Raising the Dead Read online

  Not just once but every week we gathered at that church and prayed for Chad’s healing.

  One of the elders of the church had been miraculously healed of a back injury. Chad, with his childlike faith, was particularly eager for this elder to pray for him. The elder asked Chad if there was any unforgiveness in his heart.

  Chad turned and asked, “Mom, do I have unforgiveness?”

  The elder explained how to release these negative feelings to God. After praying Chad was satisfied he had done so. Then the elder began to pray.

  As the elder prayed Chad felt cold air rush out his fingertips and by the time he got home and began getting ready for bed, he said, “I’m not heavy anymore; I feel so light. I used to feel like I had a thousand pounds strapped to my back. But it’s gone!”

  By the late fall of 2000, with prayer times like this and initial treatment, we learned that Chad’s leukemia had unexpectedly regressed from the acute phase back to the chronic phase—the presence of the disease was so minimal it showed up only in blood tests. Miraculously, Chad regained much of the weight he had lost, his muscle tone improved, and the color even came back into his cheeks. We were elated, of course. Particularly as this gave us more time for Gleevec to come on the market.

  Mexico: The Blind See, the Lame Walk

  About three months after I was touched by the Holy Spirit—or more accurately, blown back (and away) by the Holy Ghost—I called the missionary David Hogan and voiced my heart’s desire. “I am fighting for the life of my son, and I need everything Jesus can give me.”

  He said, “If you truly want the living Christ and all He can give you—as well as demand from you, because God is a jealous God, Dr. Crandall—why don’t you fly down to our mission post in Mexico?”

  I wouldn’t be joining David Hogan there but one of his missionary associates, Greg Rider. At first I was disappointed, but David reminded me that I was taking this trip to encounter Jesus in a new way, not to get caught up in hero worship. I saw his point. This made me think even more highly of Hogan’s spiritual maturity.

  So I flew down to the Gulf Coast of Mexico, landing in the shoreline city of Tampico. Eastern Mexico is a vast alluvial plain that declines steeply from the continental ridge bisecting the country. In this part of Mexico the climate gradually turns from subtropical to tropical. To the west of Tampico, where I would be staying for the next three weeks, the land is hilly and then mountainous, cut up into a maze of small farms and villages. Sagebrush and Joshua trees carpet the landscape as in a high desert, although there are isolated stands of pine. The land suffers from deforestation because the people have used most of the trees for their shacks and cooking.

  My plane landed late at night. Greg Rider was there to meet me in his small Japanese pickup. I’m not sure what I was thinking about the conditions I’d find, but I was dressed in regulation Palm Beach traveling attire: blue blazer, open-collared white shirt, khaki pants, tasseled loafers. Greg told me to throw my suitcase in the flatbed and hop in after it. The cab was filled with Greg’s Mexican coworkers.

  I tried not to complain that this was no way to treat a guest, but as we drove into the mountains for the next three hours, I was jounced and rattled and thumped within an inch of my life. Eastern Mexico was experiencing a cold snap, and I couldn’t wrap my blue blazer tight enough. I got the intended message big-time that I was not going to be treated as anything special.

  When we arrived at Greg’s house at nearly 3:00 a.m., all the lights were blazing, and his whole family—his wife and children and people I would come to know as part of his missionary team—met us at the door.

  “Do they always meet you like this?” I asked. I couldn’t believe they had all waited up for him.

  He said, “Dr. Crandall, we’ve lost eleven missionaries. They’ve been killed preaching the Word of God. When I return home, my family honors me by greeting me at the front door, whatever time it is. They know that one day I might not come back.”

  Once inside, after hugs and handshakes, Greg turned to me and said, “I know why you’re here, Dr. Crandall. You want to meet Jesus. The Jesus you’ve never met. The Jesus you’ve never known. You’re going to. Starting at 7:00 a.m. Can you get up by then?”

  “I’m a doctor,” I said. “I’m used to being on call at all hours.”

  “We start the day by reading the Word of God,” he said. “You’ll see. I bet you’ll like it.”

  The next morning at seven, Greg and his extended family gathered and read from the Bible: portions of the Old Testament, Psalms, Proverbs, and the New Testament. Greg read and his wife read, as did his children and members of his missionary team. They even passed the Bible my way. Then for a half hour we sang praise songs to cassette tape accompaniment.

  “Now let’s go out and preach the gospel!” Greg exclaimed.

  David Hogan and his associates’ ministry on Mexico’s Gulf Coast is directed toward indigenous tribes—the groups of people the Spanish found when Hernán Cortés and other explorers came to the New World early in the sixteenth century. Even more than Native Americans, these Mexican tribal peoples remain distinct from the larger society, with their own dialects and customs. Many practice tribal religions or combine pagan beliefs with an untutored Catholicism, compromising the genuine message. After five centuries these tribal peoples have hardly been evangelized.

  Greg and I and another truckload of coworkers drove out to a village, an outpost of a dozen families in wood shacks. Those better off had corrugated iron roofs; the poorer, thatch. An open sewer ran through the village’s “Main Street.” Flea-bitten dogs poked their noses at us and chickens scratched and strutted. This was very much the third world.

