A “Fine Contact of Faith”
A testimony by Brother Tommy Flannigan dated Sunday, January 26, 2014.
My name is Tommy Flannigan, I am 90 years old, and I have been following Brother Branham’s Message and ministry since 1951, when I first attended Brother Branham’s meeting in Los Angeles, California, the night after Congressman Upshaw was healed. I heard Brother Upshaw’s testimony that night and listened to a message by Brother Branham. After that, my wife and I became personal friends of the Upshaws, and we attended Brother Branham’s meetings or listened to him on the radio whenever he was in the Los Angeles area.
I was originally from a farming community in Southern Illinois. My parents were devout Missionary Baptists Christians, and some of my earliest childhood recollections are of my father reading the Bible to me out loud in the evenings and crying while he read. I accepted the Lord at the age of twelve in a tent revival. I very sincerely believed the Bible then, but I did not really understand very much until years later when I heard Brother Branham.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I enlisted in the Army and was sent to the Solomons, Bouganville, and other islands in the South Pacific to fight the Japanese with the 37th Infantry Division under General MacArthur. We travelled and fought from island to island and eventually invaded the island of Luzon in the Philippines and prepared for the Battle of Manila. I was a corporal and operated some anti-tank guns during the battles. On one occasion while we were marching I had a bad headache and had taken off my helmet. General MacArthur spotted me and drove up to me in his jeep and yelled at me to put my helmet back on. He was just taking care of me as one of his soldiers, and if I can ever say something on his behalf I will do so.
On another occasion I was sitting on the ground near Manila with some of my buddies eating lunch. The Japanese were firing their large guns in the vicinity, and suddenly I felt led to jump with my men into some holes nearby. Not even three seconds had passed after we dove into the holes that three shells of Japanese artillery hit right exactly where we were sitting. But for the hand of Almighty God, all of us would have been dead.
After the Japanese surrendered, I was assigned to take care of the Japanese prisoners. Whenever I could I would give a small New Testament to any Japanese prisoner who knew some English. As fierce as the Japanese were during the fighting, they were as meek as lambs after the Emperor told them to lay down their arms. One time I was hauling Japanese prisoners in a truck to Northern Luzon. I had just switched from being the driver to the passenger position and slid down in my seat to read a magazine. Immediately after that, we got into an accident, and the hood of a truck that hit us came through our windshield and cut my scalp open. Had the accident occurred just seconds before when I was sitting straight up, I would have been decapitated. I was awarded a Purple Heart for the incident. Once again the dear Lord saved my life during World War II.
After the War, I returned home to Illinois and had another near-death experience. I was driving a concrete truck downhill on a road with a steep embankment on the side. As I was driving down in first gear the road started to give way and cave in, and before I knew it, the concrete truck and I went over the cliff. I didn’t know what to do, but I jumped from the driver’s side door, and I was sailing through the air with the truck. The last thing I can remember was praying like Steven in the Bible, “Lord, receive my spirit.” Later I woke up thirty miles away in a hospital bed. I ended up with a bad back and two slipped disks, but once again the Lord had spared my live.
Around that time, I had rededicated myself to the Lord, and almost immediately stopped smoking cigarettes. They just did not taste good to me anymore, but it was several years later before I heard Brother Branham preach against smoking.
A few years after the War both my parents had passed away, and I moved to California to start over. I married a wonderful but very fiery Italian Pentecostal Christian girl. After our first son was born in 1953 and my wife had a miscarriage, five doctors told her that she could not have any more children. My back continued to hurt, and for many years I would lie down on the floor and rock my spine at night to relieve the pain. We attended many of Brother Branham’s meetings at the time, but neither my wife nor I ever tried to get a prayer card. There were just so many other people in the meetings who seemed to need healing more than we did.
My oldest son David was born with a large raised black birthmark right above his right eye that would often swell and fill with blood. The doctors told us that they would have to remove it surgically when he was older. When he was just one year old, however, my wife and I carried him through one of Brother Branham’s fast prayer lines. Brother Branham just put his hand on my son and said, “God bless the baby.” Within two months the black mark was gone; God had healed our son.
Around the beginning of 1962 I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder and began to buy Brother Branham’s tapes at the meetings. We also started to receive the tapes regularly from Jeffersonville. It was then that I began to understand who Brother Branham really was.
It was with great anticipation that in early 1964 we were waiting for Brother Branham’s meetings in the Great Central Valley north of Los Angeles to begin. On Saturday, February 8, 1964, we drove 100 miles up from Los Angeles to the Kern County Fairgrounds in Bakersfield. We arrived early and went to a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant to have supper. While we were waiting at the restaurant, I talked to a man by the name Mr. Price, who was behind us in line. He told me he was also going to Brother Branham’s meeting and that he was hoping to be healed.