--- title: "Attacked by an Elephant" date: "2026-05-08" featured_image: "/assets/img/posts/angrebet-af-en-elefant.jpg" featured_image_alt: "The woman who was healed from deafness after an elephant attack in Sri Lanka" category: "vidnesbyrd" --- In November 2002 I was in Sri Lanka with my cousin Jan. We visited Mervin Gunaselvam and Trumpetsound Ministries. This was while the rebel movement the Tamil Tigers was still active. We were going from Colombo to Jaffna and drove the entire way, which took us through the area controlled by the Tamil Tigers. Several of the churches that Trumpetsound had in the area had been taken over by the Tamil Tigers and turned into military bases. Mervin showed us one of these on the way. We stopped and stayed overnight in the area where Trumpetsound had a church. There we held meetings and baptisms before we drove on. A woman came up to Jan, Mervin and me. She is the woman in the photo. The woman was deaf in one ear because she had been attacked by an elephant. She was with 4 others when it happened. 3 died, but she and one other survived. She still had large scars running up her arm and shoulder on the side where she was deaf. Mervin, Jan and I prayed for her. After a few minutes she regained her hearing.

God can make the dead alive and create anew.

    ---     If you are sceptical of accounts like this, I understand. I would encourage you to approach it with an open mind. A Dutch research team has examined 14 cases of medically remarkable recoveries associated with prayer. The study is peer-reviewed and published in the *Journal of Religion and Health* (2023). It concludes that these healings cannot be fully explained within a purely biomedical framework, and that different forms of knowledge — medical, biographical, and spiritual — together provide a more complete picture. [Read the study: *A Dutch Study of Remarkable Recoveries After Prayer* (PMC)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10133067/)