To the Editor:

Miracles happen every day? Maybe to someone else but definitely not to me! Full disclosure: I am a born-again Christian for 55 years. I believe in the Bible, but when I hear about someone having been “healed,” I skeptically seek for scientific or medical explanation. But in May, my life and world-view got turned upside down, and I never thought that this would have happened to me.

For four years, my doctors have been watching a cyst on my left kidney that showed up on an ultrasound on 1/4/2019. “Let’s keep an eye on it,” they said. Since the doctors claimed that there was no concern for this cyst, we did yearly check-ups, all showing the cyst was present. In fact, an ultrasound technician told me that cysts never go away. However, one check-up did not go as planned. On 4/19/2023, the ultrasound showed that the cyst had grown 5 times in size and contained a hypoechoic mass. Words like “renal tumor,” “worrisome lesion,” and “potentially malignant” were written on doctors’ reports with the request to do CT and MRI imaging. This once minor cyst turned into a massive concern for cancer.

So, what does any person, especially a Christian, do in this scenario? We ask everyone we know to pray! A large Facebook group of 46.8K members, 5,000 of my own social media friends, and my church family were all asked to pray that the cyst would be gone. I even had a random encounter with a woman while my car was getting worked on. In public, in the car repair waiting area on April 30th, she prayed over me that God would remove the mass.

Then, on May 2nd, the unthinkable happened. Both my primary physician and my urologist ordered an MRI and CT scan. Amazingly, both tests showed no renal lesions (cysts.) My urologist tried to justify these results as a “false positive”—that the cyst must not have been there in the first place since cysts do not go away. However, my wife and I told him that we had many people praying that the cyst would be removed. Obviously irritated, he said he would look at the CT and MRI results again. He came back in the room, our appointment was cut short, and I walked out knowing I was healed.

If I hadn’t had four years of documented records of the existence of a cyst, if the ultrasound technician saw that the cyst had grown in size 5x and said that cysts do not go away, if the urologist didn’t rationalize the cyst as a “false positive,” and if I only had only one of the CT or MRIs (and not both) show the cyst/mass was not there, I would be skeptical. But, I can’t refute all proof and deny that a miracle happened in me.

Kenneth L. Schaefer

Newtown