In 1982, Ruby Holland Hutchins was diagnosed with cervical cancer and was told she would never have children. In 1997, she learned she had a rare disease called pulmonary sarcoidosis. In 2000, doctors told her she had stage-four lung cancer and would die in three months.
Today Hutchins has two adult daughters, no longer has pulmonary sarcoidosis, and her doctor told her she has been “healed” and no longer has lung cancer. The Memphis, Tennessee, resident says it was her faith in God that made the difference in her recovery.
“Faith is not a feeling and it’s not a fact,” she told Charisma. “To have faith is to know God and believe His Word. When I responded to the ordeal in faith, the Word became flesh to my very body.”
Before Hutchins was diagnosed with pulmonary sarcoidosis, she says she was sick regularly and didn’t understand what was happening to her body. “I would get bronchitis every four months, and I would catch frequent colds,” she remembers.
Hutchins was also treated for whooping cough, but it wasn’t until she dropped down to 89 pounds that she realized something was “terribly wrong with her health.”
“Food was abrasive to my esophagus, so I couldn’t eat,” she said. “It got to a point that it hurt so bad, I couldn’t even swallow my saliva.”
Hutchins’ life was deteriorating before her eyes, but she was determined to beat her sickness with home remedies and prescribed medications. But when the Holy Spirit spoke to her one day, she began to question her medical regimen.
“I was extremely sick, and I heard a voice say to me, ‘If you don’t get up and go to the emergency room, you will not be alive this time tomorrow,'” she remembers.
Hutchins initially disregarded the prompting but says the Holy Spirit spoke again: “If you don’t go to the emergency room, you will not be alive this time tomorrow.”
“I got up and rushed to the hospital,” she says.
When doctors diagnosed her with pulmonary sarcoidosis, she was “finally able to put a name with the monster” that plagued her body.
According to the Ohio State Medical Center, sarcoidosis is a rare disease prevalent in African-Americans and occurs in the lungs in 90 percent of cases. It typically results in inflammation and causes small lumps or granulomas to form in a person. In most cases, the lumps heal and go away, but in Hutchins’ case, the lumps became inflamed. The late actor and comedian Bernie Mac also had sarcoidosis.
Though Hutchins underwent surgery for the disease, in 2000 doctors once again gave her a dreaded diagnosis. This time she was told she had stage-four lung cancer and would die in three months. But Hutchins said she responded to the news not with fear, but faith.
“Doctors told me I had to get an artificial voice box … take chemotherapy and radiation … and carry around an oxygen tank. I told them to save it for somebody who don’t have faith,” she told a rousing crowd of 19,000 attendees last November at the Church of God in Christ Holy Convocation.”God can do anything but fail!”
Today she is a sought-after evangelist who travels the U.S. and abroad preaching the gospel and declaring God’s healing power, especially to people battling terminal illnesses.
In 1999, she founded Touch the World Ministries Inc., a global ministry of preaching, teaching and community outreach. The ministry is committed to “finding the need and meeting it, finding the hurt and healing it.”
Says Hutchins: “The prognosis looked bleak, but faith says, ‘God, if You healed me of cervical cancer and gave me children when the doctors said I would never have kids, and if You can heal me of pulmonary sarcoidosis, You can heal me of lung cancer.”
In 2007, Ruby Holland Hutchins shared her testimony of healing before a crowd of 19,000 attendees at the Church of God in Christ Holy Convocation in Memphis, Tennessee.
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