Barbara Cummiskey Snyder had progressive multiple sclerosis. Not the relapsing-remitting kind that comes and goes. The kind that only gets worse. By her thirties, the disease had taken nearly everything.
A Body Shutting Down
She was legally blind. She was paralysed from the waist down. She required a catheter. She had a tracheotomy to breathe. Her doctors at the Cleveland Clinic told her family she had weeks — possibly days — to live.
MS had been dismantling her nervous system for years, and there was nothing left for medicine to try. Her medical team had exhausted every option. Barbara was dying, and everyone knew it.
"Get Up. You Can Walk."
Friends gathered around her bed to pray. During the prayer, Barbara heard a voice — clear, authoritative, unmistakable. "Get up. You can walk."
In that moment, the Holy Spirit moved. Barbara describes it as power flooding her body. She opened her eyes — and she could see. She moved her legs — and they responded. She sat up in bed, removed the catheter, and stood.
She walked. Not shuffled. Not stumbled. Walked.
Studied by Medical Researchers
Barbara's healing was so dramatic and so well-documented — with years of medical records showing progressive MS deterioration — that it attracted the attention of researchers at Indiana University. They examined her case as part of a study on anomalous healings.
The results were unambiguous. The MS was gone. Not in remission, which implies it could return. Gone. The demyelination that had been destroying her nervous system had stopped and reversed. Her vision returned. Her mobility returned. Functions that MS had taken were fully restored.
She is alive today, decades after she was given weeks to live.
The Holy Spirit Does Not Accept Terminal Diagnoses
Barbara's story confronts the assumption that some conditions are simply beyond help. Her doctors were not wrong about the diagnosis. They were wrong about the prognosis — because they did not factor in the Holy Spirit.
He is not bound by medical trajectories. He is not limited by what has "always been progressive." He speaks, and bodies that were shutting down come alive.
Whatever diagnosis hangs over your life, it does not have the final word. The Holy Spirit does.
