It was four o’clock on a late October afternoon – time to pack the equipment. Jim McCutcheon stood on a railroad cross-tie, signaling to the driver, and either the inexperienced driver did not see the signal or he misinterpreted it, for he made a wrong turn. The bulldozer struck the timber on which Jim was standing. It flew up, striking him on the leg, and tossing him ten feet in the air. He landed hard on the ground on his right hip, and whether the blow from the timber did the damage – or the force of the heavy fall of a 210-pound man no – one knows.
They took him on a stretcher to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Lorain. There they discovered that the ball of his hip was broken off square and clean, “just as if you had taken a hack-saw and cut it off.” Two days later he was put in a cast, and six days later, on November 6, 1947, the first of the five operations – each seeming more painful than the last – was performed. After ten months of persistent, severe pain, and five operations, he was not only any better but worse than before the first surgery had been performed, because of the progressive decalcification.
A Wife’s Faith and a Husband’s Skepticism
It was while visiting her husband as he lay in Allegheny General Hospital, that Alma’s attention was drawn to the services. Each day on her way to the hospital she passed Carnegie Hall in the streetcar, saw the crowds, and heard the singing. Her curiosity was aroused and she stopped in the auditorium one day on the way to the hospital. Already a committed Christian and a woman of great faith, she knew what it was all about. Subsequently, she sent in several prayer requests, unknown to Jim for as he says, “I belonged to a church, but I wasn’t much of a Christian, and Alma knew I didn’t believe in divine healing.”
The doctors had told Jim now that his only hope lay in entirely replacing the broken hip ball with an artificial one of plastic and silver. This sixth operation had already been scheduled, when Alma’s sister joined Alma in pleading with Jim to go to a service. As he thought the matter over, he decided if he were going at all he had better go soon – before it was time to enter the hospital for his next operation.
The Turning Point
Unable to stand even two minutes without support, this day he stood for three hours waiting for the doors to open, and when he finally got inside the hall, he found all the seats taken. By now exhausted, discouraged, and in great pain, he went back home and told his wife what had happened.
The next week his sister-in-law offered to take him and he accepted her offer. This time to be safe, they went armed with folding chairs. “I went in the doors with a big heavy cane in one hand and the folding chair in the other,” recalls Jim, “and the first thing I knew I was sitting on the platform. How I got there, I’ll never know. I must have been just carried and pushed along with the crowd.”
The Miracle Moment
His eldest married daughter, who had been listening regularly to the broadcasts, was particularly eager to go to Carnegie Hall for a service, so the following week he went with her while Alma babysat with the children. They got seats this time midway back in the hall. Suddenly in the midst of the service, “a great heat came over me,” Jim says. “It felt as if there were a fire under my chair, and the sweat just poured off me.” His daughter had her hand on his knee, and she says in recollection, “Waves of electricity seemed to go from his leg into my arm.”
The first thing Jim knew, and to his utter amazement, his cane was stashed under the seat and he was up on his feet and out in the aisle, his daughter beside him. Without a moment’s hesitation or doubt or fear, he walked, unaided down the aisle to the platform. Without hesitation, he climbed the high steps to the platform. “When I got up there,” he says, “Miss Kuhlman told me to lift my leg high and stamp my foot. I did, and I’ve been doing it ever since!”
The only evidence that there was ever anything wrong is that he walks with a slight limp. He gave his heart to the Lord that day in 1949, and he has brought many to Christ by his witness – among the first, his own nephew.
Bless the Lord O my soul and forget not all His benefits; Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases.
Psalm 103:2-3
Miraculous Monday: 20th March 2023
Miraculous Monday 032
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