My Father's Miraculous Healing
By Shirley Ann Kelbaugh Cole
I was born on April 13, 1937, on 9th Avenue, Parkersburg, West Virginia, into the home of a very sick father, Albert E. Kelbaugh. My father and mother, Mardell Balderson Kelbaugh, were very happy, young people when they married. Their parents' farms were adjacent to each other. My father was twenty-four years old, my mother, sixteen.
But after one and a half years of marriage, my father became very ill with tuberculosis. Back in the 1930s, to have TB was a death sentence. There was very little that could be done for a patient. At that time my older sister, Eleanor, was already a member of the Kelbaugh family, and I was on the way. By the time I arrived, my father was too ill to work. In those days, we had no social programs for financial help. We were at the mercy of the neighbors (and neighbors were neighborly in those days) and the factory where my father had worked since he was sixteen years old. To say the least, my mother had her hands full.
When I was two and one-half years old, the state health department gave my parents an ultimatum—either my father would go away to a sanitarium hospital or they (the state) would take Eleanor and me and place us in a children's home. It was a painful decision. My father left by train for the Hopemont Sanitarium.
After he left, neighbors and friends helped my mother to fumigate the house and put up new wallpaper, etc. After about three months in the hospital, my father picked up a Bible in his room, placed there by the Gideons, and read it. He knew nothing about the Bible, save that it was a book about God. He had not been in a church service since he was seven years old. That was his age when he lost his father from a very rare bone disease. His father was a school teacher of a one-room school and the song leader at the community's Methodist church. My grandmother was left with five children, the youngest eighteen months old, and the oldest nine years. They made their living from their little farm and lived in a log cabin. Grandma never took them to church, even though she tried to live a good life.
My father read in Genesis where God created man. He said to himself, "If God created man, He can repair him." (Dad was a mechanical engineer.) He had never heard a message taught on healing. A few days after reading this, he decided that he must get out of that hospital. He decided to go home. He packed his small cardboard suitcase and dropped it out the window, followed by himself. He thumbed a ride to the train station with not a nickel in his pocket. He jumped a freight train home. When he arrived home, my mother was astounded, to say the least. She heard a knock on the door and opened it to find Dad standing there. He could not even speak. One lung was two-thirds gone, and a third of the other lung was gone. Also, his larynx was deteriorating very fast. This was the latter part of June. He was home. In the evenings they sat on the front porch of the house. They could hear singing in the distance. This went on for a couple of weeks or so. Then, on a Friday evening, they took Eleanor and me by the hand and walked the two or three blocks from our house. There was a gospel tent, a group of Apostolic Pentecostal people, worshiping the Lord. Brother John Carr was the pastor, and Sister Willie Johnson was the evangelist. My, what a time those folks were having!
There was no place to sit down. My parents stood in the back, then walked back home. On the way home, Dad told Mom, "If I can get what those people have, I'll be alright." Mom later told us she had thought to herself, I want you to be alright, but I'm not sure I want you to get what those people have.
The next evening, Saturday, they went again, this time early enough to get a seat. When Sister Willie Johnson invited those who needed something from God to come to the front, Dad was the first to step out. Mom said that she had not intended to go, but something just drew her to the front. They repented and were greatly blessed that night.
The next day, Sunday afternoon, they were baptized in the Ohio River in Jesus name. I was a small child, but I can still picture them being baptized. I think the reason I remember is because it frightened me so much. I was sure they were drowning my Mom and Dad. That evening, back to the tent meeting we went. After Sister Willie Johnson finished preaching, my folks went up for prayer again. By now, Dad was so weak he could not hold his arm up. He moved his mouth in prayer but there was no sound. The people gathered around him, praying with all their hearts. All of a sudden, there came a loud voice from my father's lips, but it was not English. He was speaking in other tongues, just like in the Book of Acts, chapter two, verses one through four. Oh, what great joy! One of the saints told my mother to look at my father. When she saw him being so blessed, God filled her with the Holy Ghost, too!
The next day, Mom asked Dad to walk up to the corner to the grocery store. He had been worshiping the Lord all morning. As he started to get up out of the rocking chair on the front porch, the power of God came upon him and shook him. It was like something took hold of his right hand and began to pound up the right side of his chest, then the left side and then up the middle. He felt directed to go to the back porch. It was a very bright, hot summer day in July. He lifted his hands and looked into the sun for over four hours.
Neighbors began to fill the yard. Someone called Sister Willie Johnson and told her that the man they had baptized the day before had lost his mind. She came up. After four hours, my father came to himself and said that it was like he had been carried away in the Spirit. He had been unaware of all those people during that four-hour period. He began to witness to them. He told them, "I have just been healed. I will die someday, but not of tuberculosis. God just carried me away and healed me." Some mocked, telling him things such as, "Your family needs ice. Freeze that bucket of water." But Dad began to get stronger by the day and gained weight.
The health department demanded that he go back to the hospital. Dad went to Dr. Judy, who had been his doctor before going to the hospital. He weighed him, and Dad had gained weight. They took x-rays, and his lungs were healed. One-third of one lung was gone and two-thirds of the other, but they were completely free from tuberculosis. After not being able to work for three and one-half years, within six weeks he went back to the same factory to the same job. They made him have an x-ray every year until he retired. Dad received his healing in 1941. He lived for sixty more years after that. He was faithful to the Lord to the day he died in 2001.
Above: Brother Billy Cole, Pastor Albert E. Kelbaugh, and Sister Willie Johnson, the evangelist from when Bro. Kelbaugh was healed.
Joseph, Doug; Shirley Cole; Billy Cole; LaDonna Joseph. The Life and Ministry of Billy and Shirley Cole . Douglas G. Joseph. Kindle Edition.
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