By Abigail Sanchez-Aguilar —
Amputate or radiate? the veteranarian said grimly to Tim Rupert when she showed the X-ray to the dog’s cancer-struck leg bone. Either way, Winston was given less than a year to live in 2018.
“There’s no possible way he has bone cancer,” Tim thought. “He’s four years old. Bone cancer is for older dogs.”
The vet vacated the room so that Tim could call his wife, Karan, and break the news to her. When the vet returned, Tim said he would exercise neither option. There was another option: prayer, he said.
“She kind of said, well, it that makes you feel better,” Tim recalls.
He left the office with a mixture of feelings: upsetness, consternation and also faith.
God had spoken to Tim in the vet’s office: If Winston is important to you, he’s important to me.
At home, life continued, and Winston continued to limp and favor his left paw.
“We were both pretty distraught about the diagnosis,” Tim admits.
Summer passed, as did Fall. The life expectancy of Winston was running out.
One day, a fellow Christian encouraged Tim to pray with authority: “You don’t have a right to be here,” he said to the cancer. “You have to go in the name of Jesus, by the blood of Jesus. By the same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead (words echoing Ephesians 1:20), you gotta go.”
On Dec. 1, Winston bounded around the corner and jumped around Tim like a puppy.
“I was definitely in shock and struggling with real disbelief,” Tim remembers.
“I didn’t know what to think,” says Karen. “I was scared but excited all at the same time.”
When word got back to the vet, Nancy Moore, she asked to re-consult with the dog. It was hard to believe.
The X-ray was proof. Where once a black hole mass the size of a quarter had been on Wintson’s leg, there was just healthy bone. No treatment had been administered.
Such was the case that the vet even presented the case to the Christian Veterinarians Missionary Conference in 2023. “The bone is filled in. It is no longer painful for this sweet precious dog,” she says.
Just in time for Christmas, Winston got healed.
