A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees

Marlene Klepees’ Healing Miracle

Via Craig Keener ‘Miracles Today’

Weighing just two pounds at birth, Marlene Klepees from Missouri was born with cerebral palsy.

Cerebral palsy is a group of movement disorders originating in childhood; the disease is permanent, but there are varying levels of severity.

As will soon be clear, Marlene’s case was a severe one.

A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees

Marlene became a committed Christian at age eleven;

when some Christians in her high school, one of whom had specifically felt led to reach out to her, invited her to a Youth for  Christ meeting.

An orphan since the age of two, she relished her relationship with God as her Father.

Soon after her conversation, she began to pray with words she did not understand because, at such times, she experienced feelings of God embracing her.

She was as yet unaware of any biblical terms for it.

A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees

GROWING WORSE

Marlene took for granted that cerebral palsy was God’s plan for her life and remained content.

In the years that followed, however, she began to question this assumption, as her condition grew increasingly severe.

She lost much of her eyesight and became effectively paralysed from the neck down.

Some of her muscle spasms were so severe that her seizures had broken the bones of those trying to take care of her.

She lost control of most of her body, though she retained some control of her eyes and mouth.

Also, She never stopped shaking, and her head was always bent to one side. Unable to swallow, she drooled uncontrollably.

Although she believed that God was sovereign, when she was seventeen, she began to question whether this condition itself was God’s ideal plan for her.

Although, God works everything for our good—even when someone else may intend it as evil—God also often desires to thwart that evil.

Finally, after two days of continuous spasms, Marlene became increasingly desperate.

Although her intellect was not impaired, those around her began discussing what to do with her.

Unable to understand her frantic attempts to communicate, they wrongly supposed that her brain was essentially dead.

Yet, God’s assurance of His love for her and that He would take of her repeatedly subdued her panic.

Happily, she was transferred to the respected Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic recognised that she was fully aware of her surroundings.

Unfortunately, they could not offer much hope regarding her condition.

After three months of attempted rehabilitation, they informed her that she would need to be placed in a total care facility.

She was now nineteen years old.

A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees

THE VISION

At this point, Marlene finally became angry with God.

Yet she felt not his anger in return but her heavenly Father’s comforts.

He showed her a vision of her being healed, of a church, and of an impending date: March 29.

It took her a few days of attempts to communicate this vision to her hospital roommate, and the roommate, a Christian, believed her.

Their faith was encouraged even more when Marlene received as a gift the very T-shirt she had witnessed in the vision.

Marlene told the staff that she would be healed, but no one else expected it.

“Yeah, Marlene,” they would say.

While hope can provide strength, failed hope yields disappointment, and they had undoubtedly witnessed plenty of dashed hopes before.

By Saturday, March 28, Marlene herself felt disappointed.

Her roommate had gone home. There was no one to take her to church, and she had no contact with any local church.

As she poured out her heart to God, she felt him speak again, assuring her that He would show her the right church.

When a nurse came in to feed her on Sunday morning, March 29, she managed to mouth, “Yellow Pages”.

Because she was insistent, the nurse brought her a phone book, and Marlene had her open it to the church directory.

There, the Lord seemed to highlight for her the name of the local open bible church, so she asked the nurse to dial the number for her.

The nurse left, disturbed, but finally returned shortly after noon, called the number, and put the receiver to Marlene’s mouth.

Scott Emerson, the pastor, answered. Marlene managed to ask whether his church believed in healing.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“You’re the one,” she concluded. “You can visit me.”

It wasn’t clear whether the pastor could understand her, so the nurse took the phone again.

“Sir, I don’t know who you are or where you are, but you’d better get down here.”

She gave him the room number and then promptly hung up.

Then Marlene waited patiently—for four hours.

The pastor had the room number, but he didn’t know which of the two hospitals had called or the patient’s name.

Hesitantly, Pastor Emerson arrived that afternoon.

He was taken aback by Marlene’s condition.

However, He and his church believed in miracles—but he had never witnessed one like this before.

Nevertheless, he listened as she struggled to recount her vision, interpreted to him by a nurse who had learned to understand Marlene.

