At Newday 15, Oliver Woods, from Maidstone, Kent, told me about his immediate and total healing from Meares Irlen Syndrome at Newday 14. He began by giving me some of the background to the prior deterioration in his eyesight.
Oliver, aged 13, said: “I wore glasses from year 5, from the age of 9. These glasses came from a normal optician.
“Then they looked at my eyes more, and realised that what was wrong with me wasn’t what they first thought it was. By this stage, I couldn’t read a book even with my glasses, it was fuzzy and blurry. I couldn’t read anything without glasses! I would got loads and loads of headaches. I was straining my eyes to read and write. My eyes were watering.
“They phoned the hospital, and I got into the hospital appointment system and the hospital diagnosed it as Meares Irlen Syndrome in 2012. I had mixed emotions when I got the greeny blue lens glasses. I felt quite upset that I had to wear glasses at all. Let alone the green lenses.
“This is a letter from the optician. It says: ‘Green 5 + 4 + 1 Turquoise 5 4’ which means they were very heavily prescribed.
“But anyway, I came to Newday last year and you prayed for healing.
“The prayer ended and my friend had one of them Gideon’s Bibles, the little ones, and they’ve got small writing so there is absolutely no way I would have been able to read that without my green lenses, but I did! I could read it fine!
“I was shocked because I was quite new to Christianity. A friend of mine had got me into it. I hadn’t been coming to church long and not that regularly. I wasn’t that into it.
“But to be instantly and completely healed, I couldn’t believe it. I was very overwhelmed.
“I went to have another hospital appointment a couple of weeks after Newday 14, I had it booked in anyway, and the lady, she was just so shocked, because before, on the previous visit, before I was healed, it had been the worst it’s ever been.
Picking up a white piece of card, with nothing on it but black evenly spaced dots, Oliver said: “This is one of the exercises they had. You try and focus on the spot. It’s contractions really. Now I can focus on the nearest dot to me. I could never do that before.
“Another was an image on a stick and as it gets closer, with the condition I had, the image used to go into two. But now I can bring it back to one. I did it until it touched my nose!
“After all the tests and the end of the appointment, the lady at the hospital discharged me. I don’t need the green lenses, I haven’t got Meares Irlen Syndrome and I don’t need any glasses at all. The lady looked really surprised and astonished by it.”
When I asked him about what difference his healing has made, Oliver replied:
“Being healed has really helped with my faith. It was a double blessing. Firstly I didn’t have to wear any glasses anymore. And secondly, I was being bullied quite badly. Well, since I didn’t wear the blue green glasses, they couldn’t bully me for it. It’s just a huge weight lifted off my mind.”