You may also download our newsletter in PDF format! (Adobe Reader required)
 

Bill and Delores Winder

In August 1975, Delores Winder and her husband, Bill, were planning her funeral. For nineteen and one-half years she had suffered from pseudo-arthrosis, an incurable disease that caused the bones in her body to deteriorate. To give Delores some relief from the crippling pain, the doctors performed two percutaneous cordotomies, a procedure that deadened nerves in her spine causing her to lose feeling in most of her body. This surgery is not reversible and is usually only performed on terminal patients. She wore a body cast for support.

Through a set of supernatural circumstances, Delores found herself at a Kathryn Kuhlman meeting. She wasn’t there to get healed—she didn’t believe in miraculous healing. And Delores and her friend, Gail, were certainly not fans of Kathryn Kuhlman. Before the meeting was over, Delores had seen enough of the “side show” and was ready to leave. The following is an excerpt from Delores’ book, Joy Comes in the Morning.

I turned to Gail to say, “Let’s go.” Her face was as white as a sheet, and her eyes as big as silver dollars as she nodded, unable to speak. Gail bent over to pick up some things off the floor and handed me my cane.

Using the cane, I started moving myself to the front of the seat so she could get hold of me and get me out of there quickly. “God, let me get out of here and don’t let any of them nab me,” I prayed.

I was scared and making every effort to move as fast as I could. Then I realized that the tops of my legs were on fire. It was so painful I had to bite my lips in order to inch my way to the front of the seat. I looked down at my legs and thought, “I’m glad I only have to wear my body cast one hour a day now. It’s making my legs burn.” I had to clasp my legs together to keep myself from screaming.

Finally I reached the edge of the seat and waited for Gail to get hold of me and get me out of that crazy place.

Then someone said to me, “Why do you have on that neck brace?” I looked around and there was a man crouched down by my chair.

“I have a bad neck,” I answered, and turned away from him.

After a brief pause, he said,

“But something is happening to you.”

“Yes, my legs are burning like crazy,” I replied.

Then he said, “Would you like to walk with me?”

“Yes, get me out of here,” I replied.

He nodded and helped me up. In my heart I knew the Lord had sent the man to get me out of that place.

Realizing I couldn’t walk he said, “How can I help you?”

“If you put one arm around me and then hold my arm, I can shuffle,” I said.

I was just in glory that he was getting me out of there, and no one was going to stop us. As we started out he began asking me questions. Questions annoyed me, and I always had a smart answer. When you’re an invalid, you become very clever at shutting people up.

Delores with her old brace

He asked, “Have you had surgery?”

“I’ve had four fusions and two percutaneous cordotomies,” I replied. Usually when I used the words “percutaneous cordotomies” it shut people up for good.

He stopped, turned me around to face him, and said, “You’ve had two percutaneous cordotomies and your legs are burning? Isn’t that rather strange?”

“He knows what I’m talking about,” I thought. “Yes,” I answered, but I decided not to say anything more to him. We started toward the door again and, after a struggle, he led me to the door that opened into the lobby. He still had his arm around me as I used the cane to steady myself as I shuffled along.

When we got to the door, he said, “I know you don’t know what is happening to you, but you can take your cast off if you want to.”

“My God, these people are dangerous,” was my instant thought. “Here’s a man I never saw before telling me I can take off my cast.”

I turned to him to say, “You shouldn’t do this to people,” but when I looked him in the face the words just wouldn’t come out. He looked down at me and again said, “You can take the cast off if you want to.”

The thought, “These people are dangerous” kept racing through my mind.

“Do you want to take the cast off?” he asked.

“I’ve been in this cast for fifteen years and I’m dying,” I answered. “Certainly I want to take it off.”

He nodded his head for he, too, knew I was dying. The next thing I knew, he had me go into the women’s room, where I leaned against the wall and began ripping my cast off. When it was completely off, I handed it to Gail and said, “Get me back out there to him.”

The man and an usher helped me back into the auditorium. Just as they were sitting me down in my seat, Kathryn Kuhlman swung around and said, “What do you have there, Doctor?”

“I have a spine,” the man who had been helping me said.

“Bring her here immediately!” she ordered.

“Uh-huh, he’s a doctor,” I mused. “That’s why he knows what a percutaneous cordotomy is.”

As the man she called “Doctor” and one of the ushers escorted me toward the stage, I thought, “Oh, dear God, I’m being put in the side show.”

When they finally got me up to Kathryn Kuhlman on the platform, she looked at me and said, “You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I replied, thinking that the way I looked anyone could see that.

Then she ordered, “Walk to the back of the stage!”

The doctor said, “She can’t Kathryn, she doesn’t have any support.”

“Oh,” she replied. “Doctor, tell the people what’s wrong with her.”

The doctor went to the microphone and told the 3,000 people that surgeons had performed four spinal fusions and two percutaneous cordotomies on me, that I could not feel anything in my legs, yet my legs were burning.

