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Answered Prayer for a Functioning Brain

by | Thu, Mar 5 2020

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Mother praying for child
Photo credit Shutterstock.com

Imagine being told your child will never gain a mainstream education, or even be able to talk. That’s what doctors told Kylie Ransley, when she sought help for her three-year-old daughter. “I came out of that meeting devastated,” she said, but I felt like ‘God, this isn’t what you’ve spoken over her life’.”

Kylie and her family worked together to help and support her daughter. When she started Grade 1, teachers admired their faith, but warned them to brace themselves for worse to come. Sure enough, Kylie’s daughter soon faced bullying from her classmates. “People were saying to her brother, and to her, that she was dumb. I just remember coming home, sitting on the lounge, and saying ‘God, I don’t know what you want me to do with her.’”

[audio src="https://getmediapoint.com/document/episode/podcast/MDAwMTQ5Nzg2Mi5tcDM.mp3" /]

Soon afterward, an art teacher told Kylie about Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, author of ‘The Woman Who Changed her Brain’. As a child, Barbara frequently got lost in her own home, and struggled to read and write. Nonetheless through a heroic effort, she was able to achieve a university education, and develop a pioneering program of cognitive exercises to change her neural pathways, and reprogram her own brain. After watching a video about the Arrowsmith Program, Kylie immediately emailed her husband at work. “This is the answer to our prayers,” she wrote.

The family quickly organised a trip to Canada, to put Kylie’s daughter through an intensive six weeks in the Arrowsmith program. The results were miraculous. She was soon able to interact more freely with her brothers, follow conversations and movie plots, and complete jigsaw puzzles she could never have managed before. “After three weeks, we saw so much change in her that we couldn’t come back to Australia without her accessing this program.”

Kylie Ransley
Kylie Ransley (Photo credit: facebook.com/arrowsmithprogram)

Unable to get into any schools that offered the program, they stayed in Canada for nine months. On returning to Brisbane, Kylie home-schooled her daughter for a year and a half with the assistance of an Arrowsmith teacher. In 2017, she started Grade 7 at a mainstream private school. “She got an A on her first French exam. She got an A in Japanese. And across the board for the last two years, she has been getting As and Bs in her core subjects with no learning support.”

Kylie is now Program Coordinator for Empowering Lives, which is offering Arrowsmith’s training to other young people struggling like her daughter. Teen Challenge, which is running the program, is best known for helping with addiction, but Kylie explained that the two issues are often related. “Research shows us that learning difficulties are on the rise, and that with learning difficulty comes anxiety, and bullying, and depression, and then the alcohol and drug addiction.”

A lot of the students who seek help have lost all confidence in finishing school, or holding down a job. Kylie remembers one student who entered the program failing both maths and english. “Why can’t I be like the other kids?” she asked. Eighteen months later, after topping her class, she was feeling much more optimistic. “I feel like I’m finally beginning to bloom,” she said.

“She would now love to be an author,” Kylie said, “and when she came, she was struggling to read. And so that’s the power of the brain to be able to change.”

To learn more about the Arrowsmith program and its amazing impact, listen to Kylie Ransley’s conversation with Neil Johnson below.

[audio src="https://getmediapoint.com/document/episode/podcast/MDAwMTQ5Nzg2Mi5tcDM.mp3" /]

Tune into 20Twenty and join the conversation with Neil Johnson, weekdays on Vision Christian Radio. Click here for your local times and more interviews.

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