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Singing to the Healer

Knowing she was called to lead others in worship, Kim Mannon saw God's healing hand restore her voice after an extensive medical journey that should have left her unable to speak, let alone sing.
Kim Mannon remembers herself as a toddler at the altar of the church where her dad pastored, singing on his knee. So, when her mother-in-law, a nurse, asked about the lump on her chin six years after having a malignant tumor removed from that spot, she knew that once again her vocal ministry was in peril.

Doctors determined that the cancer had indeed returned. Mannon had no insurance, but the surgery couldn’t wait.

After removing the almond-sized mass from her chin, to kill any remaining cancer, her physicians recommended a costly new radiation treatment through small tubes in her face. Mannon became one of the first to receive the procedure that entailed a week of twice-daily treatments.

The next week, she started feeling radiation burns in her mouth. Then blisters formed on her chin, tongue and mouth. She could neither eat nor drink. Her weight plummeted.

“They gave me too much,” Mannon says of the radiation. “I looked like death. That’s when our little one, Zackary, who was 3, asked his daddy, ‘Is Mama going to die?’”

The radiologist shared with her a grim prognosis: the radiation would likely destroy her salivary glands, vital for singing. The radiation could also affect her vocal cords, he said.

“Bills we couldn’t pay came in, and we had no financial aid,” says Mannon, 54, who today with her husband, Jim, leads The Assembly Brookhaven in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

Amid bills arriving daily, their ongoing financial commitments didn’t stop. Their one asset was a rural house that renters had trashed. They paid a monthly house note, and the house needed extensive repairs. For five years they’d tried to sell the home, but no one had expressed interest.

Beyond that, her ministry was in peril. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to sing again,” she says.

“Our church was praying,” she says. A godsend was the relatively new website called Facebook where people posted prayers for her. “Missionaries we knew all over the world were praying for me.”

People and churches began sending them money. Friends and acquaintances near the hospitals and treatment centers offered the Mannons a place to stay during her treatments away from home, saving on hotel fees. Out of the blue, the house sold.

The hospital hadn’t responded to their request for financial help to cover the treatments and surgeries. “In frustration and fear, I called the hospital to inquire of our standing,” Mannon says.

That’s when she discovered the Lord had her covered. The balance due for her medical care was zero.

“While our bills seemed so large, they were not larger than our God,” she says.

Surgeons removed most of her chinbone and lower teeth. Physicians let her remaining exposed chinbone heal before fitting her with a prosthetic chin and dentures.

For six months she had no chin structure in her mouth, something that ordinarily helps speech. She spoke with a severe lisp.

Because of her physical condition, Mannon was tempted to stay home until she received her prosthetics, but the Lord impressed upon her that she wasn’t to do that and that she was to go to church and support her husband.

Speaking with such impairment was humbling; singing remained a distant dream. She kept active in ministry by helping others on the church worship team.

Three months into her healing, as she was coaching students on the platform during rehearsal, the worship leader handed her the microphone and told her, “You’re going to sing.”

And she did.

It was God once again letting her know that He knew where she was at and that this was her calling, something He wasn’t going to take from her.

Ultimately, her years-long medical journey entailed multiple surgeries and procedures that were lengthy, painful and costly.

But God always provided, and miracles abounded. After one surgery on the top lip to replace radiated tissue on her bottom lip, her doctor said feeling was unlikely to return. A spot on her lip was white and numb. A visiting evangelist prayed for her healing.

“When service was over, I had color in that portion of my lip. It was lip color. I had more feeling in it. The Lord had restored sensations in it.”

Mannon has come a long way from what her facial plastic surgeon, J. Randall Jordan M.D., described as on the more severe end of the scale compared to other patients he has treated for her condition: osteoradionecrosis of the jaw. She’s been cancer-free for 20 years. Physicians released her from checkups.

“I think she’s had a very good recovery from a severe problem,” Jordan says. “I think she had help from God in that.”

Mannon’s journey to health and healing brought home the truth that God can still heal and restore. “Sometimes it’s the waiting that gets us,” she says. “We’ve got to be patient.

“Sometimes He’s waiting for the right moment because you don’t know who’s watching.”

Those with front-row seats to Mannon’s journey were the Brookhaven Assembly congregants who witnessed her endure an ordeal with trust and faith.

Through the years some congregants have received their own diagnoses. “I saw God use my testimony to help others walk through it,” she says.

Mannon cites a congregant whose husband was out of town when she was to get a mammogram report on a breast lump. Mannon insisted on going with her. “To learn something like that by yourself is not easy.”

The congregant walked through cancer, “but didn’t walk alone,” Mannon says. “She had to go through chemo, but she’s here. She’s healed.”

Her perspective on when bad things happen to God’s people has helped others process tragedies in their own lives. “People would say, I don’t understand. Why you? You’ve been a faithful woman of God and served Him your whole life,” she says.

Mannon cites her husband’s grandmother Eupha Mae Baker, an Assemblies of God pastor’s wife, with her take on suffering. “She said, why not me? What makes me so special that I don’t go through something, too?” Mannon recollects.

“Just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean we go through no problems in life. We live in this corrupt world.”

Deann Alford

Deann Alford is a journalist and author. She attends Glad Tidings of Austin, an Assemblies of God congregation in the Texas capital.