As the doctor was speaking, two other men held me in order to keep me from falling. Kathryn Kuhlman turned around, moved over to me and repeated, “Now, walk to the back of the stage.” Then she just stood there with her hands on her sides.

I thought, “She’s not only weird, she didn’t hear what the doctor told her about me.” There I was without my cast or brace to support me, my body all twisted, one of my legs nearly an inch-and-a-quarter shorter than the other, my spine deteriorated, my body bent over, and this woman was asking me to walk to the back of the stage.
I was so weak, I couldn’t even stand up by myself, and she was saying, “Walk.”

But I knew she was going to stand there looking at me, her hands on her sides, until I did something. I wondered if we were going to stand there the rest of the evening just looking at each other—in front of 3,000 people. I decided to push my right foot out to show her I couldn’t walk.

Kathryn Kuhlman interviewing Delores Winder on television

When I put my foot out, it came up off the floor—the first time that had happened in years. And when my right foot came back down, I thought I could feel the floor. But an inner voice said, “No, you don’t. You don’t feel the floor.”

All I knew for certain was that my foot had stepped out further than I had expected or intended. A minister was holding me from the back, and I knew that if he let go I would fall on my face because I couldn’t balance myself. I had to bring my left foot out because my right foot had stepped out further than I had thought it would. When I put my left foot out, it came up off the floor and back down.

“I do feel the floor,” I thought, but my mind kept saying, “No, you don’t. You don’t feel the floor. Get out of here. This is no place for you.”

Then I felt my slacks rubbing against the tops of my legs, and I started getting some feeling in my fingertips for the first time in the five years since the first cordotomy. I started screaming, “I can feel! I can feel!” But my screams of excitement didn’t seem to mean a thing to Kathryn Kuhlman. She ordered me to walk to the back
of the stage a third time. I honestly don’t remember what happened after that.

Those who witnessed the miracle said that I took off running to the back of the stage, then I ran back to Kathryn Kuhlman. I hadn’t walked without help in five years, but there I was running around on the stage!

“Now, bend over,” she said. My fusions were above my waist. I couldn’t bend over—I hadn’t been able to for years. The tissues in my back were shredding. My shoulder was so deteriorated that if I even moved it, the agony was horrible. Yet she was ordering me to bend over. Just to show her I could bend only a little, I started to bend over and suddenly realized that my shoulders were loose and moving, and I kept bending until I touched the floor.

When I rose back up she said, “Do it again!” And I did, but this time I lay my hands flat on the floor and rose back up.

Then she ordered me to twist. “I can’t do that because of the fusions,” I thought. But deciding to try, I gingerly started twisting and found I had complete flexibility. By then the feeling was coming back into my whole body.

“Now, do you have any pain?” she asked me.

“No,” I replied. I kept telling her that I could feel, but she seemed disinterested in that. Then it dawned on me—all the pain was gone!

Today, Bill and Delores Winder teach and demonstrate healing through the Fellowship Foundation in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Dear Mishpochah,

As you read this, I will have just returned from an Israeli adventure. We have scheduled six evangelistic meetings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Kriote, Nazareth, and Tiberias. At one of the meetings in Israel, I will speak to 150 Jewish holocaust survivors and lecture on miracles.

Our God-breathed strategy is to rent a hall and advertise through newspapers and flyers to invite Israelis to attend a lecture on the supernatural.

When they attend, I will give a lecture as advertised. There will be no music or anything religious. In the past,
our flyers and advertising have packed auditoriums with Jewish people in Israel, Germany and the U.S. After I speak and demonstrate God’s Kingdom by signs and wonders, almost all who attend pray to receive the Messiah!

This is high stakes. I could not inform you in advance because, if this information were to get in the wrong hands, the meetings could be aborted.

Tiny Israel is surrounded by enemies and fighting for its life. I believe war could break out at any moment. This is why my trip is so timely. I believe revival is also ready to break out in Israel. May God grant that our meetings will be the catalyst. Each meeting is being co-sponsored by a local Messianic Jewish congregation so these new believers can be discipled.

My next letter will tell you the results of the meetings. This could well be the most significant evangelistic trip of my entire ministry. I was a pioneer in establishing one of the first Messianic Jewish congregations in America. It was birthed in a move of God’s Spirit on Jewish people. In the early days, Jewish people came to the Lord every week. I also was privileged to be the main speaker at the first mass meeting to reach Jews in the former Soviet Union. I will never forget witnessing hundreds of Jews running to the altar to be saved.

I have the same feeling about these Israeli meetings. I am expecting the same evangelistic anointing that I had in the early days of Messianic Judaism and in the former Soviet Union. God is up to something big. Your partnership makes this historic Israeli Jewish evangelism possible.

I consider the healing of Delores Winder to be one of the greatest healing miracles of the twentieth century. Medical science has no explanation for this well-documented miracle. This is why I have published her amazing book, Joy Comes in the Morning. You will laugh and you will cry, but when you finish this book, your faith for healing and miracles will be greatly accelerated.

Shalom and Love,

Sid Israel Roth

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright ©1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.