  Two or three dozen villagers began arriving, nevertheless, to the preformed concrete brick building they used as a Protestant church. A few of Greg’s coworkers were musicians, and they started the singing of praise songs with a mariachi bounce. I noticed that the people were wearing what must have been their Sunday best, checked shirts and clean dungarees for the men, long skirts with ruffled fringes for the ladies. Everyone sang his or her heart out. The people sang in their dialect, which I didn’t understand, but it was beautiful. I started to feel that God had arrived.

  Greg opened his Bible, read a passage, and began preaching. His preparation consisted of mainly constant prayer and constant Bible reading, which gave him the confidence to rely on God’s inspiration when the time came for him to preach. He didn’t have four points and three illustrations, as conventional sermons go. His sermons were free-form elaborations on biblical texts as these applied to the people. As his heart longed for God’s own and beat with the people’s, his sermons always proved to be as deep and clear as the biblical text and conveyed their inspiration by the Holy Spirit. As my designated translator, one of Greg’s sons, whispered into my ear, I was shocked that anyone speaking off-the-cuff could be so eloquent.

  At the end of the service, the sick came forward for healing prayer. The deaf, the blind, the mute, the lame, those suffering from debilitating illness, machete wounds, and complaints only they could know. It was a scene right out of the New Testament. One woman who had been crippled for years was transported from her mountaintop farm to the meeting in a wheelbarrow. Her caregivers—rather rudely, I thought—dumped her out before Greg on the floor. With Bible in hand, Greg and another local minister prayed over her. She got up on her feet and walked out!

  I didn’t know the details of her condition, of course, and couldn’t help but be curious, but I saw her walk out with my own eyes and I doubt she would have been delivered in a wheelbarrow if she hadn’t been a cripple. I was amazed.

  That same day Greg Rider and his team conducted midday and afternoon services, and each time Greg would open to a fresh passage of Scripture and begin speaking as the Spirit moved him. I found the way in which the sick came to the services extremely moving, as they presented themselves with a quiet dignity, willing, hopeful, never presumptuous, but waiting on God with true faith
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  Medical Science and God’s Healing

  I was more prone to jump to conclusions or to become so enthusiastic that I could become cocksure as to how God would act. In the late afternoon of the first day an accident occurred that bewildered me and eventually served as a helpful caution. While riding his motocross bike to a meeting, one of the missionaries was struck by a bus. He was transported in the back of a pickup to Greg Rider’s house, where the team was having its evening meal.

  They put him on the kitchen table, and I could see that his arm was distorted—he had one or more simple fractures, and his shoulder was badly dislocated. Even though he was screaming in pain, I could only think: I can’t wait to see everyone pray over this man and his arm be restored! The hair on the back of my hands was standing up. We were going to see a miracle right there and then! “Oh, Jesus, thank You!” The team would pray and that shoulder would go right back into its joint. I had what God should do all planned out for God.

  Then Greg Rider looked at me and asked, “What do you think we should do, Doc?”

  “Let’s get to praying for him!”

  “Dr. Crandall,” he said, “you have to fix his arm.”

  The man was still screaming, but I was starting to feel angry. “I’m not touching his arm! I came from the States to see miracles, and I am not touching his arm. You’re men of God. You need to pray for him.”

  They did and nothing happened. The poor man was helpless with misery.

  Greg renewed his request. “Doc, you have to help him. You need to fix his arm now.”

  I could hardly get over my disappointment enough to act, but I jumped up and stood on the table, took the man’s arm, and put my foot in his armpit for leverage. “Now everyone pray in the name of Jesus!” I ordered. I pulled and popped the arm right back into joint, straightening the fractures in the process.

  I remained disappointed, though. I was so eager to see the supernatural at that point that I couldn’t distinguish calling upon God from presuming the actions of God. Later, wise teachers like Reinhard Bonnke helped me think through the difference. My skills as a physician were, after all, a gift that God had already supplied. Nothing was necessary to the man’s healing other than my acting on what I knew very well how to do. Who was I to order God around as to the method of the man’s healing?

  God created the natural order—the way this world works—and most often works through it in order to accomplish God’s ends. He intervenes in the natural order or redirects that order most often, I’ve come to believe, when only God’s intervention will suffice and usually when His miraculous power will teach us about His ultimate purpose—the defeat of death itself and the restoration of all things in God’s eternal kingdom. At the time I didn’t understand these things.

  A Modern-Day Stoning

  Soon enough, though, Greg, his team, and I were in a situation where God’s direct intervention was necessary and instructive. Greg Rider and his team were holding a meeting in a village after nightfall. We were gathered in an open field, around a Coleman lantern. There were only about a dozen in attendance. Greg had been preaching for some minutes when I heard a thud, and then another and another. Something skipped by in the grass. I saw people ducking and covering their heads. Stones were raining down on us.

  I looked at Greg. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve heard about people being stoned in the Bible? There’s a group that doesn’t like it when we come to this village, and they are trying to drive us off.”

