The Miracle

On a sweltering Thursday in August of 2006, I was working alone in the little town of Goshen, really just a glorified truck stop out in the middle of rolling hills and pasture land. I was trying to help a client, Bill Looney, prepare his house for sale, addressing a host of issues revealed in the home inspection. It had once been a pretty nice house on a decent rural spread of about five acres, but it had been uninhabited for over a year and had been left to the weather and neglect, so it was reaping those consequences. There were things for me to do at every corner of the exterior, as well as some interior leaks and rot. It was as I was running around like a madman, cutting back rotten siding, demolishing trim and deck boards, that I made a false step in my haste that pretty much changed my life.

The grass was overgrown and the ground uneven, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention to each individual footfall, so I stepped into a gopher-hole I hadn’t noticed and hyper-extended my right knee. It felt like a jolt of electricity had shot through my knee-cap, and like a spring had sprung deep inside the joint (I could almost hear the “sproing” sound conducted through my bones). I instantly went down, crashing to the ground in a heap, the clang of my heavy tool bags ringing out to be heard by no one but me. After a few minutes I flexed my leg experimentally and decided I could get up. It was pretty painful, and would bear almost no weight, but it only swelled up slightly. I limped around on it for the rest of the day, thinking that it would be fine once I got some ice and Advil for it. Besides, I only had to make it one more day before the weekend, when I could put it up and take it easy.

At 35 I had bounced back from many injuries over the years, and I imagined this would be the same, so rather than report the incident to my boss I simply went to work the following day prepared to limp through to Saturday. I had a misplaced sense of responsibility and loyalty toward the Mom and Pop operation I was working for, and didn’t want their Worker’s Comp rates to go through the ceiling owing to my stupid injury. After all, it wasn’t as if I was engaged in some Herculean task of lifting a huge beam or packing heroic amounts of lumber; I was walking across the yard. That’s it. One does not apply for Worker’s Comp because one strolled through a dewy meadow. It’s just not done. So instead, I limped on the left leg for the rest of Thursday and about half of Friday, just looking to make it to that magical weekend of rest. Then my left knee also gave out. Without warning, the thing just went on strike and said, “No more!” It seems it was unwilling to do double the work, so I went down again.

This injury felt totally different than the one just twenty-four hours previous. The pain was much more intense, but located on either side of the knee cap, as opposed to right over the middle as it had been on the right side. I called it a day right then, informed my boss and said that I’d be taking Monday off as well. When he found out what had happened he agreed right away, knowing that I could file a claim and pretty much blow him out of the water. Which, it turns out, is exactly what I should have done. Instead, I put my knees up for a couple of days, alternating heat and cold with a steady diet of anti-inflammatories and painkillers. By Tuesday, I’d picked up some of those compression braces that athletes wear when they need to play in spite of an injury and went back to work. And I have been wearing them fourteen hours a day, six days a week, ever since.

That’s nine years of the ever-expanding size, strength, and design complexity in these braces. Neoprene, gel-packed, gusseted, spring-reinforced, mid-shin to lower-quad spanning monsters, just compressing the hell out of every muscle, ligament, and tendon in a desperate attempt to keep everything in place. All while I beat mercilessly on the joints by wearing forty pound tool bags, pushing wheelbarrows full of concrete, packing dozens of sheets of plywood and sheetrock across jobsites and up stairs, climbing up and down two and three story ladders relentlessly, demolishing entire structures with sledgehammers and prybars. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year for almost a decade. To say that my knees were utterly destroyed would be an understatement.

If I’d filed for Worker’s Comp I could have had the medical coverage and, more importantly, the paid time off to recover for twelve weeks from a crippling double knee surgeries. Turns out I’d injured the quadricep tendon on the right side and the ACL and MCL on the left side, according to the doctor. She couldn’t be sure without an MRI, which I never got since I couldn’t afford the surgery in the first place.  But since I’d stupidly decided to shelter my employer and gut it out, I made do with spit and bailing wire to hold my Frankenstein knees together and was never able to lose months of pay to have them repaired, so they went from bad to worse, as you’d expect.

I was fine standing, or at a full squat, but anything in between ranged from sharp pain to complete agony. Things would pop and occasionally grind, like bone on bone kind of feeling. Shooting, burning pain was common. All this is with the braces on, to say nothing of how it was without them. Taking stairs or ladder steps anywhere between the ball of my foot and my toes was like being stabbed with something dull that was also on fire. The best part of any day was taking off the braces, which I not-so-lovingly referred to as my Knee Bras. By the end of a work week, they smelled like a dirty diaper left long in the sun.

Now, at 44, I had no hope that this situation would ever be rectified. I’d been looking for a way to get out of the actual labor side of construction for several years, knowing that my knees had a clock on them which was getting shorter by the day. I couldn’t walk further than a mile or two without the braces, no mowing the lawn, or playing Frisbee with the nieces and nephews without them. I couldn’t run at all. But with no solution on the horizon I just kept my head down, did my work, and tried not to think about it.

That all changed one week ago.

Last Friday, Lindsay and I took a trip to Redding, CA for a three-day weekend. While we were there, we visited a local church that has gained a reputation for being very friendly, open, and known for inexplicable healings. So much so, that people from all over the world come to the place by the thousands for a chance to receive prayer. So Saturday morning, Lindsay and I went in to see what all the hubbub was about. We were surprised to see how many hundreds of people had come to receive prayer at that early hour on a Saturday. People from all over the world. We met people from Canada, Scotland, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, The Dominican Republic, and Vietnam there. Some had back problems, foot problems, eye problems, Cancer, Crone’s Disease, Tourette’s Syndrome and more. All come for a chance at relief. It was both sad and inspiring all at once.

