Stanley... Healed and Being Healed!!!

“Stanley, do you know you are standing at an obtuse angle?”
Stanley gave no reply to my query, instead just stood there at 100 degrees continuing his talk with the children. But the pain was written all over his face. He could no longer perform action-songs at a stretch. Even as he sat down, the upper-part of his body was at an angle that seemed uncomfortable even for those that saw him. Stanley was in pain. His back was giving way and the grimace on his face said it all! Both hands on his waist, he was struggling to stand, sit and sleep.

A few days later, I heard he was admitted to a hospital nearby. I paid a visit and saw his back suspended to weights. Yet, he had his ever-optimistic look on his face. His mother, bed-ridden for two years, wasn’t next to him. Neither was his father, who had to take care of the household all by himself. Stanley slept on his hospital bed with a Bible, a spiritual book and an occasional visitor or two to give him company. My visit, it seemed, brought with it a wider smile. Doctors had advised him to be ‘suspended’ like this for three weeks after which they will review his status. X-rays had revealed that not everything was right.

Three weeks had passed and there were no signs of improvement. MRI scans and tests were conducted and the results were not encouraging. Stanley’s L-5 Bone in his spinal column was damaged and needed immediate replacement. Stanley will have to undergo an operation on his back. The doctors stated that without an operation, in two years, he may end up in bed paralyzed from waist down forever! But they also could also not guarantee him the chances of that not happening even with an operation. Although, he was out of the hospital bed, he knew he will have to make a decision pretty soon. He was just 19. Stanley was having nightmares of him limping along.

Stanley, who was a firm believer in God, looked up to the heavens, quite literally. Every night as the world around him slept, he used to go to the terrace and cry out to God asking for deliverance. He knew healing was round the corner.

During one of our seminars in Gujarat, as the preacher spoke from the Word, Stanley started experiencing an increase in his faith. The preacher called out people to the stage saying, “Believe that healing is yours for the taking and testify before Him.” Stanley, who was sitting a row in front of me, got up and marched towards the stage testifying that God has touched him. He says, he believed and that mattered! A few days after he returned home, it was his mother who told him that he had not been using the belt that the doctors had prescribed him to wear till his operation. He, himself never noticed the healing. He never again went to the doctor, but has saved his MRI results to show the world the mercy that his Saviour endowed on him. Stanley is 23 now! Very much alive and kicking!

But as he recovered from his back trouble that threatened to make him bed or wheel-chair-ridden, he had to confront another problem in his life. Yet again, it was his mother who noticed a patch of hair missing from the back of his head. And as Stanley inspected the patch wit his hand, a good chunk of hair came out with it. He ignored the problem for sometime, but every now and then when I banged into him inside the Xavier’s campus, I could see the patch developing bigger and covering a majority of his head. I told him, an African continent is developing in his head! He shaved off his head in the hope that they might come back, but to no avail! Very soon he lost all the hair from his body and this time there were no signs of them growing back. One day as Stanley came for our ICPF meeting, I noticed that he had lost his eyebrows. Stanley was looking very different from the time that I saw him last and that was just a week back. Pretty soon, he was to lose all the hair from his body. “I hated looking at myself in the mirror,” said Stanley. This one-of-a-kind problem of complete loss of hair is called alopecia areata universalis. Alopecia areata is considered an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system, which is designed to protect the body from foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, mistakenly attacks the hair follicles, the tiny cup-shaped structures from which hairs grow. Ask former FIFA referee Collina of Italy. This is indeed a rare disease; a disease, that can make people stand and stare at you. And one of my best friends was suffering from it and was having a tough time coping with it.

It was at this time that Stanley went to the South Asian Biblical College in Bangalore. This, he says, did him a world of good. He was away from the people he knew so well and had seen him. Just what he had wanted. At a new atmosphere, people around will accept him as he was! He looked up to the heavens, quite literally, once again. At midnight hours, when his co-students around slept, Stanley explored the big open ground, sat down and cried out looking to the skies. One of his friends at SABC advised him to go for a hair transplant, at least at the eyebrows! Stanley, to please the friend said “I’ll look into it.” But what he really was looking was ‘unto God’. For he knew, medicines again could not guarantee him hair growth.

A dawn of a new day brought with it an increase in faith for Stanley. He had avoided the mirror on most occasions, but that day he felt like staring at himself. He looked at his own reflection, something he’d hated for a long time! He stared again and closer he went for a better inspection. There was a little growth right at the corner of where his eyebrows were supposed to be. Stanley knew he was witnessing and experiencing yet another miracle.

I met Stanley next time at Ulhasnagar station on our way to ICPF. “Stanley!” I exclaimed, “You have hair on your eyebrows and you have side-locks too!!!” “Yes,” said Stanley calmly! And hair continues to grow all over his body again; he just can’t stop praising the One who showered His mercy on him.