By Ryan Zepeda —
Because he didn’t much believe in prayer, Roy Davidson declined when some men on a missions trip offered to pray for his sharp ulcer pain.
“Well, gosh, these are just common guys,” he thought to himself, as narrated in a CBN video. “How could they heal anybody?”
Pain was his constant companion since age 31 when he was diagnosed with inoperable stomach ulcers that, if not controlled, could be fatal.
“I just worked with pain. I lived with pain. I slept with pain. I ate with pain. I partied with pain,” Roys says. “Wherever we went, I just lived with pain.”
Additionally, his stomach was lined with scar tissue.
Roy quit his stressful corporate job.
During his quest for a peaceful life, he went on a mission trip to Haiti. That’s when the ulcers flared up worse than ever before.
“I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t walk. This was like a knife stabbing pain. It was an aggravating pain, a gnawing pain,” he recalls. “The doctors told me that if they couldn’t control the bleeding, if they couldn’t get the ulcers under control, that a condition like that could be fatal. It could kill you.”
That’s when the other men on the trip and the local pastors stepped forward to compassionately offer prayer.
Roy believed in God. He was skeptical about God’s direct and personal intervention through prayer however.
“To be honest,” Roy admits, “I didn’t give them enough credit.”
He decided to tough it out.
But after two day of worsening symptoms, the men came again to pray.
One Haitian pastor pulled out some cooking oil to anoint him — a move Roy associated with superstition.
“Oh, good grief! This is the crowning insult,” he scoffed. “They’re going to anoint me with cooking oil!”
But after he was dabbed on the forehead with Mazola, something happened.
“The whole room started spinning, I started getting real dizzy, and I couldn’t see a thing,” he says. “I could hear them. They were all praying in tongues. Then all of a sudden I saw myself way up in the corner of the room. I’m looking down and I’m lying on an Army cot. It was like they call those ‘out-of-body experiences.’
Roy woke up hours later. He felt no pain.
“My stomach felt funny but didn’t hurt,” he remembers. “I noticed I didn’t have any bleeding that day and I wasn’t having any pain, really. It was kind of gone.”
When he got back to the U.S., he still felt pain free. He went to the doctor, and to his surprise, the doctor was astonished by what he found.
“There was nothing there,” says Dr. John Eckrich. “I mean, it basically looked normal. What I thought was strange and still do, I really didn’t even find some of the scar tissue which had previously been there.”
Roy has lived ulcer free and pain free for 13 years onward (the video of his testimony was filmed in 2008). And he’s quick to share his testimony of God’s healing power.
“God chose to do things for me and reveal Himself to me and perform miracles on me,” says Roy. “You never know when He’s going to move or when He’s going to do something. I 
couldn’t talk enough or testify enough about God and what He does or what He can do. And my life has just been a joy ever since.”
Ryan Zepeda studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica.
