By Jamie Buckingham
(From the book DAUGHTER OF DESTINY, pp 112 – )
The following night she was back at the Tabernacle. The room was packed with expectant faces. Every seat on the long wooden pews was taken. The huge open-beam rafters resounded with joyful singing as she entered the room. The people had come expecting. Expecting a miracle.
Just as Kathryn stood to preach, there was a disturbance in the audience. A woman was coming forward. She had her hand up. “Kathryn, may I say something?”
Kathryn looked at her. Plump. About fifty. Dresses in a gray tweed suit and wearing a black straw hat adorned with a small white flower. She carried her handbag in her right hand, but was waving her left hand in the air. “Come on, honey, of course, you can say something.”
The woman came to the front of the building and stood facing Kathryn, separated only by the long pipe from which the altar curtain was hanging by little brass rings. She talked softly.
“Last night, while you were preaching, I was healed.”
Twice Kathryn tried to say something, but nothing came out. She finally stammered, “Where were you?”
“Just sitting here in the audience,” she smiled back.
“How do you know you were healed!” If it was of God, it could stand examination.
“I had a tumor,” the woman said shyly. It had been diagnosed by my doctor. While you were preaching something happened in my body. I was so sure I was healed that I went back to my doctor this morning and had it verified. The tumor is no longer there.”
There had been no numbered healing line. No laying on of hands. No prayer. The miracle simply occurred while Kathryn was preaching about the power of the Holy Spirit.
I took a full week for Kathryn to grasp what had happened. Then, on the following Sunday, another miracle occurred, this one even more spectacular. In 1925, George Orr, a World War I veteran—and a Methodist by denomination—had been injured in an industrial accident. A splash of molten metal so badly scarred the cornea of his right eye that he was declared legally blind. His ophthalmologist, Dr. C.E. Imbrie of Butler, Pennsylvania, said the eye was permanently impaired, and the resulting scar on the cornea was too deep for surgery. If they operated, they would have to remove the eyeball.
In March 1947, Orr and his wife attended one of the Tabernacle services in Franklin. Over the next two months they returned several times to hear Kathryn preach. On May 4, they drove up from Butler for the morning service, riding with a young couple who were also interested in Kathryn’s ministry. Kathryn was still preaching about the power of the Holy Spirit, and during the service, declared flatly, on the basis of the woman who had been healed earlier in the week, that physical healing was just as possible today as spiritual salvation.
Something happened inside George Orr. He prayed, “God, please heal my eye.”
The next moment he felt a strange tingling sensation in his eye, as though something was passing through it. Then it began to stream tears. In fact, Orr was embarrassed, since he couldn’t control the watering. His eye overflowed, and tears splashed onto his jacket.
After the service, afraid to tell anybody else what had happened to him, he staggered out of the building to his car. On the way home, he kept blinking the eye as it continued to stream tears. Then, just as they went over a hill, he said sun seemed to suddenly burst forth in all its glory. Cupping his hand over his good eye, he shouted, “I can see! I can see everything!”
George Orr, who had long been drawing workman’s compensation because of his blindness, returned to the service in Franklin on Tuesday night to testify.
Kathryn’s bush had begun to burn.