• Amputation or Prayer?
  Word quickly began to spread of the healing miracles that were taking place among the workers in the Muqattam churches, and people began to bring their relatives and friends from outside the area to receive prayer for healing.
  Caroline, a girl from Heliopolis or 'New Cairo', was suffering from a tumor in her upper tibia - the part of the shin bone just below the knee. Doctors who examined her in June 19911 found that this tumor was a malignancy called Ewing's Sarcoma. Caroline was only six years old, yet she was suffering from a rare and fatal condition. The only treatment for it at the stage it had reached was amputation.
  This was the only recommendation she was given after going to France for specialist investigations; the doctors in Egypt agreed. While she was awaiting amputation, they gave her radiotherapy and chemotherapy. This resulted in her losing all her hair.
  Yet Caroline's parents had faith that God could do something to save her leg. They went to the Cop tic monastery of Abu Seifeyn, in Old Cairo - the same site that was rebuilt in the time of Patriarch Abraam. There they were advised to go and see Father Simaan in Muqattam. Hearing about the miracle of the mountain moving really helped to strengthen their faith that God can intervene in the present as he did in the past.
  They took Caroline to Muqattam, and through the ministry there she came to a personal relationship with God. And on 21 August 1994, Father Simaan prayed for her healing in the name of Christ. He then told the doctors to stop giving Caroline the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment, trusting that she had been healed.
  Caroline's parents confirmed in faith that they did not want the amputation done. This was not a decision that can be taken lightly. Ewing's Sarcoma typically spreads from the leg to the liver and the brain, bringing death within about six months.
  But Caroline is today a healthy girl, living at her family home in Heliopolis, or 'New Cairo'.
• World Vision Award
  By now, Father Simaan had been ministering at Muqattam for twenty years. Recognition for his ministry at Muqattam in all its forms came the year after Caroline's healing, in 1995. The Bible Society of Egypt recommended Father Simaan for a special presentation, citing his outstanding example in spiritual leadership. This recommendation led to the decision of World Vision International to give Father Simaan the Robert Pierce award. Its purpose is 'to provide recognition for those who have contributed in a significant way to the Kingdom of God'.2
  Bruce McConchie, the Regional Director of World Vision in the Middle East, came and saw the church's ministry for himself. He describes the atmosphere in the Muqattam Mountain site on the night of the presentation: The strains of 'He is Lord' rose from the cave as we strode in the Mokattam Coptic Orthodox church, on the outskirts of Cairo. As the auditorium came into view, the vastness was breathtaking. A huge arc of upward sloping terraces and seats to a charcoal grey crescent at the top where the cave opened to the sky and a single star. Ten thousand people could find seating in this place. The band, choir and congregation could now be seen and heard in one great crescendo of praise to the living Lord and Savior.  We were deep inside the Mokattam Mountain as Father Simon Ibrahim gently guided me into the front rows of the auditorium. The worship continued. Time stood still as I reflected on what I had seen and heard during the previous few hours. It had been a non-stop affirmation of transformational development in all its variety and potential. The power of God was inescapable. The impact was evident in the thousands of people seated up to the sky behind me...
  
  Father Simaan received the award in the presence of his congregation, his family and invited guests. It must have been a proud moment for his wife, Su'aad, who had supported him so faithfully in his ministry. She had held down a job as general secretary of a company while being active in church work and in bringing up their children, Albeer and Mary. Both of their children were now married and watching the presentation. Albeer had risen to become a company director, and Mary was helping to supervise the running of the Patmos Hospital with her husband, Dr SamweeL
  Coptic priests representing the Bishop of Shubra EI-Kheima diocese (who was abroad) came to attend the presentation of the award, as did the Director of the Egyptian Bible Society, Ramez Atallah, who for years had taken an interest in the ministry at Muqattam. The Reverend Jim Doust came to represent the Anglican Cathedral in Cairo.
