A Clown Laughs Again by Sanford Silsby Sandy Silsby is a teacher with the Escondido Union School in Escondido, California. He works exclusively with the More Able Learners (MAL) group—children with especially high IQs. He is a native of Michigan and holds an A.B. degree from Eastern Michigan University and an M.A. from the University of Michigan. His wife Margie is a nurse and they have three children. This story is not about me—at least not directly. Rather, I want to tell you about a friend of mine named Virgil (Tiny) Poor. It would be best for Tiny to write his own story, but he is not too good with words. So, Tiny has asked me to tell you about it, just the way it happened. In his better days, Tiny Poor had been a clown with the MGM Studios. But during the last twenty years, he had moved from one place to another, wandering all over the West looking for some way out of his misery. I first met him through my wife Margie who was a nurse at the local hospital. She told me about this poor man who was dragging his pain-wracked body up to that hospital trying to get help. He had been the custodian at the La Costa Downs Country Club in San Diego. He had the title of Assistant Building Engineer. “But,” he always said with a grin, “I was just the janitor.” One evening in 1964, Tiny was coming down a flight of concrete steps outside the club house carrying a huge garbage can on his shoulder. It was dark and he misjudged a step and plunged fifteen feet down the stairs. He landed on his back and neck against a brick banister. He tried to work the next couple of days, but finally quit as the pain in his body grew worse and worse. Tiny simply resigned himself to the pain. He did think it strange when other symptoms began to appear and he noticed painful swellings in all of his joints — knees, back, hips, knuckles, wrists. He finally went to a doctor who diagnosed his condition as arthritis and loaded him down with pills — pain-killing pills. He was now lonely and alone, unable to support himself even though he was in his early fifties. The knuckles on both hands were swollen out of shape. He could turn his neck only about fifteen degrees in either direction. His back was so filled with arthritis that it was only with teeth-gritting determination that he could sit down and getting up was pure torture. His hips, knees, and lower spine were becoming so calcified that even walking was a painful experience. The doctors could take X-rays and give him pills, but they could not cure him. This type of arthritis is incurable and progressive. It cannot be halted in its ruthless advance that finally leaves its victim crippled and bedridden. I had grown to love Tiny as a lonely and forsaken man who lived in a tenant house on an old ranch outside Escondido. One evening after school, I drove out and found him sitting in his living room in the dark His face was wet from tears. “This afternoon, I tried to weed my garden,” he said. “I pulled two weeds, but the pain was so bad I could not stand it. I cried like a baby and I think if I had a gun, I might have killed myself.” My heart went out to Tiny, but I felt helpless to do anything for him. The Welfare Department had sent him to Los Angeles to be examined by the State Disability Board and they had declared him totally disabled. He was drawing a small pension, but a few paltry dollars were small compensation for the pain and the prospect of ultimate incapacitation. “Only God can help Tiny,” I said to Margie when I returned home that night. I believed in God and I had always had a strong faith that He was opposed to suffering, disease, and human misery. But I was not much of a church goer and I knew I lacked spiritual power in my life. How could I encourage Tiny with spiritual help when I had no power myself? A short time later, Margie’s brother Frank Hines, a Chicago lawyer, sent her a copy of John Sherrill’s book They Speak With Other Tongues. She read it and then began to urge me to read it also. For the first time, I saw in words what I had seemed to know existed all along—the power of God manifested by the Holy Spirit. I did not realize it at the time, but God was manipulating the time schedule of my life and Tiny’s life also. The day I finished the book, I received a letter from Frank. In the letter, he shared a powerful testimony of the transformation that Jesus had made in his life as a result of this same source of power the Holy Spirit. The book and the letter provoked me to hunger for this same power. I began to search for others who shared the same feeling. All this time, I was praying for Tiny. I guess I felt that if I could find the answers to my own spiritual quest, I could share them with him. He had accepted Christ as his personal Saviour and when I suggested we ought to try spiritual healing for his body, he agreed. I promised him that I would begin a search for someone who had been given the Christian gift of healing and could minister to Tiny through the Holy Spirit. Thus, compelled by my own desire to receive the power of the Holy Spirit and prompted by my longing to help Tiny with his physical needs, I attended a meeting of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship in Oceanside. I asked the first man I met if he knew of any Christian who