Walk-in healing clinic brings hope to the hopeless
OTTAWA, ON—Visitors to a church-based healing clinic are experiencing God's miraculous healing power.
Every Friday, people make their way to the Healing Clinic operated out of Dominion Outreach Centre (DOC) in Ottawa. There, volunteers pray with them about a myriad of issues; from struggling marriages or depression, to cancer and diabetes.
"The city is full of people who desperately need an encounter with God's healing power," says Healing Clinic director Ken Smid, who is part of the pastoral team at DOC. "There are so many people who cannot be helped by the medical community, so there is a definite hopelessness that the healing clinic helps fill."
Prayer volunteers from numerous denominations volunteer at the clinic, which was founded in 2005. It has received more than 7,000 visitors, and many of those people have made decisions to follow Christ.
"We're not a counselling service," Smid explains. "We're there to pray and believe God for the impossible. We don't see everything we want to see, but we are definitely seeing an increase."
Roxanne Harris heard about the clinic from one of its volunteers.
"I was completely crippled with ankylosing spondylitis [a form of arthritis that primarily affects the spine]," she says. "I could barely walk."
After prayer Harris felt no pain, but didn't realize what had happened. The next morning, she thought she seemed taller, so she asked her 10-year-old if she looked different. Her daughter responded, "Mommy, what happened? Your back is straight."
"My spine was actually fused together and now I have X-rays that show my spine is not fused anymore," Harris says. "It's emotional because that's medically impossible, but nothing is impossible for God."
Harris later joined the prayer teams and prayed with Terri Waldron.
"I was suffering with fibromyalgia. I had excruciating pain every day for more than 30 years," says Waldron. "I was on morphine."
The team prayed several times before the pain started vanishing. Like Harris, Waldron didn't immediately realize what had happened. It didn't sink in until she stopped in the washroom on her way out.
"I was used to hearing my knees click when I sit," she explains. "I realized I had no pain. I ran out and started crying. I couldn't believe it."
That was three years ago and Waldron is still amazed at God's healing. She says one of her doctors now calls, asking if she would speak with patients or bring them to the clinic to give them hope.
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