From that night on Charles Price's ministry was radically changed. He called his new message "the full gospel," by which he meant that no part of the New Testament message would henceforth be left out of his preaching. He became known especially for his in sistence that healings like the ones recorded in the Bible were meant to be part of the normal experience of the church in every age.

 And now Dr. Price was in nearby Maywood holding a tent meet ing of his own. As I neared the spot, my heart sank. Cars were parked half a mile away, and when I finally reached the huge tent, every seat was taken with scores standing on the grass outside.

 Dr. Price was speaking from a platform hung with red and white bunting, a sandy-haired middle-aged man with rimless spectacles that glittered in the overhead spotlights. He finished his sermon and invited any in need of healing to come forward for prayers. Hun dreds of people surged into the aisles. I looked at my watch. It was nine P.M. I would never get near him tonight. But the thought of my church on their knees before God made me stay. Slowly the long lines inched forward. Ten. Ten-thirty. Eleven. The ushers were trying to close the meeting. "Dr. Price will be here again tomorrow night, sister. . . ." "Dr. Price will be glad to pray with you tomorrow night, brother."

 Dr. Price was gathering up his Bible and the bottle of oil with which he anointed the sick. "Sir!" I called out. He turned and squinted to see past the bright lights. I dodged past an usher. "Dr. Price, my name is Demos Shakarian, and my sister's been in an automobile accident, and the doctors in Downey Hospital say she can't live, and we wondered if you'd come," I said, getting it all out in one breath.

 Dr. Price closed his eyes and I saw the weariness in his face. He remained standing there a moment. Then abruptly he opened his eyes. "I will come," he said.

 I hurried ahead of him through the slowly dispersing crowd, fretting each time someone stopped him. Dr. Price noticed my im patience. "Don't be anxious, son," he said. "Your sister will be healed tonight."

 I stared at the man. How could he make such a blandly certain statement? But of course, I reminded myself, he hadn't seen the X rays; he couldn't have any idea how serious the situation was.

 My skepticism must have showed in my face, because as I started up the motor he said, "Let me tell you, young man, why I am so sure your sister will he healed." Years before, he related, back in 1924, a short while after his experience in Miss McPherson's meeting, he had been motoring through Canada when he came to the little town of Paris, Ontario. As he drove through the village he felt a strange urging to turn to the right. He did so. Then he felt a compelling urge to turn left. In this manner Dr. Price was guided through the town until he came abreast of the Methodist church. There he seemed to get the order: Stop.

Without any idea why he was doing so, Charles Price rang the doorbell of the pastor's house next door and introduced himself. He was, he said, an evangelist—and suddenly he heard himself asking if he could hold a series of meetings in this church. Much to Dr. Price's surprise, the pastor said yes.

 Among the people who attended the meetings, Dr. Price's atten tion was especially drawn to apathetically crippled young woman, whose husband carried her in each evening, and laid her on a cushion on one of the front benches. Inquiring about them, he learned that their names were Louis and Eva Johnston, that they came from Laurel, Ontario, and that Eva Johnston had been bed ridden and in constant pain for over ten years following an attack of rheumatic fever. Dr. Price kept looking down at those shrivelled and twisted legs, the right one grotesquely drawn behind the other. The couple had gone to twenty different doctors in Toronto, he was told; they'd tried
electric treatments, X rays, surgery, heat massage, only to have the deformity grow worse each year. And yet__as he preached__Dr. Price knew that tonight Eva Johnston was going to be healed. He knew because each time he looked toward her he felt physical warmth envelop him, like a heavy blanket settling over his shoulders.

  A shiver ran down my spine as I recalled my identical experience with Florence's ebow. With difficulty I kept my eyes on the road ahead.

 Dr. Price interpreted the sensation of weight and warmth as the Presence of God. He told the congregation that they were about to witness a very special miracle. He stepped down from the platform, laid his hands on the woman's head, and began to pray. Before the entire congregation, the woman's back drew erect, the twisted legs straightened and grew visibly longer, and although she had not taken a step for over ten years, Eva Wilson Johnston got to her feet and walked__almost danced__the
entire length of the aisle. Dr. Price was still in touch with the Johnstons; the healing had been permanent.

 "And tonight," Charles Price went on, "we are going to see another miracle, because the moment you spoke to me that 'blanket' fell over my shoulders again. It's there now. God is in this situation."

 I swallowed hard, for a moment not trusting myself to speak. In the eleven years since my own experience I had never heard of a similar thing.

 It was half past eleven when we reached Downey. The front door to the little thirty-three-bed hospital was locked and we had to ring the bell. At last a nurse appeared. "I'm glad you're here," she told me. "Florence is bad tonight."

 I asked if Dr. Price might come with me into the room and he, too, was fitted out with a sterile gown and mask. Then the two of us entered Florence's room.

 She lay in her bed of salve, half hidden by a thicket of tubes and pulley wires. I introduced Charles to her and she nodded weakly.

 Doctor Price took the bottle of oil from his pocket and poured a little in his hand. Then reaching through the apparatus around the bed, he placed his fingertips on Florence's forehead. "Lord Jesus," he said, "we thank You for being here. We thank You for healing our sister."

 His strong gentle voice continued to pray but I no longer heard the words. For an extraordinary change had come over the atmosphere in the room. It seemed more . . . more crowded somehow. The air itself seemed to have become thick, almost as though we were standing in water.

 All at once, on the high bed, Florence twisted. Dr. Price jumped back as one of the heavy steel traction weights swung past his head. Florence rolled to one side as far as the wires would allow, then to the other. Now weights all over the room were swinging, circling, as she rocked back and forth. I knew I should try to stop her__ doctors had said over and over that the shattered hip must remain immobile. But I stayed where I was, wrapped and bathed in that pulsing air.

 A groan came from deep in Florence's throat, but whether of pain or a kind of wordless ecstasy, I could not tell. For twenty incredible minutes Florence continued to toss and roll in her wire prison, while Dr.Price and I dodged the wildly swinging weights. At every second I expected a nurse to burst through the doorway and demand to know what we were doing; I knew the room was checked every ten minutes. But no one came; it was as though the three of us had been transported out of ordinary space and time altogether into a world inhabited only by that warm all-invading Presence.

 And just as suddenly, it was an ordinary hospital room again. Florence lay still on the bed, gradually the weights ceased their circling. For a long moment she stared at me.
"Demos," she whispered, "Jesus healed me." I bent down above her. "I know," I said. When the nurse stepped into the room a few minutes later, she was delighted to find Florence sleeping soundly. ...The next morning, after driving Dr. Price to his home in Pasadena, I was still asleep when Dr. Haygood phoned.

 "I want you to come down and look at these X rays," was all he would say.
The X-ray room was jammed when I arrived, doctors, nurses, lab technicians all crowding to see. Pinned against a lighted screen were eight X-ray plates. The first seven showed a crushed and dislocated left hip and pelvis. The bone was almost pulverized in places, the bone chips more widely dispersed in each succeeding photograph. The eighth slide, taken that morning, showed a pelvis that was normal in every respect. The two sides of the picture were identical: the left hip bone as well formed as the right. Only some hair-fine lines indicated that once__surely many years ago__this solid bone had ever been injured.

 Florence remained in the hospital another month while the burns on her back continued to heal. The night before she was discharged she had a dream, a strange one in which twenty-five glasses of water stood on a table for her to drink. "I believe those are the years I'm to have here on earth," she told Rose and me when we came next day to bring her home. "I believe God is giving me twenty-five more years in which to serve Him."

 I didn't know about that. I only knew that with my own eyes I had seen God's power. What I had yet to learn was my own weakness.