had been given the gift of healing. “It must have been the Holy Spirit that sent you to me,” he replied. “I am an usher at the Kathryn Kuhlman meetings in Los Angeles. She does not claim to be a healer, but miracles take place when she conducts a service.” I told him of Tin/s condition and he promised to meet him at the stage entrance of the Shrine Auditorium at the next service and help him find a seat before the service began. In looking back, it seems like another minor miracle in a long chain of miracles that God had guided directly to this usher. It would have been impossible for Tiny to have waited outside since he could only stand for short periods of time. I told Tiny and we made arrangements to attend the service in April 1967. I read Kathryn Kuhlman’s book, I Believe in Miracles, telling about countless sufferers who had been healed through the power of the Holy Spirit. I read the chapter on arthritis to Tiny. Tears came to his eyes and he asked, “Do you think it could happen to me?” I found myself praying daily for Tiny’s healing and asking others to pray. The Sunday finally arrived when Kathryn Kuhlman would be in Los Angeles. Margie could not go, but she packed us a tasty lunch. I took my two sons, Charles and Ford, and we drove out and picked up Tiny from his humble cottage on the ranch and began the long drive up the coast to Los Angeles. We were so anxious to attend the service that we arrived an hour earlier than we had planned. I took Tiny to the stage entrance and we talked to the doorman. Yes, he knew our usher friend and suggested that Tiny take a seat just inside the door on an old-fashioned, wooden folding chair. He would point him out to the usher so he could find him a seat in the auditorium. Confident that all was well, the boys and I went around to the front of the auditorium. More than a thousand people had already arrived although it was only 11:45 A.M. and the doors did not open until 1:00 P.M. All three of us felt that this was Tiny’s day. God was surely going to heal him. The service was marvelous. After the song service, Miss Kuhlman’s first statement was, “Medical science says that arthritis is incurable. At these services, many people have been healed of arthritis by the Holy Spirit.” This is Tiny’s day, I thought excitedly. “Oh, hurry, God, hurry and heal him,” I prayed. I did not know where Tiny was sitting, but knew he was somewhere in that vast throng of people, waiting expectantly for the power to fall on him. Then we got caught up in the content of Miss Kuhlman’s sermon. While she was preaching, I was aware that healings began to take place all around us. The Spirit of God was sweeping through that great auditorium touching people’s bodies. Shortly thereafter, they began to come to the stage asking if they could testify about the miracle. The very first person to come to the microphone was a lady who had been healed of arthritis. She bent over and touched the floor—something she said she had not been able to do for years. My heart was in my throat as I stretched my neck looking for Tiny. I expected him on the platform any moment. Then the testimonies began to come so fast that I was almost off my feet from the impact. A six-year-old boy had been healed of curvature of the spine. His mother was with him, weeping for joy. A lady dressed in furs came up holding two hearing aids in her hand. She was from a church in Beverly Hills. A man came carrying a leg brace. We sat spellbound at the wonderful things God was doing. An elderly lady came up in a wheelchair. She kept repeating over and over, “I have been healed.” “Well, then, get up and walk,” Miss Kuhlman said. Stiffly and with the greatest effort, she pulled herself upright from the wheelchair. At first her knees were partially bent and her back stooped, but she hobbled across the stage. Gradually, her knees and back straightened and she was walking back and forth, chuckling to herself, tears running down her face as she praised God. She ended up giving others rides across the stage in her own wheelchair. There were many, many other healings. Some of the people around me who had been healed were too excited to go to the stage. Some others may not have recognized that they had been healed. It was a grand sight. I had read all about the miracles of God in the Bible. I had heard ministers talk of the power of God from their pulpits. But this was the first time I had ever really seen God’s power with my own eyes. But where was Tiny? What had happened to him? The boys kept looking out over the audience trying to spot him, but we never could see him. The benediction was pronounced and the people were leaving. Tiny had disappeared. We found the usher, but he hadn’t seen Tiny at all. We all began looking for him, but he was not to be found. We finally went to the car and waited. Forty-five minutes passed and the sidewalks around the auditorium were almost deserted. Tiny still had not shown up. By now we were genuinely worried. I went back to the stage entrance where we had left him. The door was ajar and the inside room was dark. I peeked in and there was Tiny—sitting on that same wooden folding chair where we had left him. As he came out, he shook his head and said, “This is the darnedest place.” Gradually, the