  He then addressed the whole meeting in a firm voice. “Everyone, let’s pray that no one gets hurt. We are going to finish the meeting. We will not leave. We will not run. We will not take cover. We will call on almighty God that none of us will be injured or hurt.

  “In the mighty name of Jesus,” Greg cried, “I ask You, God, that no one be injured or hurt, no one be stoned in this meeting this night. Shield us from the stones, Lord. Deflect the stones. Cover us with Your protective hand.”

  Greg Rider stopped praying and started preaching again, but the stones kept coming. They were being thrown from the surrounding woods that hid our attackers. The stones became larger—more lethal. The rocks were so big, finally, that they were like shot puts. People were hurling them with all their might.

  We did not move, although I was tempted to run, I can tell you.

  The rocks at last stopped coming and no one had been hurt. I thought back to Greg’s family’s greeting him at three o’clock in the morning and understood much more immediately why.

  When we returned to his house, I said to Greg, “Your God can do this?”

  He said, “Oh yeah, Dr. Crandall, when we call on the name of Jesus, and we really need Him, He answers us. We have no one else here but Jesus to protect us. We don’t have a police force. In situations like that, we have nothing but the power of God, and we have learned to rely on God’s power.”

  “But when you have a doctor, you use a doctor,” I said, teasing him.

  “Sure, why wouldn’t we?”

  A Burden for Souls

  For more than two weeks I went to meeting after meeting with Greg Rider and his team. I’ll never forget piling into the back of his pickup truck one day and driving for fourteen hours to a village. Fourteen hours—one way—over dirt roads that were rutted and potholed. That drive left my entire body aching. My back hurt, my kidneys hurt, my arms and legs were sore and bruised; I had such a headache from being the jack-in-the-box that my eyes felt ready to pop. Once we finally stopped, I wondered aloud to Greg why we had come all this way.

  “For two people,” he said.

  “Two?” I was incredulous.

  “I was here on my dirt bike a while ago. The two we’re here for said they’d become Christians if I came back. Isn’t it great? There’ll be rejoicing in heaven tonight!”

  The two villagers came to worship and pray with us, and they did accept Jesus Christ as Savior.

  I saw something in Greg then that was even greater than his gifts of preaching and healing—a burden for souls, the desire to see people enter God’s kingdom. We all want to know God is there and loves us and is willing to meet our needs, particularly in difficult circumstances. We rejoice easily in the spectacular phenomena of supernatural healing; miracles part the curtains and we are given a privileged glimpse into eternity. One that’s pretty obvious, for someone with any faith at all.

  Rejoicing over conversions is a different story. Although most Christians say that they are inspired by conversions, few of us are as enthusiastic about people being received into the kingdom as we are about supernatural healings. That day in Mexico I had to ask myself whether I really believed enough in the importance of evangelism that I would have volunteered to take the trip if I had known in advance how arduous it would prove to be. But as I witnessed those two people’s accepting Christ, one old man and one old woman, kneeling in the dirt with clasped hands, confessing Christ as their Savior and Lord, I understood, even if I still didn’t get as pumped up, that this miracle was even more important than a supernatural healing, because it was the healing of these souls for eternity. They were being rescued from eternal separation from God to enjoy His company endlessly, in both this life and the world to come.

  The fourteen hours back weren’t short, but they were eased by what Christ had accomplished through Greg’s faithfulness and even my part in being along for the ride.

  One of the important experiences of being with Greg Rider and his team in Mexico consisted in their relating the many miracles they had witnessed. Over meals, on our forays out in the trucks, Greg and his team told of healing after healing. They had witnessed many other miracles like the wheelbarrow woman’s regaining the ability to walk and God’s protection on the night it rained rocks. They weren’t building themselves up with mere wishful thinking, either. Nothing like that could have kept them going, because their life was hard, dangerous, and isolating. They spoke of what they had seen with an awe that truly made them consider the life
they led privileged. A type of privilege about as far from the privileges of Palm Beach as can be imagined.

  The Principle of Exchange

  When I returned home, I gave Deborah a prayer cloth that I had taken to every healing service along the journey. It was a simple red-and-black bandanna. I didn’t tell her what it was, but when she held it in her hands, she almost fainted away. She took a couple of steps backward and said, “Wooooo. What is that?” I explained how many times it had been blessed and prayed over, following the biblical precedent in Acts 19:11–12, where handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched the apostle Paul were taken to the sick and their diseases healed.

  In my absence God had performed another work of healing, as Chad was visibly improved. He had begun to grow again!

  This was a first instance of a deep spiritual principle that I would come to recognize more and more—the principle of exchange. There are countless instances and varieties of exchange in the spiritual life. For example, Jesus asks us to forgive others as God forgives us. He pledges that God will extend mercy to the merciful. The most fundamental exchange consists in Jesus’ promise that if we will give Him our lives, He will give us life in abundance—His eternal life. And, He says, what you have done for the “least of these my brethren”—His followers who are poor, without resources, in trouble—you “have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40 KJV). God blesses us when we allow ourselves to be used by God to bless others. So while I was helping out with the work of God in Mexico, God was blessing our family through improving Chad’s health. I would keep encountering this principle of exchange as I grew in my spiritual life.