By Joy Smith Griffin, FAS Board Member
NOTE: This article was originally published in The High Calling, Jan/Feb 2023 issue.
About four weeks into the semester, our women’s softball team had made it into the championship game and we were in the bottom of the ninth inning, up by just one run. We had two outs on the other team, but needed one more out to win the game. The problem was there were runners on second and third bases, so if the ball got through the infield on the ground, it would be all over for my team and the coveted championship. With victory so near I could just about taste it, I was hoping for an easy out with a strike-out or pop fly. But when the ball was pitched, the ace batter connected with a magnificent, rocket-like line drive that was great for the other team but doomsday for ours. Still, I knew there was one last chance, if only I could run fast enough to catch that ball!
I dove into the ground, similar to the way you’d slide into first. Plopping soundly into my glove like ice cream into a cone, that ball and I melded together. We WON! Even as the crowd leapt to their feet and erupted with cheering, my momentary elation was quickly eclipsed by a searing pain and the sudden awareness that I was trapped on the ground, immobilized in my own body.
Instantly paralyzed, I was at the mercy of those around me who rushed to my side. I don’t recall many details because of the shock that temporarily kept me from realizing the desperation of my circumstances, but I do remember the doctors telling me I would never walk again. When I fell, the trauma caused the muscles, nerves, and bone tissue to rip away from my spine, leaving everything inside me in one big, tangled jumble. The internal trauma was so deep that it even caused my monthly periods to stop.
Crushed emotionally as well as physically at the tender age of 22, I tried to wrap my head around the devastating reality that I would never walk down a church aisle to meet my bridegroom. I would never cradle a newborn baby in my arms. I couldn’t even do something as basic as use the toilet. A bedpan became my constant companion next to the pallet that my mother arranged for me on our living room floor.
As distressed as I was by physical infirmity and relentless pain, my most tormenting thought was, Now I’ll never even be able to go out and find someone to help me understand how to become like Jesus. What I didn’t take into account was that Jesus wanted for me to know him even more than I did. He had already set a plan in motion that would forever transform my life.
For the next eighteen months, with the help of a dear pastor, I struggled to understand the meaning of God’s love, holiness, and sanctification. Finally, one muggy July night, I heard, “Joy, just take one step and jump!” The unmistakable voice of Jesus spoke right then and there to me. I could trust him. No longer straddling the fence with one foot in and one foot out, it was as if I had been given a brand-new heart.
This was what I’d been looking for all along, but my heart couldn’t receive it because I had not yet fully surrendered. I gave all I had to him, and he gave me all I would ever need. Himself.
Every summer in the county where we lived in rural Georgia, there were Methodist camp meetings that had taken place annually for at least 150 years. With rustic, open-air structures set in the fragrant, piney woods, these revival meetings would attract young and old from miles around. My family always went, but I hadn’t been able to go the previous year because of my paralysis.
One day shortly after my radical change of heart, my parents came into the living room with the local newspaper. “Joy, look at this! See if you know anybody that’s speaking at the camp meeting next week.” As they held the paper so I could see an article with pictures of the featured speakers, I recognized a classmate from my brief stint at the seminary who would serve as the camp youth director.
“Hey, I know this guy! He was at the seminary with me and we talked about how we were both struggling with what holiness was all about. I would really like to see him and his wife, to tell them all about how Jesus has changed my heart,” I said. My parents knew it was excruciatingly painful for me to be moved, but they suggested perhaps they could lay me in the back seat of the car and take me to the meeting with them. Excited at the prospect of sharing my good news with these friends, I agreed.
Although the deeply-rutted dirt roads made me grit my teeth to endure the pain, I was overjoyed when we arrived at the camp, sensing I was supposed to be there. Laying me and my pallet carefully on the cement porch slab, my parents went off to greet their friends as mine came over and welcomed me back. With my brain and my mouth in serious overdrive, I began to share how Jesus had poured out his love on me through the Holy Spirit.
“Wow, Joy—that’s incredible!” said my friends from the seminary. Just then, a car pulled up and an older gentleman emerged, someone I recognized from his picture in the newspaper article my parents had shown me. I knew he was an evangelist named Tom Barrett from south Georgia and was connected somehow to Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, as well as with Indian Springs Holiness Camp Meeting. Both of these would prove to be incredibly influential in my life.
