No one wants to receive the news, “You have cancer.” And no one wants to receive that news while lying on a gurney in a crowded hospital hallway. But both those things happened to Rebekah of worship duo Brad + Rebekah—the day before preorders opened for their new album, The Sound of Heaven.
What neither of them knew was that God had a miracle in store.
In a whirlwind diagnosis process, Rebekah had gone from what she thought was a “baby mama tummy” to realizing it was a hard mass to a doctor visit to an ultrasound to a CT scan and then to the Emergency Room. The doctor who spoke to her in that crowded hallway identified the mass as a malignant abdominal sarcoma. Rebekah needed major surgery—and major prayer.
“From the beginning,” she says, “I just began to pray for a miracle. I wanted God to heal me. … I thought I had this amazing plan that the tumor would just disappear and all the doctors would get saved, right?”
Instead, she prayed a specific prayer—one that, Rebekah says, “doesn’t even make sense. Physically, medically, I don’t know why I chose to say the prayer this way. But I asked God that He would make the tumor fall out of my body, that it would just shrivel up and fall out.”
And then 12 weeks went by: “12 weeks of waiting and me praying every time, every new CT scan or biopsy that [the tumor] would have disappeared, and it was still there,” she says. “And rolling into the surgery room, I was even thinking, You can still make it happen.“
That’s when God did the unexpected. After only 2 1/2 hours of a planned six- to eight-hour surgery, her doctor came out to update the family: “We’re all done. The surgery’s over; she’s in recovery. She’s fine.”
And then the doctor added the words she couldn’t have known ahead of time: “Once we got her asleep and opened her up, the tumor practically fell out of her body.”
Rebekah had never shared her prayer with her doctor. When she learned of the doctor’s words, she says, “In that moment, it just felt like it was God’s way of saying, ‘Even though I’m not going to choose your plan, … I want to let you know that I heard you. I’m in this. … In those moments when you were praying and seeking Me, I was with you.”
Listen to the podcast to hear more of Brad + Rebekah’s incredible story.
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