T e s t i m o n i e s

Severe gallbladder pain

A woman phoned us one evening. She complained of severe gallbladder pain that had been building up for several days. She had already been to the doctor and he told her that she had a 'porcelain gall bladder' (this is a disease of the gall bladder in which the wall hardens. The hardening is caused by fibrous connective tissue fibres, i.e. scar tissue and calcium). She also complained of severe pain during the phone call and kept crying. We received specific instructions from the Holy Spirit and then told her that she needed to repent and surrender everything to God and then we explained to her how gallbladder inflammation should be categorised spiritually. We prayed and also took communion together. After the prayer and communion, all the pain was gone. The next morning she sent us a WhatsApp message in which she said that she had slept wonderfully and woke up without any pain. She feels very good. Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus Christ!

The aching toe

My wife Ann and I visited an elderly couple. The woman had been complaining of severe pain in her left big toe for a few days. This toe was inflamed and the toenail was apparently ingrown. She could no longer wear a shoe without experiencing severe pain. As the chiropodist, whom the old lady trusted implicitly, was unavailable for a few days due to roadworks, she endured the pain with clenched teeth. She did not want to consult another therapist as she had already had unpleasant experiences with chiropodists. This suffering old lady has to wear compression stockings to improve blood circulation in her legs. Her husband always helps her to put them on in the morning, but she has been in terrible pain for days if she touches her toe even lightly. It was almost impossible to touch the toe without wincing. She asked for prayer. My wife Ann placed her hand lightly on the foot and prayed a short but very energetic prayer with authority. She then sat down again. After the prayer, the old woman was feeling much better. The husband touched the toe and pressed it a little. The pain was a lot less. However, it still hurt when pressed harder. But you could tell that there was visible relief. There was no further prayer with the laying on of hands for this toe on the same day. The next day we received a call that the old lady had almost no more pain. After another day, the pain was completely gone. The appointment with the chiropodist a few days later confirmed a completely healthy toe with no problems! Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus!

The sciatic nerve

One morning, a woman called us complaining of severe pain in her sciatic nerve, which stretched from her lumbar spine to her feet. This pain had become increasingly severe over the previous days and was now unbearable during the phone call. She asked for prayer.
We prayed for her twice on the phone. Afterwards, she said that the pain was completely gone and that a pleasant warmth was flowing through her legs.
She told us again in the evening of the same day that the pain was still gone and that she felt well.
Thank you Jesus Christ!
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then this short and concise testimony should encourage you. Act as Jesus Christ says (Mark 16:18), believe and trust in the Lord. Prayers also work over distances (e.g. telephone). Relief often comes in a relatively short time, after a short prayer. But sometimes it also takes a little patience and time.

