Vinny was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at 16 years old during his sophomore year of high school. Crohn’s is an autoimmune disease that affects the entire digestive system. Vinny had always been healthy up to that point, played high school basketball and baseball, and weighed an athletic 165 lbs. That year, Vinny started getting sick and was having awful stomach pain. He couldn’t eat without feeling immediately ill. Even when he didn’t eat, there was rarely a time throughout the day that he was not in pain, and, at night, he couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. For four months, he stopped going to school or out in public completely because he physically and psychologically needed to be within feet of a restroom. Throughout that year, he was on all different types of medication that were not helping, and he even tried all sorts of special diets. Nothing seemed to help as he slowly wasted away to 100 lbs.
The last treatment the doctors were pushing for was to do multiple surgeries in order to remove sections of Vinny’s intestines. However, this was not a cure or even a guarantee for improvement in his symptoms. Vinny and his family had been at Lifesong for a little while, and, one Sunday after church, they received prayer for Vinny. Over the next few months that led into years, Vinny’s health progressively improved, and he never got the surgery. He went on to his senior year of high school that next year before continuing on to college, and he has been free to live his life without diet restrictions and free of pain and fear. Now almost 27 years old and looking back on the past 10 years, Vinny can see God’s faithfulness in his life time and time again. His health has been great for years, and tests from doctors have confirmed how he has felt. He declares today, “The power of prayer cannot be understated in my life.”