Bruce Watters, 78, reflects in his store.
He helped a boy walk. He relieved a woman’s chronic back pain. He faced risky open-heart surgery with no doubt that he’d recover.
Now, his wife Patricia is battling Alzheimer’s. He’s powerless against the sickness he wants to cure the most.
“I pray pray pray pray pray pray pray,” Bruce Watters said.
“Pray” gains momentum in the story of his wife’s battle with disease, still awaiting resolution.
“Nothing happened.” Watters shrugs ever so slightly. “And yet strangers walk in my house, I pray for ’em, and bingo, they’re good as new.”
The symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease appeared in Patricia’s brain three years ago. Now doubt challenges one of the 78-year-old Watters’ deepest beliefs: in God’s power to heal.
“You and I have the same power as Oral Roberts or Benny Hinn or Billy Graham or any of ’em,” Watters said. “To lay hands on the sick, anoint him with oil and they will be cured.”
His journey to conviction began unexpectedly. Decades back, his faith was insubstantial. All that changed one Sunday almost 30 years ago.
During the service at Unity Church, roughly 200 parishioners gazed steadily down at their hands or up at the pastor. Pews squeaked. Coughs echoed abrasively. The so-called “frozen chosen” were frozen in worship, but convinced they were chosen.
Then, a moment in the middle of the service shook Watters’ spirituality to the core.
There came a voice, as audible as if it were the person sitting next to him. Watters knows it was the voice of God.
“Get up and tell that woman in the wheelchair two rows up from you to get up and walk,” the voice told him.
Surprised and halfway troubled, Watters didn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. Why? He doesn’t really know.
Now, fragile white hair caps Watters’ slender, pale face. Creases form malleable parenthesis around his mouth, but they fail their grammatical function. If parentheses marginalize and separate, his voice engages and explains. His words flow and ring with an authority underscored by his height.
Watters uses a rougher tone for words like “really” to hammer home a point. His brown eyes depend on glasses after years of Bible study, spreadsheet analysis and jewelry examination. A gold cross clips his tie in place, next to a Rotary pin.
Faith and business on display on Watters' shirt.
Much of his workday is spent in a back office of Bruce Watters Jewelers, named after his father. Pinellas County’s oldest retail establishment has been in business since 1905.
Sitting behind his desk, hands clasped in his lap, Watters remembers how God’s voice propelled him through an exploration of faith spanning the next 30 years.
“It was the first and last time in my life that I really heard the voice of God talking to me,” Watters said.
“I’ll tell you what,” Watters said. “If I ever hear that voice again, I’ll do exactly what it says.”
In with Hinn
Watters spent six months on and off watching televangelist and faith healer Benny Hinn when he first appeared on TV. Watters at first felt ambivalent towards the wild spiritual enthusiasm and miraculous healings.
Churchgoers collapsed on floors and escaped from wheelchairs, casts or debilitating mental illness. Watters scowled from his couch.
But he wanted more than the frigid Unity Church. Hinn was leading a “crusade” in Indianapolis, so Watters and his wife decided to join the tens of thousands of people waiting in line hours before the service.
“People were healed long before Pastor Hinn came in the place,” Watters said.
Even before Watters went in, the man standing next to him in line took the cast off a recently broken leg. Watters said the man told him the bone shattered when he jumped off a ladder. In front of Watters’ eyes, the man walked apparently pain free.
Robert L. Park, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Maryland, has written and spoken extensively to debunk faith healings and other “pseudoscience.”
“People have been doing that one for years and years,” said Park. “There’s no verification the leg was broken. That kind of evidence just doesn’t mean anything.”
Park reflects those who are skeptical of Watters’s experience.
“All of the scientists know its bull shit,” Park said of faith healing. “It hardly seems fair the rest of the public has sort of denied that knowledge.”
Watters said he felt strong faith and unusual collective power in line outside the Indianapolis crusade. But he went into the stadium still feeling skeptical.
Many were “slain in the spirit,” taken so strongly by a holy presence they can’t stand, in Pastor Hinn’s sermons.
“I didn’t want to do that, but I found myself laying on my back,” Watters said.
He wanted to know more.
