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Christmas 2009
Christmas 2009

Nothing is impossible

Danny Maloney knows the miraculous power of prayer

I am a volunteer at the Salvos’ family stores in Manunda, Cairns, Qld, and a recovering alcoholic.
Thanks to the Salvos’ Bridge Program, which I had to go through four times, I am sober today and loving it!
I wanted to share some amazing instances where I believe the power of prayer has saved my life.

In 1975 I had a car accident, breaking the C2 vertebrae in my neck. My mother was told I would not survive 36 hours—she prayed for me and here I am!

In 2001, I went fishing with two mates. I was as drunk as a skunk. After jumping from a rock, I fell, hitting my head as I sank to the bottom. My mate told me that they rang the police and ambulance and could not find me for about 14 minutes. When I regained consciousness in the hospital, the doctor told me that by everything
scientific I should be dead or a vegetable. He also told me he rang my mother in Melbourne and asked her to come and switch off my life support machine. But my mother prayed for me!

In 2002, I was admitted to the Mt Isa Hospital suffering severe alcohol poisoning. After examining me and doing some blood tests, the specialist said, ‘Mr Maloney your liver is shot to pieces’— meaning I had sclerosis of the liver, and it was cancerous. The nursing sister who
was accompanying them was a personal friend. She came back to me after the ward rounds and said, ‘He shouldn’t have told you like that’ and we had a hug and a cry together.

That afternoon, I had three visitors, a mate who is an electrical technician and was working for the Salvos, and two ladies who were elders at the church I attended at the time. I told them that the specialist had virtually pronounced a death sentence on me. With that, Tina, one of the ladies said ‘Danny, we are not going to accept that, and tomorrow we, the whole church are going to pray and ask God for a miracle.’
My mate said he would pray also.

On Monday I had more blood tests done. On Tuesday morning, the doctor came walking towards me reading my blood test results. She stopped in her tracks, looked at me and then the test results, and her exact words were, ‘Mr Maloney, I don’t know what is going on here. According to the tests, there has been a dramatic increase in your blood cell count, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you at all.’

My road to recovery took a long time, but God didn’t give up on me. Two years later I was in Darwin staying at the Bakhita hostel run by St Vincent de Paul for men with alcohol and drug problems. I had, by then, begun drinking methylated spirits and was feeling very sore in my liver, so I went to the hostel’s doctor in the Nightcliff medical centre. I told him I had pains in or around my liver and that my father was an
alcoholic who had died of cancer of the liver at age 53 and it really worried me.
He arranged for me to have a liver ultrasound. When I returned with the results he read the specialist’s diagnosis, and said to me, ‘Danny, there is nothing wrong with your liver, and as a matter of fact there is no fat at all around your liver, and for a man of your age that is impossible. You have a liver equivalent to that of a newborn baby!’

God still does miracles today—there is incredible power in prayer. Reading my Bible and actually thinking and respecting what God has in store for me has opened my eyes to how I treat my body. I am thinking more about what I am putting into my body, what I do with it, the people I associate with and the actions I do.
God keeps telling me to trust in him with all aspects of my life and this is what I am doing.

Story republished courtesy of Warcry.