The flat tyre

One Monday morning, Ann and I travelled to the Czech Republic - as we often do - to spend the day there in prayer with God. We usually go to remote, large forest areas where there are few people. There are plenty of them in Šumava, in the west of the Czech Republic. Bohemia has grown close to our hearts over the years and we have developed a burden of prayer for this country. So we pray for the Czech Republic and for the people, villages and towns there when we are on Bohemian soil. In the Bohemian low mountain range, I can blow the shophar horn undisturbed and proclaim the word of God. Even as we drive over, we sing praises in the car, pray in tongues, worship the Lord and rejoice in His creation. While I blow the shophar horn in the open air, praying and proclaiming God, my wife Ann uses this time to intercede, worship and also to fight in the spirit. Just as she receives to do. She is also an indispensable help to me in intercession, because there have been many attacks from the spiritual world that would probably have ended less lightly had she not felt in the spirit to pray for me urgently and place me under the Holy Blood of Jesus Christ while I had just blown the shofar and proclaimed. Thank you Jesus for this wife, your daughter! The two of us have had many beautiful but also challenging experiences during the hot summer days and the bitterly cold snowy days in the Bohemian Forest.
But this Monday turned out differently than we had imagined. We only ever go over to the Czech Republic for a day of prayer, we've never spent the night there. On this Monday, too, we wanted to be back in Passau in the evening. After spending a few hours in prayer in various forest areas and blowing the shofar, we ate something and drove on to proclaim and pray. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened so far. So we drove on, both fresh and lively, and now wanted to reach the apex of our journey and then drive back down along the Lipno reservoir towards Bavaria. We were on a lonely country road in a vast forest area, with not a house or settlement to be found for about 18 kilometres. This is nothing unusual in the Bohemian forests. We had only passed one house at a lonely crossroads, but only Ann had noticed it. About 1.5 km later it happened: the tyre warning signal in the car appeared and a few seconds later a red warning light and an unpleasant whistle with a warning signal: 'Flat tyre - stop'. We had already experienced some unpleasant surprises and warning messages from our car regarding tyres, but this was different. We were in the middle of nowhere! There was a forest track that turned off the road and I decided to drive into it so that the car would at least be off the road. The tyre whistled and went flat very quickly. I always have a mechanical pump in the car for such cases, which is actually used for mountain bikes but also fits car valves. I've had to use this more than once. This time, however, I couldn't pump as quickly as the air escaped. The pointer on the pump's bar indicator didn't move! It was about 17:40 in the evening when this happened. I was really at a loss. I had an air pump with me, but no spare tyre, as this is not intended for our french car. As I hadn't seen the house we had passed about a kilometre ago, I had the impression that we would be alone in the forest for miles. Ann had apparently forgotten this in this situation too, because she didn't tell me that she had seen a house before. I knew that this wasn't going to be fun. In a situation like this, your thoughts start to run wild. If you don't stop them straight away, you lose yourself and Jesus Christ is then further away rather than closer. I realised that my thoughts were threatening to derail me. What should I do? It was just before 6.00 pm! I tried to inflate the tyre again. Nothing moved. Then I prayed to God in a loud voice: 'God, Jesus Christ, you have to help us now. Send someone round to help us. God help us! Send someone to help us! Please send someone to help us!' Ann heard this and thought that this prayer sounded so sincere that she gained confidence and came into an unexpected peace. We still had a bit of reception in this wooded area, so I looked on google maps to see where the nearest garage was.They were all a bit further away. The shortest distance was about 14 kilometres! I called four or five garages in the surrounding area. Nothing. All of them were already closed. It wasn't even 6pm yet and nobody was available! My thoughts started to gallop again. Silence! 'God, you have to help us now! Send someone to help us! You can just send someone round!' Our broken-down vehicle passed several cars, but none of them stopped, on the contrary, they all sped past as if they wanted to get out of this forest as quickly as possible. I gradually realised that we probably wouldn't be able to solve this problem that day. The time was getting on: 6pm. I looked at google maps again and enlarged the map by slowly pulling it apart with my thumb and index finger. Somewhere behind me I heard my wife praying. I spotted a small house on the map and clicked on it! It lit up: Penzion! You don't need to speak Czech to understand that this is a guesthouse! Hallelujah! This pension was about 1.5 kilometres away from us, in the direction we came from - and it was the only house within 18 kilometres! I showed it to Ann and told her that this was now our destination, because for now it was all about being able to spend the night somewhere. We would see tomorrow. I tried to drive the car out of the forest track and onto the road. However, I didn't succeed at first as there was a good 10 cm difference between the gravel path I had parked on and the tarmac road. As our car was lower down anyway and now also had a flat tyre, it wasn't possible without tearing off the front spoiler. As we all know, a problem doesn't come alone! Somehow, with constant prayers in my tongue, I managed to reverse sideways to overcome this height difference to some extent and the car was on the road. Now we crept towards the house indicated on google maps at an average speed of 7 to 9 kilometres per hour. I hoped that there would be people there and that we could spend the night. These 1.5 kilometres seemed like 10 kilometres! In the meantime, we sang 'The Blood of Jesus', accompanied by the rhythmic cracking and whining of the front right flat tyre, which we were killing with this snail's pace. When we arrived at the guesthouse, we found a guest who immediately referred us to the landlady. Ann and I don't speak Czech, the landlady spoke almost no German and could only manage English to a limited extent. But somehow we managed to make her realise that we would have to spend the night with them because our 'horse was lame'. We told her our problem and she immediately called her boyfriend, who was in another city and wouldn't be home until late in the evening. Her boyfriend, a native Canadian who had also lived in Australia for a while, spoke - thank God! - fluent in English! He said on the phone that it wouldn't be a problem. They had an old shed behind the house and there were some old car wheels with tyres lying around. I should just choose one and fit it and then I could drive on. We looked in the shed and found some wheels with tyres, but - this would have been too easy and perhaps not in God's plan - they were all with five bolt holes. But our Frenchman needed wheels with four holes! After we had looked through all the wheels in the shed, the lady of the house called her friend again. He said we should take a room, he would give it to us cheaper because we were an emergency and we would sort the whole thing out the next day. He would come home at around 10pm and we could then briefly discuss the next steps. He would definitely be willing to help us. We should just not worry and relax. The woman asked if we needed anything to eat as they didn't serve dinner or breakfast. They probably had a kitchen where we could prepare something. She then wanted to drive us to the next village to a small shop where we could buy something. We were really surprised by this friendliness. First the man on the phone who wanted to help us at all costs and now the landlady drove us to the next village so that we could buy something to eat. Ann and I were amazed! So we quickly bought some shower gel, mixed bread, cheese and a chocolate bar in a small shop. We put our few things in the room, then went for a walk and quickly realised that we would lose the battle against the blood-sucking pests in the evening sun at the edge of the forest. We decided to retreat from the battlefield and take a shower.