Emerson looked like the pastor she had seen, and he agreed that her description of the church matched what his church looked like.

But at first, he didn’t seem to take the hint to invite her to the evening service.

Finally, however, a Christian nurse helped get authorisation, and pastor Emerson brought Marlene to his church’s evening service.

It was Sunday, March 29, and there were about seven members there.

He explained what the bible said about healing, then invited his church members to gather around.

“I’ve never prayed for someone like this before,” he confessed, not very encouragingly, but then led the group in prayer.

After they had prayed, Scott asked Marlene if, by faith, she wanted to try to walk.

She did not know what “by faith” meant, but she knew that she wanted whatever God had, so she granted affirmatively.

They released the restraints on her wheelchair and raised her.

“Suddenly,” she testifies, “my feet hit the floor flat, and for the first time, I could feel the floor under my shoes!

I took a few steps, with others holding onto me.

Then, they let go of me.” Her feet still pointed inward, but they began to straighten with each step.

Every lap she took around the inside of the church, she grew stronger and stronger, learning greater motor control, as everyone celebrated with her.

Now her eyes felt warm, and she again heard her heavenly Father, this time telling her to take off her glasses.

When she took them off, she found that her vision was completely healed—soon certified as better than 20/20.

Pastor Emerson felt that he needn’t bother with the sermon that night.

The group went out for Ice cream to celebrate, and Marlene held and ate an Ice cream cone for the first time.

As they were leaving, they ran into a worker from the Mayo Clinic.

He had seen Marlene’s wheelchair sticking out of the back of the pastor’s yellow Volkswagen and feared that this meant that Marlene had already died.

When instead he then saw Marlene, he asked, stunned, “Marlene—is that you?”

She recounted the story, and he beat them back to the hospital with the news.

A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees

TESTIMONY

When Pastor Emerson brought Marlene back to the Mayo Clinic, the nurse in charge saw her walking in and dropped the telephone he was holding.

Marlene soon began entertaining the nurses by demonstrating all the things she could do now.

All the professionals were rejoicing with her, except one, who insisted “We’ll see what you’re like tomorrow morning.”

Emerson’s wife had worked in a rehab unit, so the pastor could understand the cynicism of repeated disappointment.

On Tuesday, the doctors ran tests, and when Marlene walked into the conference room, they stood up and started applauding.

Apart from Marlene, no one had expected this outcome, but everyone was pleased.

Wondering about her eyesight, someone asked about her vision.

Thinking that he meant the vision God had given before her healing, she began recounting it.

All of them listened graciously and respectfully, and at the end, one doctor, obviously a Christian, blurted out, “Praise the Lord!”

This healing occurred in 1981, and Marlene has remained well in the nearly four decades following.

She bicycles and runs a flower shop, Heaven’s Scent Flowers (www.heavensscentflowers.com ) full-time,

she also prays compassionately for others, and often they receive healing.

One of the better-documented cases is that of Chris Carlson, who suffered for fifteen years from trigeminal neuralgia.

Chris and her husband, Dave, had always prayed for the right doctors but had never prayed for God to heal Chris directly.

When Marlene offered to pray, Chris protested “I don’t believe in this healing business.”

“That’s okay,” Marlene replied “I can believe for you. That’s not a hard task.” She prayed a simple prayer.

Chris felt a warm tingling starting in her neck but brushed it off.

“Have a nice trip,” she told Marlene as they parted.

But the tingling persisted for twenty-five minutes, and when it stopped, Chris’s pain was gone.

That very night. Permanently.

Shaken and reordering their priorities, the Carlsons soon dedicated their lives to God’s calling.

After Craig Keener interviewed Marlene, she prayed a gracious prayer for him.

“Each of us is special to God,” she advised.

She recognises that she does not deserve healing any more than anyone else does.

And She emphasises that she did not do anything to merit her healing, it came at the cost of Jesus’s suffering for us.

Most of all, we need to recognise how loving the heavenly Father is—

the heavenly Father who embraced an orphan at age eleven and has been with her ever since.

Also Read: The Healing Testimony of Ruth Lindberg – Diademng

A True-Life Story and Testimony of Marlene Klepees