By Yvette Harding —
As family and friends gathered in her hospice room read the prayers sent by mail from 450 people who heard her plight over the radio, Barbara Snyder, dying in bed, twisted like a pretzel from multiple sclerosis, heard a voice from the corner, where nobody was.
“My child, get up and walk,” the voice said.
Startled but surging with faith, Barbara sat up, scooted her legs over the side of her bed, sat up, put her feet flat on the floor. She hadn’t done/couldn’t do any of those things during seven years of deterioration.
“My feet hadn’t been flat for years,” Barbara says.
Barbara’s miracle is documented in a new Christian movie The Case for Miracles produced by former atheist Lee Strobel.
From teenager, Barbara was afflicted with multiple sclerosis — a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the protective covering of the nerve cells in the brain.
“She’s on her deathbed curled up rigid, one lung collapsed, the other lung at 50% capacity, a tube in her throat so she could breathe from oxygen canisters,” Strobel says. “She had lost control of her urinary tract and bowels, virtually blind. She’s dying.”
But somebody said, “Hey why don’t we call the radio station in Chicago of the Moody Bible Institute? They’ll pray for poor Barbara.”
On Pentecost Sunday, her friends were in her room reading to her the prayers in the letters from so many people. Then God spoke, and Barbara heard him.
“She rips the tube from her throat,” Strobel says.
“I don’t know what you’re going to think about this, but God just told me to get up and walk,” she told her friends.
She jumped out of bed. The first thing she noticed was her feet were flat; for years MS had twisted them and she hadn’t felt the flat floor.
“Then my fingers came uncurled,” Barbara said, as narrated by Strobel. “Then I noticed I could see.”
At the next service, the pastor asked if anyone had any announcement.
Barbara walked up the aisle – to gasps of amazement and tears of astonishment of church members. The church spontaneously broke out into “Amazing Grace.”
When she walked into the doctor’s office a few days later, the doctor thought it was an apparition.
“Oh, she died and that’s a ghost,” the doctor thought.
When she realized it wasn’t Barbara’s ghost, the doctor was astonished: “This is medically impossible.”