Coming over to where I was lying on the cement, he peered down at me and said rhetorically, “You’re not lying there for the fun of it, are you?” Before I could even say a thing, my seminary friend jumped in and told him all about my accident. Thinking this man would probably respond with polite sympathy just like everyone else, I had no expectation of anything different. Most people who met me after the accident would say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll be praying for you.” But no one seemed to have any hope that I could be healed, and no one had actually offered to pray for me in person.
“Have you ever asked God to heal you?” asked Rev. Barrett. Caught completely off guard, I had to take a moment to even think of a response. My inner self was saying, “Don’t you understand that I just pray for enough relief from pain to be able to fall asleep every night?” I didn’t really think healing was an option for me.
Without waiting for a response, Rev. Barrett continued, “Honey, I don’t claim to understand healing. I don’t know why some are healed and some are not; why we sometimes go to church and pray for someone to be healed, and then they die the same week. But I do know that everywhere in the Gospels where it says they brought people to Jesus, he healed them. The Bible says in Hebrews 13:8, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.’ It also tells us in James 5:14 to call on the elders to pray. I just want you to know I’m willing to ask Jesus for you to be healed.”
“Yes, sir, I’d like you to pray for me. But I don’t have much expectation.”
“Well, young lady, Jesus says in Matthew 18:19, ‘If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.’ Before I pray, I want to know what you can agree with me on. Would you agree with me that God could heal you in six months?”
“Yes, sir. But six months is a long way off, and I know that the people I know would not give God the credit if he did heal me because they’d probably say I just got better gradually, or maybe that I’d had a special surgery. I want people to know the same Jesus I know, the Jesus who radically healed my heart two weeks ago. I don’t want any human being to get the credit for what God does because no one is good but God. I want him to get all the glory!”
Now I want to make clear that I firmly believe God uses the gifts he has given doctors and nurses and pharmacologists and other medical personnel to bring healing to his children. I believe most people are healed gradually in that way. Instantaneous healing, at least in the times in which we live, is unusual.
“So, Joy, could you agree with me that God could heal you right now?” he asked.
Bursting into tears, I cried, “No, sir. I can’t. I’m in so much pain and I can’t even move. The doctors say I’ll never move again. I can’t imagine even sitting up in a chair, much less walking or running. I’ll never be able to walk down the aisle to get married or have babies!” I was completely undone.
Persisting gently but firmly, Rev. Barrett said, “I don’t mean to be flippant, Joy. But tell me this: Before two weeks ago, could you ever have imagined feeling the kind of love, joy, and peace God gave you when he sanctified you and filled you with his Spirit?”
Only God could have led him to say that, because it suddenly took my mind off myself and refocused it soundly on Jesus. As I recaptured the glory of the miracle he had done on my heart two weeks before, I realized it was the greatest thing I could ever imagine, even more for me than the miraculous parting of the Red Sea, because Jesus had made my heart totally clean and filled it with his love.
Answering Rev. Barrett’s question, I said, “That was the greatest miracle I could even imagine, having my heart become clean like that. If God could do that for me, I know he can do anything.”
Without asking my permission, brother Tom launched into a conversation with God, so simple and straightforward, no flowery language, no Thee’s and Thou’s. I don’t remember specifically the words he used until he said this: “Father, because of Matthew 18:19, I agree with Joy that it is DONE!”
With those words, everything was suddenly different, as if I had gone absolutely numb. Feeling like I must have fallen asleep, I was aware of the conspicuous absence of pain. I thought, It’s so wonderful to not hurt! I hope nobody wakes me up because I could stay like this forever!
But brother Tom was very present and asked, “Joy, did anything happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said very tentatively, reluctant to verbalize my thoughts.
“Well, can you move anything?” he persisted.
Not stopping to see if I could even wiggle my toes, I shot up off the ground like a rocket. Thrusting my arms up and my legs out, I did jumping jacks, I ran in place, I leaned backwards, performing a back bend like a gymnast—everything I used to do! It was as if I had never been paralyzed. There was absolutely not even any muscle atrophy, something that defies the laws of medical science.
Just a few hours after I leapt off the ground, praising God like the paralyzed beggar in Acts 3, God gave me another miracle. My monthly period, which had been dormant for the past 18 months, suddenly started. God had truly answered every single prayer.
Joy Griffin and her husband, Wes, co-founded the International Leadership Institute (ILI) in 1998 to accelerate the spread of the life-transforming power of the Gospel through training and mobilizing leaders of leaders around the world. A member of the FAS Board of Directors, Joy is the chair of the Outreach Committee. This article is taken from her recent book, Jumping for Joy (Francis Asbury Press, 2022; originally self-published). Used with permission.