Healing After Two Dozen Years of Suffering

by Jeff Finley

Linda Prince, a Free Methodist pastor’s wife, battled a debilitating neurological disease while rearing two children and helping launch a successful church plant. Then the Lord surprised her. Now she’s sharing the story of her miraculous healing and helping others to experience God’s power.

“At the time I was healed, I’d had it for 24 years,” she said as she and her husband, Pastor David Prince, recently joined Brett Heintzman for a new episode of “The Light + Life Podcast.”

Linda was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996 at age 30 following the birth of her daughter, Jessica, and a year into planting Cross Creek Church in Palmyra, New York.

“Those first five years that I had it were pretty awful and overwhelming. We already had a 5-year-old son named Jacob who is globally developmentally disabled and nonverbal,” said Linda, who added that David was taking care of Jessica, Jacob and herself. “He [David] was having to carry me up and down the stairs, and our home was actually 25 or 30 minutes from our church plant, so it was pretty tough.”

Linda’s illness also caused financial challenges. Her nursing salary had provided the primary income for the family while they were launching Cross Creek.

“Linda went on disability, and it took us a number of years before there was any financial help from disability,” David said. “Her parents helped us through those really awkward, difficult years financially.”

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“It wasn’t our strength that got us through it. It was what He provided in our weaknesses.”

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David’s parents were retired, so they provided in-person care for the family so that David could continue pastoring. Cross Creek Church grew and became one of the largest congregations in the Genesis Conference.

“We really just believed and had faith that God was able to carry us through this. We really fell back into the Scriptures that we had in our hearts that when we’re weak, His strengths shine in our weaknesses,” David said. “It wasn’t our strength that got us through it. It was what He provided in our weaknesses.”

Although Linda suffered from MS for 24 years before being healed, some people weren’t immediately aware she was battling this disease of the brain and spinal cord that comprise the central nervous system, which plays a key role in controlling bodily functions.

“I was treated very aggressively by my doctor in the 2000s, which afforded me the ability for people really not to even realize that I had the disease most of the time,” she said. “However, in the last three years of my diagnosis, I was given three separate treatments of a chemotherapy drug as a last resort. I had been through every MS drug there was, so there was a new study on this chemotherapy drug that they were using on multiple sclerosis patients.”

The chemotherapy drug led to one of Linda’s sisters, who also had MS, not needing to take MS drugs anymore. However, the drug did not provide the same relief for Linda. After the third dose in June 2020, Linda recalled, “I felt like — every step that I took — someone had a flamethrower at the bottoms of my feet and just shot flames up my legs and out my shoulders, down my arms, and even when I was sitting, I just felt like I was smoldering in heat.”

The doctors advised Linda — then in her early 50s — that there was nothing else they could do because no therapies seemed to work, and they would shift to only treating the symptoms.

“That’s really scary, because it’s only going to get worse. They can’t stop it,” she recalled thinking. “They could do nothing for my pain. I was going to a pain clinic. I was maxed out on pain medications.”

She became depressed because she could no longer go places and participate in activities.

“Over the 24 years, I’d gotten really good at faking it, and people didn’t even know days when I was just miserable,” she said. “But I couldn’t fake it anymore. I was in so much pain I couldn’t hide the pain that I was in, so I just didn’t leave the house.”

Connection, Forgiveness and Relief

In November 2020, the Prince family went to Florida for a visit with sister Lois Hitchcock-Faraj. Brother-in-law Asaad Faraj connected them with Dee Pinckard, a friend in Tennessee who was healed of Lyme disease after 15 years. Over the phone, Pinckard asked Linda if she believed God could and would want to heal her.

“Of course, I said yes, and he told me that God required me to ask forgiveness of anyone that I’ve harmed and to forgive anyone I was holding offenses toward,” Linda said.

During the call, she immediately thought of two people, and three other people came to mind that evening. She made a list on her phone. The next night, she called Pinckard. He asked her to share the people’s first names only and to refrain from providing details about why she needed to forgive them.

“We prayed for myself to be forgiven of the sin in my own life that I hadn’t dealt with, and then we repeated a prayer for each one of the people in my list — asking for God to forgive me for holding an offense,” she said.

As they prayed together, Linda became excited as Pinckard began to reveal details about the offenses that she hadn’t shared with him. Pinckard said he would rip up his list of the names and asked her to delete the list off her phone, and then he told her that he knew she was free of the unforgiveness and her own sin.

