| When our daughter, Hollee, was born the toes on her right
foot turned inward and her right foot turned inward from the ankle. Her
left foot was fairly normal. The doctor put a cast on her right foot to pressure the toes outward and to turn the foot outward from the ankle. She wore this for a couple of months, and then was put into special shoes that curved outward at the toes. Whenever she slept, she also had to wear a special brace between the shoes that turned her right ankle outward. She wore the brace for a couple of years, and the special shoes until she was about six years old. From all we could tell, her feet were all right from then on. About 20 years later, after we were in the ministry, she was over to the house one day and complained about having a headache. We were in the bedroom getting ready to go out, so we had her sit on the bed and my wife, Beverlee, sat next to her and I stood in front of her. I laid my hands on her head and commanded the spirit of pain to come out of her head. When I did, she fell back on the bed and started groaning and then screaming. I thought the pain in her head had increased radically, as pain sometimes does before coming out, so I kept commanding the spirit to leave. Then she started yelling, "My foot, my foot!" I looked down at her feet and her right ankle was turning inward in an almost fluid motion. There was no hesitation to the motion at all, the ankle was slowly and fluidly turning inward. If I recall, I was leaning partially over her at this time with my hands still on her head, and I started commanding the foot to stop turning but without success. The foot had now turned further inward then it seemed possible for any foot to turn, certainly far beyond what you could physically force a foot to turn. Naturally, Hollee was now in tremendous agony—and I wasn't making any progress at all. Then the Holy Spirit spoke within me and said, "Take hold of her foot." So I took hold of her foot with both of my hands, but had no idea of what spirit I was dealing with. Then the Holy Spirit spoke again and said, "Cast out the spirit of club feet." Although the thought immediately came that there was no such thing as a spirit of club feet, Hollee was in too much pain for me to do any arguing—and the foot was still turning inward; in fact, it had unbelievably turned inward further than forty five degrees. I tried later to turn my foot inward as far as it would go and I could in no way turn it that far. Hollee's pain must have been tremendous. All this time I had been trying to hold her foot from turning any further inward but without any success. But when I said, "Spirit of club feet come out in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ," the foot immediately snapped back to a normal position. And when I say "snapped," that's exactly what I mean. Hollee's foot snapped back to a normal position as if a rubber band had been pulling it and had suddenly broken. The spirit came out that fast! I've always believed the Holy Spirit drove that demon out that quickly because neither Hollee nor her foot could have stood any more inward turning. In the years after that, I don't believe I ever saw a demon come out any faster. After it was all over, we asked Hollee if she ever had any problems with her foot, and she told us that if she ran or walked for a long time that her right ankle would become very tired and her foot would start to turn inward. Obviously the spirit had been in her foot since she was a baby, but after the cast and the brace had moved her foot and ankle back into a normal position and the tendons and muscles in her ankle had strengthened, the spirit could not turn her foot inward except when her ankle became tired. A demon in or on our body, and they usually reside in one place or the other (see The Girl with a Demon on Her Back), is subject to the ability of our body, mind, or emotions to resist it. Now someone may ask, "Then how could that spirit turn her ankle inward so easily when you were trying to cast pain out of her?" The answer is, "I don't know." But I do know that often when you cast a spirit out, it will manifest itself in its full strength, or at least what we assume is its full strength. If you check the Gospels, you will find this happened several times when the Lord himself cast demons out. It was from the Holy Spirit telling me to take hold of Hollee's foot to cast out the spirit that was in her foot, or rather in her ankle, that we learned to always place our hands upon the place where the problem was. It increasingly made sense to us that if the power of the Holy Spirit was being transferred from us to the person we were praying for, then the closer our hands were to the area of the problem the better we would transfer whenever power we had directly into that area. Of course, if we were as full of power as the Lord was it wouldn't make any difference where we touched, or what area of us the person needing the healing touched—even the bottom of our clothes. |
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