  Father Simaan was grateful for the recognition, but it also motivated him to pray, 'Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and put a new and right spirit within me' (Psalms 51.10 RSV). He asked everyone present to pray that he would continue to be strengthened and encouraged by the Lord. 'Places -like Muqattam,' he said, 'do not satisfy the hearts of men. Only God satisfies the hearts of men. Therefore you can say, "I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me!'"
• Transformed Lives
  The thousands who attended left the auditorium with that challenge ringing in their ears and - he hoped - resonating in their hearts. The gospel continued to make a big impact on people's lives. The goodness of God continued to be seen in the ministry of the church, the hospital, the kindergarten and the lower primary school. His abundant provision was seen in vocational training activities and encouragement for small businesses. Lives were being transformed by these projects.
  One example was Jehan, a girl from a very poor family who had graduated from the church school. She joined the Vocational Training Workshop and became skilled in making attractive handicrafts from recycled cloth. Her work helped greatly to raise the standard of living in her family. Jehan became one of the first zeballeen girls to travel. She went abroad to represent the Workshop at international conferences concerned with recycling. The Workshop and her projects to kick-start small businesses were playing an initial role in a population in and around the mountain that had now reached 40,000 people.
• The impossible Dilemma
  Miracles of healing continued to occur. For example, there was an urgent crisis to face in the case of a young couple Nahid and her husband, Mahir.
  Nahid found that she was losing weight rapidly. When it was dropped from eleven to seven and a half stone, she went to a doctor, who immediately took blood tests. Nahid was also suffering from terrible headaches. She was given antibiotics, but it wasn't long before the doctor referred her Ein Shams hospital.
  After being given the usual. X-rays a consultant told, Mahir that Nahid needed a brain scan. The equipment for that was not available in the hospital so Mahir had to take Nahid to a specialist centre. They then went back to the consultant who told Mahir that the situation was extremely dead. He said that Nahid had a swelling on the outer meeting of the brain, known as an extramural haematoma.
  This external symptom was linked to an internal problem in the brain. There was a major artery in the brain that had a heurism - a condition that causes sudden dilatation or hemorrhaging of the wall of the blood vessel. Eventually it vessels causing hemorrhaging in the brain. The rupture was likely to happen within seventy-two hours.
  Doctors also told Nahid that they would have to perform open heart surgery. Tests had shown that she was suffering cardiomyopathy - a condition affecting the muscles of the heart which can in some cases necessitate a heart. Not long after they told her this she lost consciousness for a time and her husband, Mahir, found himself in an impossible dilemma.
  The doctors told him that to have any chance at all of saving Nahid, they must do operations on both the heart and the brain. One operation without the other would not work. It was not enough just to operate on the valves in the heart that were malfunctioning. If they did not also deal with the dilated artery in the brain, then the brain would hemorrhage within seventy-two hours.
  Yet to agree to this double operation was a huge responsibility. Mahir was told in no uncertain terms that the risks of such an operation going wrong were so great that the outcome was doubtful in the extreme. It was possible that even if the surgery succeeded, Nahid might be left paralyzed in both legs. The area the surgeons could safely work on in the brain was no more than 2.5 square centimeters in area.
  Mahir told the doctors that he and Nahid had a Christian
  Faith: that if this was impossible for human beings, it could be possible for God. The doctors hadn't considered this point of view at all and were certainly not convinced by it. But they did agree to have Nahid moved from intensive care to a cardiac ward.
  When Mahir called Father Simaan to come and see them, the first thing he said to Mahir was this: 'Do YOU pray or not?' Mahir said to him, 'I used to pray, but I don't these days.'
  'Why don't you pray?'
  'After I got married I just stopped praying,' he confessed. 'Do you have faith, or not?'
  'I have faith that God will heal her.'
  Father Simaan had come while Nahid was unconscious.
  The heart monitoring equipment was taken off her, and Father Simaan put his hand on her face, making a cross upon it. He brought a cup of water, prayed over it, and put it to one side. Then he prayed for her.
  Nahid appeared to be asleep. Father Simaan went and got the water and poured it on her face three times. 'After that,' said Mahir, 'our Lord was glorified and the miracle took place.' Nahid regained consciousness. Father Simaan then spoke to Nahid: 'As Christ said, "Pick up your bed and walk," I say to you, pick up your bed and walk!'
