Monday, June 24, 2019

More Than a Healing



The Story of George Wurlitzer’s Healing and Miracle

In December of 2015, I had knee replacement surgery on my right leg.  I had suffered an injury playing softball some 25-plus years before, and I had come to the place that a replacement knee was necessary. The surgery went perfectly.

However, near the end of May of 2016, I needed emergency surgery because MRSA, an extremely serious and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, had developed in my new knee replacement. I nearly died. I was in great pain and required a morphine drip. I had two PICC lines to treat my body with two different antibiotics that were supposed to work together to kill the MRSA bacteria. (A PICC line is a thin long catheter inserted into a vein to administer medicines, etc. from an exterior source.) I went to multiple appointments to try to eradicate this life-threatening infection. One of the antibiotics nearly killed me, and the other was ineffective in killing the MRSA bacteria.

My doctor wanted to amputate my leg above the knee. His concern was that if the MRSA bacteria spread to my bone marrow, kidneys, or heart, I would die. While receiving medication through the PICC lines, the doctor said “Your body is in complete duress. It has as much duress as a body can handle.” 

I am living without the use of my right leg.  I am reduced to living on my couch. If I put any weight on my right leg, it will break. If it breaks, I am back to square one, and I imagine amputation.   After two weeks of living on my couch, I was out of hope… my “hope-ometer was at 0”.
In December of 2016, a year after my first surgery, I had a third surgery to remove the MRSA infected knee replacement. A spacer was inserted into my right leg to fill the place where a knee should be.

By March 2017 I had been living on the couch without the use of my right leg for 14 months. The muscles were atrophied, my right leg nothing but skin and bone. I had to use both my hands to lift my right leg because it had no muscle or strength of its own. The doctor didn’t know if I would even survive. I had no hope.

During these long 14 months of only living on the couch, I suffered the agony of excruciating pain, and was heavily drugged because of it.  I was discouraged. Depressed.  Without hope.
I wouldn’t answer my phone even though many friends called to encourage me, want to visit me and pray over me, but I was too depressed; I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.  I was completely without hope so why bother?

When someone did reach me and ask me, “How are you doing?” my reply:  “I have reached my bottom and I’m subletting an outhouse.”

My hopelessness was influenced by my spiritual battle of weighing faith vs. my doctor’s words, of his vision of my future. His prognosis was to amputate my leg now to save my life. He said “If something additionally bad happens, or we do surgery and something bad happens, it will be too late to amputate and you are dead.”

This period of time was not only terrible for me, but also for my wife Lori. In the midst of my extremely dismal and painful near-death condition, my wife had to keep working under a great load of stress.

-        STRESS of working and leaving me at home
-        STRESS of our finances due to my loss of income and huge medical bills
-        STRESS of what was happening at her place of employment, which is our church; I’ll explain a little more later 
-        STRESS of living in a supernatural environment, including negative and positive
But also during these long excruciating months of couch time, I lived an amazing supernatural time. God gave me multiple supernatural and spectacular Words.  One of the messages to me from God in an audible voice during my darkest days was “Pursue My fires”.  He meant both spiritually and literally.

Me: “How do I do that with one leg?”

Another supernatural prophetic Word given to me was about our church, an action that we needed to take immediately. I knew that I had to have a sound mind not being influenced by medicines and pain killers in order to communicate well and for my words be trustworthy. I stopped taking all my medications, including the pain killers. I fasted for seven days to prepare myself spiritually for the meeting I would have with our pastor to tell him the message God had given me about our church. It was a difficult thing for our Pastor, our Elders, and my wife Lori to hear because it would change something very dear to the hearts of many of our people. It would also drastically impact the church finances in a negative way regarding what could be seen only by the physical eye.  This is the stress added to my wife regarding her job because she is employed as a financial officer for our church.

The amazing thing about this is that after praying for about two weeks, our pastor and elders received confirmation in their spirit and took action to do what God had revealed to me. It was a giant act of faith, and as a result, they became unpopular with some people, until the fruit of God’s plan became visible in later months.

This Word for our church was only one of many supernatural and spectacular Words from God during this time.

So, on the first Sunday afternoon in March of 2017, I asked our Elders to come over and pray for me. By the time they left, I had a little hope, my first glimmer of hope in a very long time.

The following Saturday I went to A Healing Place, a prayer ministry outreach of our church, where a prayer team prayed for me. 

Muscles started twitching, a feeling I had not felt for months.
I felt a warming sensation throughout my leg.  It became intense heat. In a picture, it felt like a bolt of lightning.

I said to the team, “I think our Jesus healed my leg.”  I wanted to drop my pants to see my leg and test it, but of course I didn’t.

When we got out to our car, I said to my wife Lori, “I’m gonna try something.” To which her response was, “Don’t you break it!”

I was able to use my right leg on its own power to get in the car- my walker to my side, and slid in. I lifted my leg up with no assistance or added power of my hands. I knew that it was healed, but didn’t know to what extent.

At home, I could lift myself out of the car on my own power using my right leg.   Inside, I took off my sweatpants down to my tidy whities and I could see that my right leg was noticeably larger.
I measured my left leg – the uninjured one that had been doing all the work for both legs for over a year. I measured my right leg that had not been used in a year and a half.

They measured exactly the same!

I measured both legs twice to be sure it was accurate measurement. They still measured the same!
JESUS healed me!

JESUS did a miracle of recreating new muscle in my right leg where there had been none!

Before going to A Healing Place and having the team pray for healing, I had been to a pre-op meeting with my doctor to discuss surgery for a new knee replacement. The leg he was looking at then was my old skin and bone leg with atrophied muscles.

After prayer, at the hospital for the new knee replacement surgery, my doctor asked, “Where did you get your muscles?”

So I got to share my Jesus healing miracle story with my doctor.

I now had hope for the outcome of a fourth surgery to put in a new knee.  The surgery was done and all went perfectly.

During that terrible dark time, God had told me, “Pursue my fires.” He meant it both spiritually and figuratively. Our church is now living out the path of the Word God gave me for our church. The physical part is being lived out now as my company is a big part of the massive cleanup in Paradise after the devastating Camp Fire. I am back to work doing hard physical labor for long hours each day. My right leg works perfectly.

I am living a crazy supernatural life!

                 Psalm 103:2-4
          Let all that I am praise the Lord;
                may I never forget the good things he does for me.
          He forgives all my sins
                and heals my diseases.
          He redeems me from death
                and crowns me with love and tender mercies.

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