story unfolded. Shortly after we left him, the doorman was changed. The new doorman did not know the usher or that Tiny was waiting for him. The usher, who had never met Tiny, arrived and looked for me. When he could not see me, he thought we had taken Tiny in some other way and left to take up his ushering duties. And Tiny had sat on that wooden folding chair from 11 A.M. until 5:30 P.M., waiting for someone to tell him what to do. He never heard a thing that went on in the auditorium, nor did he ever see Miss Kuhlman. He had sat on that hard chair for six and a half hours. I was confused, disappointed, and angry. We had been so excited about the service that we had not double-checked to see that Tiny had gotten in; yet, our primary purpose in coming was to bring Tiny. At first, I blamed myself. Then I was angry at the usher. Then, in my frustration, I did not know who to blame. Tiny said very little as we drove home. The boys and I were bubbling over with the excitement of what we had seen and heard. Yet we hesitated talking about it because Tiny was right there and had missed the whole thing. We tried to explain what had gone on in the services, but since he had missed it all, he could not visualize the wonderful things that had transpired. I apologized to Tiny again as I dropped him off at his house. We made tentative plans to go again with better arrangements. Margie was just as bewildered as I when she learned what had happened. I went to school the next morning, but even my normally exciting job working with the special children was depressing. In fact, I was so downcast I could hardly wait for the day to end. After dinner, Margie and I decided to go out and see Tiny to try to cheer him up. “If I am this discouraged,” I said, “think how he must feel.” We turned off the highway and drove the long road into the old ranch. In the distance, we could see Tin/s little cottage. The front door was open when we drove up and through the screen we could see Tiny sitting in the living room. Margie and I tried to offer our feeble excuses for what had gone wrong, but after awhile we gave up and gave Tiny a chance to talk. It finally occurred to me that he had spoken but a few words since 5:30 P.M. the day before. “Guess what I have been doing?” he said. “I’ve been weeding in the garden all afternoon. Look, look!” He got up from his chair, bent over, touched the floor and cried out, “I’ve been healed. I’ve been healed.” I could hardly believe my eyes. Even the swellings on his knuckles had disappeared. “But when, Tiny? When did it happen?” I cried. “Why, it happened yesterday at the Shrine.” “Yesterday? But you didn’t even get in the auditorium,” I objected. “I know,” he said. “It happened while I was sitting out there on that chair.” “But why didn’t you say something about it on the way home?” I asked in frustration. “I was afraid it wasn’t real. I was afraid it would go away. But this morning when I got up, it was just like I had springs in my legs. I went out and pulled the weeds out of the garden and I have worked hard all day. It’s the first time I have been able to do any work in a year and a half.” “Tiny,” Margie said, “tell us what happened.” “Well,” he said, grinning and scratching the back of his neck. “Sandy and them left me on that chair in the hallway outside the auditorium. I never got up. I wanted to get up once and go to the bathroom, but was afraid if I did that the usher who was supposed to come after me would miss me. Every time I saw a man coming in my direction, I would think it was the usher. But no one ever came after me.” He paused, trying to remember the exact details. “I knew the service was going on inside the building, but I never heard anything, never saw the stage, didn’t even know what was going on. I just sat there. Then, about 4:30 P.M., I felt a huge electric shock shaking my body. It made me tingle and bum inside.” He grinned, embarrassed, and continued, “It was the same feeling I used to have when I would take a big drink of raw whisky and feel it hit my bloodstream.” Only this time there was no hangover—just joy and peace. “I looked at my hands. ‘My gosh, I can move them,’ I said out loud. I sat there, wiggling my fingers. I tried to move my knees. I had been sitting so long in that one place that everything about me had gotten stiff. But I finally got up and walked about twenty feet to one side and everything worked perfectly — just like it did when I was a clown back at MGM twenty years ago.” Tiny shrugged his shoulders and grinned widely. “Then about 5:30, Sandy came back for me. I didn’t understand what was going on. I knew something had happened to me, but I was afraid to say very much right then. I guess it was God after all.” Margie and I returned home with singing hearts. Everybody else had forgotten about Tiny — everybody but God. And God had overcome man’s obstructions and had beamed His healing power right into the heart of a lonely, forgotten man. And Tiny Poor has never been the same since. I said at the beginning that this story was about Tiny and it is. But I cannot help but mention that my life has been changed, too. Every time I go back to the Shrine Auditorium, I grin and say, “You know, this is the darnedest place!” Be Careful How You Pray: Chapter 15 |