In the winter of 2007, a close friend of mine was felled by not one but two brain aneurysms. For weeks she lingered on life support, growing weaker each day. As her condition deteriorated, her children were called in to say their goodbyes, and her church prepared for a funeral. Then Linda suddenly snapped out of her coma. As she came to, she looked over at her husband and asked, "Where is everybody ...

One of the most remarkable and well-attested physical healings of someone I know personally happened to a fellow pastor named Kenneth Wallace. When I first became a pastor in 1975, he was the presbyter of the area in central Illinois that included our church, and he oversaw the interviews for my ordination. At that time he must have been in his mid to late fifties, and he struck me as a happy warrior: ...

Amy Knight—single mother of Kayla, Ryan, and Alex—attends Whitehouse (Texas) First Assembly and had heard stories of divine healing, but she had never personally experienced or seen one. When 11-year-old daughter Kayla began complaining about ongoing headaches that continued to grow in severity, Amy desperately needed those healing stories to become a personal reality.

The headaches grew ...

I am increasingly convinced that if the Church is to live, and actually be alive, one of the reasons, maybe the most important and maybe the only reason, will be because we have taken up our place in the line of the generations of the faithful who came before us. It will be because we pray the prayer that Christ himself prayed when he walked among us and now longs to pray through us.

It will be because ...

I was sitting at a lunch table at the Canadian Fellowship of Christian Assemblies Conference in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, in early October 2005. Paul Vallee, a pastor in Red Deer, Alberta, was recalling his early days as a youth pastor in a town far up in the northeastern part of the province. Another younger pastor at the table had been a member of Vallee's youth group back then.

Vallee and ...

In 1993, Lt. Col. Gary Morsch joined the Army Reserves as a doctor to care not only for U.S. soldiers, but also for wounded civilians and prisoners of war. In 2005, as a part of the war in Iraq, he was called up to serve as the field doctor for a battalion near the Iranian border. He would take care of soldiers in the medical tent, provide supervision and training to eight combat medics, and visit ...

Dill Rummel, a woman from the church where I pastor, once told me the story of how a colleague of hers was hospitalized for ten weeks. Her name was Colleen, and she had broken her back in two places. Despite the doctors' efforts, her back wasn't healing. Dill was very busy, but she knew God wanted her to visit Colleen. In fact she felt God wanted her to lay hands on Colleen and pray for healing—something ...

During his time as the U.S. division director of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Bernie May used to write a column in the ministry's newsletter. He once wrote about Ken and Neve Shoemaker of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, faithful supporters who were in their 80s at the time.

"We're on our last lap," Ken told Bernie on the phone, "[but] we're committed to spend three hours a day in prayer—mostly for Wycliffe ...

Carrie was a casual acquaintance from church—an outgoing person with a quick smile and ready words of encouragement. But something in my spirit discerned that all was not as it seemed on the surface. She was, in fact, a single Christian woman who was in a compromising sexual situation. I had been watching from a distance and quietly interceding for her for some time when I distinctly felt the ...

Sybil MacBeth, a mathematics instructor by profession, doodler and dancer by avocation, has written, and doodled, a daring devotional. Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God chronicles her experiments in intercession and challenges readers to take pens and paper in hand and, well, intercede…

MacBeth's doodling discoveries came from a crisis. About three years ago, a litany of cancers—lung, ...