I CAN WALK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At the age of about 10, I started using a walker. The walker was an improvement from the wheelchair, but I still wasn’t satisfied with a walker. And along with the walker I had to wear braces. You remember the movie “Forrest Gump”? I really had braces like that. They were terrible. Me and my dad would have to force them on my feet every morning. They weighed more than I did. You can imagine me in a walker, but I didn’t move that fast. It wasn’t long before I really grew upset with the walker. I went into my therapy at my school and asked them for crutches instead of a walker. They thought I was out of my mind. I had only been on the walker for a year and a half and I was still getting used to that. But they were used to me asking to go beyond my limitations. I would always be the one to jump off the padding in the therapy room. They would always say that one day I was going to give them a heart attack, and I imagine I came close a couple times. Finally I convinced them to give me crutches. I fell down even more than I did with the walker, but I insisted on doing the crutches instead. At the same time that this was going on, I also was able to talk them into letting me ride a bicycle. They had to Velcro my feet onto the pedals to keep my feet on. There were times that I would go so fast that I would dump over. One time I even broke my front tooth doing it. The one thing you have to understand though, I had three things going for me at the time. Number one, I was in full faith that God was going to completely heal me of my cerebral palsy. Second, I was a kid, and three, I was a boy. I was not going to play it safe at all. But after this it wouldn’t be long that I would go back to my therapy and ask for them to take away one of the crutches. At this point, they thought I was absolutely nuts. But at the same time, there was no use arguing with me. So they gave me one crutch. This took me a long while to get used to. In fact, while I was getting used to one crutch, I still had to use the walker because it was a lot safer. Now something happened one day at school when I was 12 years old, something that I can’t explain. I can’t explain how it happened, I just know that it did. I was in class and we were supposed to do a writing assignment. I looked down and realized I didn’t have any paper. The teacher had already left the room and the assistant was nowhere to be found, but I had to get the paper in order to do my assignments. It wasn’t that far away, the stack of paper had to be about 5 to 8 feet away and I really didn’t want to use my walker to go 8 feet. So I slowly got out of my chair, no one was really paying attention to me, they were all doing their work. One sat in front of the other. I went over and got my paper. On my way back, the teacher came in. She was upset that I would dare get out of my seat when nobody was in the room. She yelled at me for a brief moment. When I got home, my parents had already prepared a barbecue cookout. We had invited one of our closest friends, a friend of the family. I don’t know why I brought it up at the moment, but I did. My dad was outside cooking and my mom was setting the table. I thought this would be the perfect moment to tell my dad, as he walked in the door, that I got into trouble at school today. They asked me politely what I did wrong. I explained that I needed paper and the teacher was out of the room, so I went and got the paper. They both were stunned for a brief moment. Then my mom said, “You did what?” I repeated what I said and they asked me how and the only way I could explain it is I said, “I just did it.” They said, “Show us what you did.” At the time I crawled a lot on my knees, so I crawled back to the end of the hallway and I got up on my feet and walked as fast as I could back to the living room and dining room. They both were so happy that they didn’t know what to say, even though I only could walk about 15 steps before I fell. I still claim that this is the day that the Lord healed me so I could walk. After this, I still used my walker sometimes. But now something was different, I knew in my heart what the writer was talking about in Isaiah 53:5 when he said, “And by His stripes we are healed.”