Sid: And you know I don’t understand a backslider when you know what’s back there you’d never want to backslide. But my guest knows what’s back there his name is Don Dickerman I’m speaking to him at his home at Bedford, Texas. And Don has been in prison ministry for many years, he’s been in hundreds of prisons, thousands receive salvation. But as a good Baptist pastor which he was ordained as a Baptist Pastor, he did not understand the supernatural and it was like revolving doors, someone would get saved, would leave prison and then the next thing you know they’d be back in prison. And he said, “There’s got to be something more,” and he prayed out one night, and he said, “Lord,” he didn’t even know what he was praying but he said, “Lord make me a deliverer” and then he had a prophesy. And the prophesy was that, “Oil would splash off his body and people would get healed and delivered,” and as he started speaking people were getting healed. In fact Don you started getting words of knowledge; tell me about the one where you saw a rat eating the inside of someone’s colon.
Don: You know that was my first experience with something like that and I have to say Sid, I guess it was my background, but I was always very cautious about speaking something that wasn’t from God and you know and saying it was. But I was sitting in a prison chapel down in Huntsville and I went to that particular prison once a month and we had probably three or four hundred guys in the chapel and their little praise band was singing and I was sitting on the platform waiting for time to speak. And I had just a mental image in my mind, but it was so clear I could see like an ugly rat with jagged teeth inside of someone’s colon just gnawing away at it; it was a very strange, obviously a strange vision. But I did know what it was and I didn’t know what to do with it but I felt the Holy Spirit was telling me somebody’s experiencing that pain right now and I’m going to heal it. So I cautiously when I got up I spoke that and I said, “Somebody here is going to be healed tonight of that problem. Well a man jumped up and he just ran down the aisle he said, “That’s me, that’s me.” Well, I prayed for him and he went back to his seat and said “He was healed and the pain had left.” But after the service was over and the inmates were filing out back to their cell blocks an inmate came up to me and put a note in my pocket and he kind of hung around and I was shaking hands, guys were leaving. He came back up to me and he said, “Sir, would you read that note now?” And I opened it up and it said, “I’m the one, I’m the one with the colon problem” and he told me that he was embarrassed to come up front earlier, but that he’d just got back from the prison hospital and horrible pain And with a lump that I actually had seen that lump in the vision that was kind of hanging over his belt, a big knot. But they told me I need surgery but since I was going to be released in a few months it could wait. So I just put my hand on his stomach and prayed for him and commanded that to leave. He doubled up in a knot and began to throw-up blood and bile and you know it was not the kind of thing that you want to talk about a lot, but some other inmates came with, got a towel and they cleaned up everything. And I walked him to the back of the chapel and I didn’t know who he was, but you know he kept saying “The pain is gone, the pain is gone.” So I left and he went back to his cell, but I didn’t know really what had happened and I didn’t know how to verify it, you can’t just call the prison. So when I went back the next month, this man met me at the chapel door and he pulled up his shirt and he said, “It’s gone brother, its gone; I haven’t had a pain since then.” And it was such a overwhelming thing to me, and such a confirmation of the Holy Spirit revealing something to me. That would happen a few times after that and I learned that when that would come, when I would get some time of vision like that that would always happen, not just you know maybe, it always happened.
Sid: Listen. I am so excited about the people that are going to get free from your brand new book, “When Pigs Move In.” I’ve got a picture, It’s almost, not almost it is a before and after picture of an Irish prisoner by the name of Eddie Ferncomb. Tell me about this particular Irish prisoner; tell me about this particular Irish prisoner, what did he do to end up in prison?
Don: Well Eddie was he grew up in the streets of Dublin, he was a gang leader, but he was also a heroin addict at an early age and pretty violent; he had stabbed I think about fifteen people before he was fifteen years old. He wound up in Ireland’s worse prison, in Portleigh, Ireland. But I heard about him through a man that I know you, know, David Berkowitz.
Sid: I’ve interviewed David who was also known as “Son of Sam” and that’s another amazing, amazing story. I understand that you wrote a letter to David Berkowitz before he got saved and he wrote you a letter back and he said, “If I ever get out of here I’m going to murder you.”
Don: Awe yeah, he said, “I’ll kill you.” Yeah, I wrote David because I had seen you know God’s grace applied in so many lives and I didn’t know who he was and did know what he looked like but I had read about his crimes and I knew that he was in Adica, New York so I wrote him a letter. And basically said, “God still loves you and he will save you.” Well, he did write me write back and he said, “Don’t send me anymore stuff like this and he said “If I get out of here I’ll kill you.” Well, I kind of joke about that now, it stopped our correspondence, but I ran into David, I was in his prison preaching Sid, in 1987 at eleven or twelve years after I’d written him that letter. And I didn’t know that he was even in that prison, but he came up to me after the service and introduced himself, put his arm around me and said, “I want you to know I appreciate you and I appreciated the message tonight and I thank you for being faithful and you know,” and so on and David and I became friends and he calls me fairly often.
Sid: So he was concerned about this Irish inmate.
Don: He had read about Eddie in newspapers as being Ireland’s toughest prisoner and so on and he related to it. But New York inmates are not allowed to write to write to any other inmates. So he asked me, he said, “Would you write this man and witness to him like you did to me.” Well, you know I was glad to that, well, Eddie answered my letter and we began to communicate through the mail and eventually Eddie accepted Christ by mail and I told him that about my family and our ministry. And he asked me if I had any tapes I could send him, and I did from prisons services here in Texas. And so I sent him a handful of prison service tapes and now this guy, Sid he’s in the deepest part of the prison, they had four to eight officers escort him wherever he went. He was in the dungeon, but he did have a tape player so I sent him sever service tapes and he wrote me one day and said, “I have demons that I, and he listened to one of our services that included a mass deliverance at the end, a congregational deliverance. And he said, “While you were talking and addressing these demons” he said, “Heat came all over me,” he said “I got so hot in the middle of the winter I was splashing my face with water.” Any way he said, “I know I have demons, he said, “I told my chaplain about and he laughed at me.” But in the letter he said, “Would you come to Ireland and help me be free?” Well, it’s one of those things I guess the Holy Spirit just quickened in me as soon as I read it I knew I had to go, but I didn’t know how, I didn’t know anybody in Ireland and he put me in touch with a lady that had ministered to him some. And she made arrangements, but I wound up going to that prison and sitting down in a private visiting room with Eddie, him shackled and officers all around and Eddie, Ferncomb received deliverance and it was a classic battle in the sense that his stronghold was unforgiveness, he couldn’t forgive. And I told Eddie, “You know Eddie, if you can’t forgive, I can’t help you and I’ve come all this way, and I can’t do anything until you’re willing to forgive.” So I actually left the prison that day and told him I would come back the next day, but he had to release that. Well, when I went back the next day, it is kind of interesting the officer that walked me back to this dungeon area said, “Are you like David Wilkerson?” And I knew what he meant and I said, “Yeah, yeah I am, and he said, “Well, you’re welcome here lad. And so Eddie came in that day, he had a smile on his face and he said, “I did it, he said, “I did it I forgave.” Well, it’s a long story in itself but I took Eddie through deliverance.
Sid: Listen, I have the picture of the before and the after, it’s unbelievable the glow of the glory of God on Eddie’s face.
Don: It is.
Sid Roth: And I’ll tell you what, you’re book has such an anointing on it.