In the evening around 10:30 pm, Daniel, the wife's boyfriend, arrived. He said that it wouldn't be a problem with the tyre, he would look for a wheel with a tyre in the right size on the internet tomorrow and then we would pick it up and fit it together in his car and then we could drive on. He would also be free on Tuesday anyway and he could help me with all this. We shouldn't worry and sleep well. We were really amazed at how relaxed this person took it all. I briefly wondered if they were Christians because they were both so helpful and friendly. But I had my doubts about this idea. I tried to tell the woman about Jesus Christ in the evening when she drove us to the next village to do the shopping, but she looked at me as if I was trying to sell her flying milking robots from Mars. So far so uncertain. Ann and I were surprisingly relaxed, we prayed, took Holy Communion together and quickly drifted off into a starry night in the Czech nowhere, somewhere in the middle of the Bohemian forest.
Then Tuesday dawned, a new day. The day that Jesus Christ had created! Daniel called me at about 07:45 and said that he had already looked for used wheels on the internet, but that the nearest person who had a used whell that would fit our Frenchman lived about 100 kilometres away. That was simply too far. He told me that he would now try a few garages in the neighbourhood. He would get back to me when he had found something. He actually called me shortly after eight o'clock and said that there was a suitable tyre for me in Český Krumlov, about 16 km away. I told Ann this and made my way down to the car. When I arrived downstairs, I saw that our car was already jacked up and the front right tyre was missing. Daniel came towards me and said that he had already done everything and that our bike was already in the boot of his car and we could drive off straight away. I was speechless and needed a few seconds to finally realise the situation. This young man, who I had only known for 10 hours and with whom I had not exchanged more than 100 words in my life, jacked up our car, dismounted the wheel and put it in the boot of his car! I would never have expected such friendliness and helpfulness and, to be honest, I found it hard to accept that this was all a real thing. Well, I got into the passenger seat and he drove out of the yard in the direction of Krumlov. What I had expected and hoped for happened: he asked me why we were here and what we were doing. This was the chance! So I got started, told him what we were doing and why we were often in the Czech Republic and immediately told him my testimony: who I was before Jesus Christ and how I had converted and started a new life with Jesus Christ. I kept looking at him from the side. He was speechless and said that he had never heard anything like it. I thought to myself, I've got him hooked now, so here comes the gospel! We arrived at the tyre dealer. Daniel explained to the mechanic what it was all about and he disappeared into the workshop with the wheel. I didn't understand a word and hoped that everything would go well and that they would fit the right tyre. We stood outside the workshop in the morning sun and I used the 30 minutes we had to wait to tell him more and more about Jesus Christ. I told him about Ann's testimony, about our ministry together and about many other miracles we had experienced with Jesus Christ. I also made it clear to him why Jesus Christ came to this earth and that we, with the help of the Holy Spirit, need to realise that we are sinners before God and that we need to repent and turn from our wicked ways. He listened devoutly the whole time, asked questions from time to time and was very impressed that there are people who follow God like this. He kept saying that he had never heard anything like it, even though he had lived on different continents.
When I realised that it was good and that the gospel of Jesus Christ had touched his heart, the wheel with the new tyre arrived. I paid, put the bike in the boot and we drove out of the city again. In the remaining minutes in the car, I told Daniel that I believed that none of this was a coincidence. The whole event from last night until now, the chance to tell him the gospel and the testimonies, was - in my opinion - too skilfully orchestrated by God. He also said that this could not be a coincidence and told me about events that had happened in his life a few days before our meeting. I knew then that everything was in God's way. We arrived and I mounted the wheel and looked at the clock: it was 10.30am! Another answer to prayer, because I had asked God this morning if it would be possible to be on the road again with a repaired car before 12 noon. Everything went like clockwork. But then I checked the front left tyre and saw that it was completely worn on the inside shoulder and that some of the metal was already coming out. So we had to go to the tyre dealer again, but this time with our car. I said goodbye to Daniel, paid for the room and we promised to keep in touch by phone or to pop in again when we were in the area. Ann and I prayed to the Lord again that He would keep us safe until we arrived at the tyre dealer in Krumlov. God is faithful! The left front tyre was also replaced and we were able to start our 130 km journey home with two completely new tyres. We arrived safely in Passau on Tuesday.
On Thursday of the same week, two days later, I went to a tyre dealer in Passau because I knew that I would need four new tyres. I had already made this appointment a week earlier. But God came before us and protected Ann and me and prepared the ground for the seed of His gospel - somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the Bohemian Forest. Hallelujah! Blessed be the Lord!

Be encouraged! Jesus lives!