by work. He took my foot, a stranger’s foot, into his hands with such tenderness and began to work. The man warned me that what he was going to do was going to hurt—and he was no liar—but after he was done rotating and popping and adjusting my ankle the pain was gone. He looked so focused and peaceful as he worked and his hands moved with such familiarity and purpose. My new hero told me to rest it for a week but that I would be fine. I felt a lot of stiffness and had to lean on my friend as we waited for a car to take me back to the mission but the pain that had made me cry out was gone.
I was told that this man had no medical training but goes to the hospital and sets broken bones and sprains which heal at an unheard rate—sometimes even a week—and asks for nothing in return. The hospital workers say that he was blessed with the healing touch. I have always been skeptical of the gift of healing because how could it be that simple, right? But today I had the scales dropped from my eyes as this man rubbed my ankle and my friends prayed over me and I was healed.
Over the past three days my ankle has regained strength and I can walk on it just fine. Never have I gotten over a sprained ankle so quickly and I am in awe. I can say that before this moment, people having the gift of healing was something I scoffed at but now I see that it is something I did not understand. God uses us to do amazing things. Some people he uses to heal the body, others he uses to heal the soul; this man did a bit of both for me
