One Saturday Morning
A Testimony

In March, 2006, Gisela awoke early one Saturday morning to a frightening experience—she felt a very strange aching sensation in one side of her face.   She went to the bathroom mirror and was stunned by what she saw.  Her face was twisted as though from a stroke.  Not wanting to alarm Edmund, she let him sleep while she hurriedly dressed and rushed to the emergency clinic.  The good news was that she had not had a stroke, but she had been stricken with Bell’s palsy, which neither she nor Edmund had ever heard of before that morning.

Gisela’s face was frozen in a contortion, one eye unable to close.  The right side of her face and neck had been affected.  She suffered lack of muscular control, constant ache and tingling sensations, and difficulty swallowing that caused frequent choking—especially when drinking water.  Worst of all, the Ministry was attacked.  Gisela’s right vocal chord seemed to become dormant, and singing became extremely difficult.   The Palsy had strangely affected the hearing in her right ear.  Everything sounded far away and hollow, so it was difficult to judge the distance of sounds, and her equilibrium was thrown off, causing balance issues.  Loud noise (such as DEVOTED’s own voices and music coming through monitor speakers on stage) hurt her ears and caused headaches.  Having near-perfect pitch before, Gisela now struggled to harmonize with Edmund as they sang together; and because her right vocal chord was rendered inactive, her throat hurt and bled after performances.

The devil was after DEVOTED, ultimately, and Gisela directly.  Gisela had no control over her facial expressions.  Besides singing having become physically challenging, it was also embarrassing for her to be on stage before live audiences and cameras.  Folks stared.  Some said things like, “What happened to your face?”  What Gisela had loved was now drudgery.  The enemy’s plan was to drive her out of ministry, or at least to cause her to dread it so much that she would become completely distracted and useless.  Gisela came to understand this, and in June, 2006, she made a commitment to never quit—no matter what, but to praise God and honor her calling.  She never missed an engagement.

Gisela and Edmund saw several specialists.  Some gave hope, some none, describing Bell’s Palsy sufferers who recovered instantaneously—just as mysteriously as they had been stricken, while telling of other victims who had recovered after several years, but continued to suffer some effects; and even a few who had required surgery to restore their facial contours.  Gisela continued to sing, while Edmund continued to pray and believe with her.  Each night he would anoint his wife and pray a prayer of supplication and thanksgiving for her complete recovery—seemingly to no avail.  The ill-effects sometimes worsened.  Sometimes, on a good day, it would appear that Gisela was improving, then, suddenly, her symptoms would recur with a vengeance.

Then, finally, one day—after three years—Gisela noticed that she hadn’t awakened at night choking (as she often had) in quite some time.  She also realized that the odd ache and strange neural sensations and tics on the right side of her face had all but vanished.  Her right eye closed, and the twisting of her face relaxed.  The inflammation in her vocal chords, along with the bleeding and discomfort while singing that resulted from it, had stopped.  Where she had been physically unable to smile before, she now beamed a glaring grin.  God had done it.

Gisela still bears faint reminders of her bout with Bell’s palsy, but the beauty of it all is that she made up her mind in the beginning that she would not let God down.  She would do what He had gifted her to do—even if she had to do it with a grimace.  (Never losing her sense of humor, Gisela once laughingly asked, “Who in the world is Bell, and what does he have to do with my face?”)  The end of the story?—God is great, Gisela wins, and DEVOTED continues.