“I literally felt like I was two feet off the ground,” she recalled. “He had David get me a bottle of water and drink it periodically while he prayed for me on the speaker phone. … He started praying, and as I started drinking the water, I felt like the cool water didn’t just land in my stomach like it usually would. It just kept flowing down my legs and cooling off the burning that was going on in my legs and going down my arms.”

Linda said that Pinckard asked about the T cells that were connected to her MS diagnosis and then “he prayed for every nerve ending in my body to be made whole again and any damage done over the past 24 years to be gone.”

He also instructed her to get a good night’s sleep. She awoke early the next morning, which was Thanksgiving Day.

“I put my one foot over the side of the bed, and it hit the floor. Usually when that happens, the first ‘bolt of lightning’ for the day goes up my leg,” she said. “I felt nothing, and my eyes went wide open. I looked in that mirror on the dresser and gingerly put my other foot down — nothing. I felt nothing, no pain.”

She stepped into the hallway and saw her brother-in-law. She jumped up and down and told him that she was healed, and he high-fived her and praised God.

“I burst into their bedroom and jumped on my sister’s bed shaking her: ‘I’m healed! I’m healed,’” Linda said. “We started jumping up and down. We just held hands and jumped up and down and danced together, and she asked if I told David yet.”

Linda realized she hadn’t told her husband, and she found him with Jacob and exclaimed, “David, David, I’m healed!” David calmly turned and replied, “I know.

“Later that day, he told me that during the night, I was going to sleep, and I was very restless like I usually am because of the pain, and all of a sudden I just got really calm, and he knew I was healed. He knew that before I even woke up the next morning,” Linda said.

As the day progressed, she realized she could see out of both eyes, which she hadn’t been able to do for 24 years.

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“It’s really cool to be one of those people who can actually say, ‘I was blind, but now I see.”

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“Losing the sight in my left eye was the first symptom I experienced 24 years earlier. I had just learned to adjust to it. Most people didn’t even know that I didn’t have sight in that eye,” she said. “I closed my right eye, which used to be my good eye, and I could still see as perfectly. … It’s really cool to be one of those people who can actually say, ‘I was blind, but now I see.’”

That evening, they called Pinckard who said he also received a word from God for them about Jacob.

“He said that his [Jacob’s] healing would be over time, but it was real. Now we’re thanking God for Jacob’s healing and mine. David and I have always laid hands on him at night and prayed over him. The verse I pray over him every night is Isaiah 32:4, ‘May the mind of the rash know and understand, and the stammering tongue be fluent and clear,’” Linda said. “Now our prayers have turned into praise because it’s just a matter of time. The next testimony from our household will be from Jacob’s lips, to God be the glory.”

When the Princes returned to New York, David gave an abbreviated account of Linda’s healing in a sermon that was part of Cross Creek’s Christmas series. In January 2021, she posted a Facebook video with a longer account of her healing, and people increasingly began viewing and sharing her testimony.

“There were a lot of people who’d been at our church the whole time, and they really did know how bad it [the multiple sclerosis] was,” Linda said. “It just catapulted excitement.”

The church held a prayer and healing service (via Zoom because of COVID-19 restrictions at the time).

“About 86 people were healed that night of some major, major things,” Linda said. “We had a site for people to write in and tell us their testimony of healing, and I just bawled through it. We were excited. Since then, we’ve started having our prayer and communion night every week.”

The healings haven’t been limited to one service.

“People have gone to our website and watched the previous prayer and healing services, and we’re still finding that people are being healed even just watching those prayer and healing services,” David said. “We do not have it figured out. … We’re just willing to be who God wants us to be in the moment right now.”

Shifting Perspectives

David said that he “had been a pastor who believed in the supernatural,” and Free Methodists believe in miracles “but we don’t do well at allowing those things to be who we are. We say it’s who we are, but it’s not what we do.”

He reflected that he previously had a negative experience in a Pentecostal setting, and, after Jacob was born, some people told the Princes that they were responsible for Jacob’s challenges.

“There was a lot of hurt,” he said. “Ultimately, when I became a senior pastor, I’m like, ‘There’s no way I’m allowing that to happen. We’re not going to be that kind of church.’ It took Linda’s healing for me to come to grips with where I’ve been, and I needed to repent that I had been in essence stopping what it is that God wanted to do.”

David emphasized that not all healing is physical: “Healing happens every time somebody accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior. That is the greatest of all healings that can take place.”

Some church members had been inspired by Linda’s faith in the midst of battling MS, and her example helped them as they faced physical, mental or financial difficulties.

“God used her to bring courage to a lot of people,” David said. “I just think He wanted to ramp it up 10 times over and say, ‘Hey, not only that, but I can do this.’”

Click here to listen to the full podcast. +