A blind girl receives her sight

This is one in a series of daily excerpts from “The Legend of Morris Cerullo: How God Used an Orphan to Change the World.”

By Morris Cerullo

The back of the stadium suddenly erupted into a mass of commotion that slowly swept its way toward the platform, where Morris passively stood his ground.

A smattering of officials on the stage rose from their seats to get a better look at what was happening. A dozen feet in front of them stood Morris, narrowing his eyes to get a fix on what was coming.

What they witnessed was many people with their hands over their heads passing a little baby over the top of the crowd, one by one, carefully but quickly propelling the prone baby toward the platform.

The stadium once again exploded in yelling and general chaos.

Morris turned to his left and asked his young interpreter what was happening.

“Brother Cerullo,” the boy responded without shifting his gaze from the center of the action, “while you were preaching a child back there who was born blind can now see and was grabbing for his parents’ eyes, nose, ears, and head. The place is going wild.”

They continued to move the child toward the platform, passing her over the heads of the people row after row until the tiny body reached the front of the stadium.

Morris looked down at the baby held aloft in the front row and smiled.

The little girl was gaping in confusion at her unusual journey through the stadium crowd. The poor child had never seen anything before, and suddenly she was being passed through the hands of total strangers amidst shrieks of awe and fear with the bright stadium lights illuminating her path to the platform.

Meanwhile, her startled and unsettled parents were doing their best to push through the humanity that had spilled into the aisles of the stadium during the pandemonium that had broken loose. When they, too, reached the end of the line at the foot of the platform they retrieved their daughter and waved their fingers in front of her eyes. For the first time in her life she followed their fingers everywhere.

Suddenly she changed her focus from the fingers to the closest face, which turned out to be her father’s face. A big smile took over her face as she noticed her daddy’s nose and started grabbing for it. Her father, tears in his eyes, smiled and laughed along with her as she played with his nose. Beside them, the girl’s mother was worshiping God in Creole, the Haitian language, while tears of joy drenched her face.

Suddenly, a prestigious official seated in the front row behind Morris jumped to his feet and started yelling in Creole.

“What’s he saying?” Morris asked his interpreter.

“He’s saying, ‘Oh my God! That’s my neighbors.’”

Word was circulating throughout the stadium about the miracle the white man’s God had performed on the little girl.

So far the witch doctors had managed to do nothing but chant.

But the show wasn’t over yet.

In another part of the stadium word started to spread of another supernatural healing. Then from the opposite side of the crowd another miracle was identified. In just a few minutes’ time there was no zone in the entire stadium where some miracle had not been discovered.

Healing dozens of people’s ailments and diminishing the stature and iron grip of the witch doctors would have been spectacular enough. Such a demonstration of love and power would have driven thousands of those present to their knees with droves seeking forgiveness and salvation.

But God was not done that evening.

The spotlight returned to the witch doctors, but not in the way they had planned.

The black magic practitioners still stood out in the crowd because of the red shirts they had donned. Now, many of them were visibly weeping as they watched the little blind girl receive her sight and bask in the beauty of the world God had created.

Throughout the stadium other witch doctors could be seen falling to their knees with their heads thrown back and their arms lifted high, crying out to Jesus Christ to save their wretched souls. They sought forgiveness for manipulating the people and for holding them in the grip of fear. They sought God’s grace for their masquerading as agents of power and for blocking people from the true power source.

The breaking of the witch doctors’ stronghold opened the floodgates for revival that evening. Morris seized the microphone again and issued a powerful altar call that was heeded by thousands of people. The stream of converts included a number of the government and military officials who had been sitting behind Morris all night.