  Father Simaan then told Nahid to go home. She had been used to having four injections every hour, and another injection every four hours. In the hospital she had had numerous injections of antibiotics, and there had been no response to them. But now Father Simaan was telling her to leave the hypodermics behind her and go home! In the most natural and unaffected way possible, she got up and - with Mahir's help - packed up her things and went home.
  All this happened on Friday, 9 August 1996. Father Simaan had arrived at noon. They went home at one. The surgeon had informed Mahir that he needed a day to prepare for the operation. Since the hospital only did operations on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, that meant they had to decide by Friday or Saturday at the latest.
  By 1.15 pm on Friday Mahir and Nahid made their decision: there would be no operation. They phoned the doctor from home and told her that Nahid had been healed by faith. The doctors were totally unconvinced and decided they must be very ignorant people. How could Nahid have just discharged herself when the X-rays showed that she had an aneurism in the brain on top of needing new valves in the heart? But that is just what Nahid had done.
  Yet the threatened hemorrhage never took place, and Nahid made a full recovery. Her .came to give her testimony at Muqattam on 9 September, with her husband Mahir and her small son. Since she had been unconscious much of the time, Mahir had to fill in many aspects of the trial they had gone through. She had not even known about the life-threatening aneurism in the brain, but she was now completely free of all its symptoms, such as the severe headaches she had suffered from.
  Suc4 testimonies showed those who heard them that trials do not have to lead to despair. 'Nothing is impossible with God' (Luke 1.37). The believers at Muqattam saw that, by turning every problem into prayer, God could make them 'more than conquerors' (Romans 8.37) over everything.
  These testimonies also affected their view of death. In the Western world, people are frightened of talking about death. When someone famous (such as Princess Diana) dies suddenly, it sends shock-~avers around the country, although in many ordinary families people often have small and private funerals. In the East, by contrast, people drop everything when someone they are acquainted with dies. Men leave their place of work and women dress up in black to go and sit with the bereaved family. Death in Egypt has a higher profile and people can display great, almost uncontrollable, emotion in public funerals.
  But the believers at Muqattam began to sense that bodily death did not have to be seen through terrible tears, loss and anguish - but could be understood as the process of being transferred from one state of existence to another. A grey-haired priest present at Nahid's public testimony reminded the listeners of how Jesus said of the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue ruler, 'The child is not dead, but asleep' (Mark 5.39). Then he said to her, 'little girl ... arise' (verse 41), just as if he were waking her up from sleep. Sleep here means bodily death. It is sin that is really death.
  If we do not hear God's voice calling us in this life, we will hear it on the day of judgment. The miracle God really wants to do is the miracle of raising us from the death of Sin.
  If you are ill in Egypt, you can spend a huge sum to get the services of a well-known surgeon, for instance. But many people, like Nahid and Mahir, can testify that God was able to raise them up not just from the bed of sickness, but from death itself - freely, without charge or payment. Even this, to them, is only a sign of something infinitely greater. To trust in the blood of Christ is to be truly raised: raised not merely from the death of the body, but of the soul.
• Out of the Pit
  On 16 October 1996 a young doctor gave a testimony at a meeting in Muqattam. He explained how his preoccupation with healing the body for a time led him away from the Lord. But God intervened, and turned his priorities upside down:
  'I was suffering from three slipped discs in the lower part of my back. A doctor told me to rest. After five weeks, he said, I should be able to go back to my normal everyday life.
  'What was my everyday life like? I had known the Lord for about fifteen years, having had an experience of meeting him personally. Yet after starting work I found little time for him. I told myself, this is not like the time you were at school, or university. Now you are in the world of work, it's completely different. You can't expect to have time for ministry. Anyway, I told myself, medicine is a kind of ministry - and this is how I quieted my conscience.