A few services and cities later, Watters was sitting in the back of the room at a Benny Hinn revival in Florida. A staff member pointed to him.
“You with the wisdom on your head,” the man said. “Come up here.”
Watters had dinner with Hinn after the service and decided he was real.
Now that he saw healing in action, guilt started to trickle in from not helping the woman in the wheelchair.
Watters first volunteered locally with Hinn, and then traveled for 10 years as a staff member. He and his wife drove to revivals across the country. Watters worked in the wheelchair section, Patricia helped during services and kept him company.
Marvels and Skepticism
The miracles, Watters remembered, just kept coming.
“I saw so many miracles that there’s no doubt in my mind that God still heals,” Watters said. “Miraculously still heals.”
In one service, a boy came to the church in a wheelchair with his feet pointed 90 degrees inward.
That night Watters prayed with the boy and his mother. The next day, the Holy Spirit told Watters to tell the boy’s parents he would get a healing.
Watters calls the sensations “grumblings,” and can only translate the messages to people he feels affinity for. Watters is emphatic about one point: he does not heal, it’s a higher power.
“It’s the Holy Spirit that can come and touch us,” Watters said.
Later that night, he saw the boy approaching Benny Hinn’s platform, on his feet, toes pointed straight ahead.
When Watters saw that boy’s feet pointing straight, he remembers thinking, “Lord, you are really real.”
From the stadiums to the streets of St. Pete
At home, removed from the teeming revivals, Watters felt himself channeling the same energy and connection to the Holy Spirit.
To this day, he says his faith is a critical part of his business plan. The family prays at least once a week in the store.
“I think the success of our store is based on prayer, and belief that the Lord will keep us prosperous,” Watters said.
Customers started asking to be prayed for in his store.
“They too wound up on the floor, which is a little disconcerting to the average person,” Watters chuckled. “But that’s ok, you know?”
Supper with the Holy Spirit
He believed so thoroughly in the Lord’s ability to heal, he brought services home after traveling with Hinn became too exhausting.
Supper with the Holy Spirit brought anywhere from 5-30 St. Petersburg community members together under Watters’ and Patricia’s guidance. Watters missed seeing the Holy Spirit in action after his years with Hinn, and couldn’t bear returning to the “frozen chosen.”
Arthritis arched the backs and sent fiery pangs through the knuckles of many of his attendees. One woman came in with a particularly sore back.
After one supper with the Holy Spirit, she called Watters the next morning, pain free.
Faith and mystery
Watters knows better than most that prayer alone won’t keep life pumping through human veins.
He spent a week in the hospital while the fibers of his skin, muscle tissue, and ribs knitted after open-heart surgery.
Doctors replaced a valve. But only faith told Watters to take the 1 in 4 chance that surgery would fail.
“There’s heaps of power in prayer,” Watters said. “It’s just like me going to the hospital knowing I’m gonna come out.”
Surrounded by decades worth of memories, Watters sits at his office desk.
Yet the enigma in his wife’s brain remains. Watters put Supper with the Holy Spirit on hold through the summer because Alzheimer’s devours his attention.
The phone rings in Watters’ office. Someone calls out that it’s his wife.
He answers with a different voice – higher, closer to the tone adults use with their young children.
“You’re doing Ok, sweetie?” he asks.
“Well, I have to hang around here for a few hours ’til we close,” Watters said. “Then I’ll hurry home.”
“Mm.”
“Well at least you’re up and around. Yesterday you didn’t get out of bed all day, just sleeping around. You had me a little worried.”
“Ok I’m glad you’re doing well. I’ll see you later”
And that’s how it goes. Watters says he keeps his emotions in check. But still he kneads his hands, and his left foot taps the carpet.
Patricia’s memory is failing, Watters says, but her health is decent. Sometimes he wonders why medicine prolongs his wife’s life. There’s comfort in the knowledge of the hereafter. He knows she will die with a smile and a sense of peace softening her features.
Ever the healer, he looks now to other caregivers. His message: it’s ok to think about difficult things, and share.
“I don’t try to figure it out,” Watters said. “I just don’t try to figure it out. God has a plan for everybody.”