The Church—Bethel it’s called—opens its doors every Saturday morning for any and all to come and receive free prayer. No collections plate is passed, no membership cards are checked, no religious tracks are passed out. You could be anyone; homeless, atheist, Buddhist, communist, criminal, or curious looky-loo. No conditions applied, no questions asked, except about what you wanted prayer for. People came who were terminal and had exhausted all medical options, people came who had no medical options to begin with because they had no insurance. We were every color, every gender, every age, every orientation, every income level.

There was live, contemporary music played by very capable musicians; people dancing with colored banners; a circle of a dozen artists all painting on different canvases; people meditating; people praying; people huddled in small groups; people reflecting in solitude. Like a carnival of souls. In turn, people from the church, who all had name badges and were very warm and empathetic, would approach different people and ask if they wanted prayer. Always a team of two, a man and a woman, working together. The people that approached me were named Reuben, who was from South Africa, and Marry, who was from The Dominican Republic. They asked some questions about my injuries, and heard an abbreviated version of what I’ve relayed here, and then they asked if they could pray for me.

Of course I said yes. What could it hurt, really? But honestly, I was pretty much only there because of Lindsay’s interest. I haven’t been to Church much—besides holidays and family gatherings—in over ten years. We left a Church in 2005 with a lot of heartbreak and cynicism and haven’t been back. So to say the least, I was phoning it in. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lindsay, and the strange phenomenon of thousands of people coming from all over the world, I would never have bothered with such a place. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Because we were out on a Saturday, I wasn’t wearing my loathsome Knee Bras. So when Marry asked me to try and bend down at the knees to see if anything had resulted from their prayers, I was fully expecting to get about half an inch down into the stabbing/burning zone and pop back up, reporting failure. After nine years, I’m pretty well versed in how it goes. So imagine my surprise when I made it all the way down and back up without a stitch of pain. I was incredulous, and at first thought that I’d just done it too fast. So I went back through the motion, down and back up, but slowly this time, which is always a suicide mission. When I have to go through the Zone without my Knee Bras, I do it at full-speed, because every second spent there is excruciating. So I went back down and hovered in the zone, even went up on my tip-toes, came back up, went back down. Nothing. No pain at all. I dropped down suddenly, then jumped straight up, because landing from a jump is like a bomb going off under my knee caps—guaranteed agony—braces or no. Still nothing.

Reuben and Marry—these two strangers, one man, one woman, one white, one black—were looking at me quizzically. I can’t even imagine what the look on my face was. Shock? Disbelief? Absolute relief? I just kept testing and trying, looking for the old, familiar pain. Where had it gone? I probably spent a full minute looking for a way to find the pain; twisting, hopping, lunging; anything I could think of. Nothing. Nothing at all. Having had such low expectations, it was like I didn’t want to believe it was possible. Who needs false hope? Who doesn’t hate to have their expectations raised and then dashed? But after that long minute of looking for that hated but all-too-familiar pain, I had to admit that it was nowhere to be found. It was totally gone.

I said, pretty much to no one, “For the first time in nine years, there’s not even a bit of pain.”

That word spread like wildfire. People all around started clapping and jumping up and down, I heard total strangers murmuring about “Nine years?” Next thing you know I was bawling like a baby. I’m just hugging Reuben and Marry, and any strangers that got close enough for me to get an arm around. I couldn’t stop jumping up and down, doing lunges, hopping up and down on one foot. Because as happy as I was, I was still looking for the injury to return. For this obvious placebo effect to wear off and the pain of hamburgered ligaments to reassert themselves. But it never did.

When I woke up the following morning I immediately checked to see if the psychosomatic nonsense had worn off. Surely a day of sightseeing, going to the movies, and eating out had dissipated whatever religious mania was at the root of this momentary reprieve, and a night’s sleep had rebooted the world to its proper order where I was halfway to being an invalid. But it hadn’t. No pain. None at all. I jumped, I squatted, I lunged. Nothing. I was both perplexed and over the moon at the same time.

When Monday came and we were home again, I returned to work, not wearing my Knee Bras for the first time in almost a decade. I decided that if this fake-out nonsense was ever going to be revealed it would be at work. No Jedi-Mind-Trick-herbal-gerbil-mind-body nonsense can withstand the serious brutality of my average day at work. I resolved to not only go about my day as normal, totally without my Knee Bras, but to go out of my way to beat the crap out of my knees while I did it. I jumped down from the ladder, I took extra-heavy loads in one trip instead of two, I kneeled on hard concrete, things I wouldn’t have done even with the braces on. The coup de grace was when I installed a 150 lb. steel fire-door by myself. Nothing I did could even bring a twinge to either knee. I have been at it like that all this week. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir! Still nothing.

Since this all occurred I’ve been skipping, running, and jumping like a kid. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve literally jumped up in the air and kicked my heels together. Like, seriously, so many times! Nothing your kids do on Christmas morning can match how I’ve been acting. Completely over the moon. I feel like the word “miracle” gets bandied about way too much, and has lost its meaning. I wish I could think of a different word to describe this inexplicable, yet undeniable experience. I got nothin’.

For me, the kicker is that this isn’t a story of the faithful being rewarded with that for which they have believed and quested for so long. It’s the story of a tired, faithless cynic half-assing his way through a pointless church meeting, only to be given a gift by One whose generosity and kindness do not depend on anything about me. Gratitude is all I have to offer.

There were a lot of other people there reporting that they were also healed of various maladies that day, but I can’t speak to the veracity of their claims. I hope they were all true. God knows we could use a little relief around here. One thing I know: I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.

Make of that what you will.