  'There came the time when I was afflicted with three slipped discs. For the whole five weeks that the doctor had told me to rest I felt unable to get up from my bed except to go to the toilet. At the end of that time I got into a chair. After precisely five minutes I felt a sharp pain in my back that transmitted itself down one leg. I told the doctor what had happened, mentioning that I was now beginning to feel pain on my right side when previously it had only been on my left. This doctor was a well-known specialist in bone disease. He told me, "Look, you can do one of two things. Either takes to your bed and stay there for another two months, or - if you're the kind of man who earns a thousand dollars a day - I can do an operation for you tomorrow morning. It won't cure the problem instantly, but it could speed up the time it takes to recover."
  'These words discouraged me very much. I couldn't get up from my bed, and got depressed. My brother was going out to see a priest, so I told him, "Tell the priest that I'm ill.”
  'When the priest came I had two questions for him.
  They were not about healing. Although I was a believer, it wasn't the issue of healing that was occupying my mind. What I wanted to know was, "Does God wants to say something to me through this illness?" And secondly, "Where is the wisdom of God in leaving me unable to work and support my family?"
  '[Father Simaan] came and I asked him,
  '''Is there anything you want to say about my illness?" '''No,'' he said. This reply seemed to me a let-down. '''Is my illness something to do with my spiritual condition?"
   I asked.
  '''I don't know." At this I really felt as if I were in the pits of depression. But he added,
  "'You should ask God, and he will tell you." Then the priest asked a question of his own: "Do you believe that Jesus Christ heals you?"
  'He prayed, quoting two Bible verses. Then he commanded:
  '''Get up." And I got up.
  '''Move your head." I moved it.
  "'Walk to the other end of the flat." I went.
  "'Come back." I came.
  'At the end he said, "Congratulations, God has cured you!" I went and kissed him [a culturally normal thing for men to do in the Middle East, and particularly as a mark of respect to a priest]. I showed him to the door, and hesitated. A little uncertainly, I asked, "Can I move about now?"
  '''You can run and jump!" he replied.
  'Run and jump! I was exhilarated. I went and shaved off my beard, got dressed and found my wife. I wanted to go and greet my father and brother. I spent two hours bumping up and down in a car seat. I wasn't on a fixed seat: it was bumping up and down.
  'I was taught in my medical training that if I put a lot of weight on one disc it would transmit pressure to the next and if I put a great deal of pressure on the spinal cord (for example, by jolting up and down) in the condition that I had this could lead to a paralysis of the leg.
  'So I felt that people seeing me like this were bound to try to stop me moving around. I knew that even when I found the courage to tell people that I was healed, people would tell me, "Even so, take it easy - don't do this or that." But I was determined not to give in to that pressure.
  'This determination was tested when I felt some pain and it came back, on and off. I took this as a challenge, and read right through the Gospel of Matthew, highlighting in yellow all the statements made about healing. Armed with these verses, I felt equipped to fight a spiritual battle. This struggle went on for four days as I insisted - no matter what the devil might tempt me to believe - that God had healed me. At the end of that time, the pain finally stopped. I have now been living a very, very normal life for the past four months, without any recurrence of the illness.
  'Remarkable as it was, though, this healing was not merely God touching my body. Much more powerful than the physical healing was the fact that God gave me joy in my life. This joy meant more to me than anything else and so 1 became open once again to ministry. I offered everything back to the Lord - the hospital, my work, my leisure time. I said to him, "Take my hand and lead me anywhere you want - anywhere at all. All that matters to me is that I should be in your kingdom.'
• NOTES:
1. Dr Adly F. Ghaly, an Associate Member of the Royal College of Pathologists, diagnosed 'Ewing's Sarcoma of the Upper Tibia' in a report dated 17 June 1991. In a slide consultation on 19 June 1991, Dr Saad S. Eissa, Professor of Pathology at the National Cancer Institute of Cairo University, found 'sheets of closely packed malignant small rounded cells'. The tumour had 'infiltrated the bone and bone marrow'.
2. McConchie, B., The Renewal of the Garbage Collectors, quoted in a letter to Father Simaan dated 15 May 1996.

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