It was 1982, I was married with two beautiful daughters and a lovely home. It looked perfect, but it wasn’t! Then came a catalyst to blow it all apart…

Picking up the telephone one day I couldn’t hear in my right ear. Eventually after hospital tests I was told to – ‘Wait and you will hear from us’.  Well I didn’t hear. I was patient. My tinnitus was bad, my taste buds affected – I couldn’t taste tea and began to drink stronger and stronger coffee. My face was numb and my left arm and leg were starting to show warning signs. I rang the hospital in August 1983 to find that my papers had got lost!

I had a brain scan that December and got the result on 4 January 1984 – ‘We will cut the Acoustic Nerve and you can expect a wheelchair as it is touching the spine.’ My husband forgot all my appointments and after hearing this verdict, sitting on the bus going home I faced the truth that my marriage was over. I didn’t think about dying, but that as our home was mediaeval with twisting stairs everywhere I would not be able to go home in a wheelchair.

That frightened me. Then into my head floated some words spoken by a visitor some 9 months before – ‘God healed my hands.’ I can remember thinking ‘Funny woman,’ and how odd it was, but I contacted her and she suggested I visit a couple who had given up their farm to pray with sick people in Kingston St Mary. Agnes and Gerald Hooper prayed for me in the name of Jesus Christ for a whole hour. I was very nervous and didn’t remember a word they said. I left despondent. Still deaf, paralysed and thinking ‘Well it’s not surprising I don’t go to church!’

However three days later God answered! (just as I now know Easter is three days – death, burial and resurrection.)

I got my new life. I was still in the same mess, still with the risk of a wheelchair – and yet I was ecstatically happy. My operation was on 8 March 1984, a 10-hour operation – and I was home in 7 days, walking and thanking God for all he had done for me.

My happiness has never left me. God had permanently moved into my life. Just as well as five weeks later my husband left, he shut the bank account and I was to be given £20 a week. I had a wig on, half deaf, no job, no money – so lots that would have worried me. However I didn’t lose a wink of sleep, didn’t feel any panic or fear, no tablets, no drinking, no doctor. I look back and know that that was quite unnatural, I was finding that God had helped me with His supernatural strength.

Those around me found it difficult to understand but my consolation is that now with a Heavenly Father loving me, easing my life through many problems and waiting to greet me when I die here on Earth, I have a fabulous future to come. This is the promise for every human being who turns to him and asks for his help. God loves everyone he created. He made you in His image. He washes away all our mistakes and sins no matter how bad. He sent His son Jesus to show us the loving Father and to open the path to the doors of Heaven. I will not miss my way now. Thank you, Heavenly Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit!

39 years later I can only say that the love God lavishes on me makes me a happy woman, who is now 85 years old.