This testimony highlights the power and importance of faith in the midst of hopeless circumstances. Faced with her son’s severe autism and a prognosis with no natural hope, Tahni Cullen chose faith over despair, trusting God when coping was no longer enough. As she held onto hope in Christ, her faith opened the door for peace, renewal, and extraordinary breakthroughs, including her son’s miraculous communication and profound spiritual insight. Although some accounts shared by Sid Roth/his guests can at times be subjective or unreliable, faith must ultimately be anchored in the Holy Bible, which can be revealed in various powerful ways.
Sid (Introduction): Have you ever been in a hopeless situation? I'm sure you have. But this was hopeless, hopeless.
My guest had a son, seven years old, the worst kind of autism, can’t read, can’t write, can’t spell. And all of a sudden he starts communicating with the most profound thoughts coming from Heaven. In fact, it then gets better. Then he begins prophesying and changing people’s lives.
My guest, Tahni, a pastor, one of many pastors at a mega church—your life is going good. You have a nice marriage. You have a beautiful baby boy and then a bombshell hits you. What was it?
Tahni Cullen: Well yeah, everything had been going wonderful. We had our little joy, Josiah, and we named him that because it meant “fire of the Lord.” And we were excited to start our family, and we bought our house, we wanted to have 2.3 kids with a dog and picket fence, you know, the American dream.
Sid: You had been watching TV.
Tahni Cullen: Exactly. But Josiah was hitting all of his medical milestones. Everything was going really well, until about 22 months old, all of a sudden, very quickly things began to shift. And over about a three-week period of time he stopped looking at us. He stopped responding to his name. Suddenly, play skills that he had, he started losing them, and the 40 words or so that he had began to just go away, words like “mama” and “dada.” He was flipping lights on and off incessantly.
And so we mobilized and we tried to figure out what was going on. After four months or so of testing we finally found ourselves sitting in a board room with doctors around the table, and they said it’s autism spectrum disorder. And I remember opening the folder and the words leapt out at me: “No known cause, no known cure, lifelong.” We were going into something that was a hopeless situation as far as that goes. And that’s really what I struggled with. God, where is hope when there is no hope?
Sid: And then it got worse. At age five, he got a lifetime sentence. Explain that.
Tahni Cullen: We mobilized. We had done everything we possibly could in the natural. We absolutely got him into the best therapies. We did all sorts of alternative therapies with him. I even sat with him in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber for 14 dives, they’re called. We did everything we really could. But then at five years old, we did get that addendum that we just hoped we would never get, that he was non-verbal, low functioning and severe. And so, Sid, what that meant was that he would be one of 40 percent of children with autism that they say would never speak.
Sid: How did you as a mother cope with this?
Tahni Cullen: Well that’s just it. You’re really told to learn how to cope with it. And I really struggled with that coping thought. In fact, I asked God, how am I supposed to cope with this? I wrote down ten questions for God because I said, if I’m going into this I need to know biblically what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to pray, how I’m supposed to manage this life. Everything—just all your best resources burn up very quickly. Emotionally, spiritually, mentally, financially, you just burn out very quickly.
And when God says I have good plans for you, I have good plans for your son, plans for hope and a future, I have to be really serious and ask God, is that for us? Do you mean that for me? I had to look at the affections of my heart and was autism the voice that I was hearing the loudest, or was what Jesus did for us what I was hearing loudest?
Sid: And then at one of your lowest moments—you’re not one that would have experiences with God where God would show up. That wasn’t you. That wasn’t your paradigm. But He showed up one day. Tell me about it.
Tahni Cullen: I felt like for the first time in my life I really needed to feel Him and couldn’t. And I felt like when I prayed I was just praying into the darkness or something. Well things had been really difficult with Josiah and I put him down for a nap. And I decided I’d better catch a wink because you don’t get a lot of sleep when you’re a parent of a child with autism.
And I got to lay down, and all of a sudden, about 20 minutes later, I just wake up, and I smell this most amazing smell, and I can’t figure it out. I’m smelling my hair. I’m smelling the pillow. I’m trying to sniff this out like a bloodhound. What is this smell? And it smelled like vanilla and cinnamon, like crème brûlée almost.
I couldn’t figure where it could have been coming from. I go out into the hall—not there. I come back into the bedroom, and I’m like, I’m just going to lay down for a second, and I just drink it in. And I’m going, what is this?
And I remembered my mom telling me about when my father had passed away. He died at 55. She was so low and that one day she smelled a fragrance and she told me it was the fragrance of the presence of the Lord. And I went and I looked it up on Google. I’m like, vanilla, cinnamon, fragrance of the Lord. And here other people had experienced this.
But Sid, what that did to me, it showed me that even though I couldn’t feel Him, that Jesus came and superseded that by getting to my senses to say, “I’m here. I am here.” And there was this peace that overcame because of it.
Sid: And then you found something called rapid prompting method. Did you ever teach him to spell?
Tahni Cullen: No.
Sid: He starts spelling—how supernaturally he knew words. And get this, how supernaturally he knew amazing theological concepts that Ph.D.’s don’t know. It gets even better than that. He grabs his iPad and starts typing this. I mean, I’ve heard of miracles, but this is off the charts. Did you ask him how he learned how to spell?
Tahni Cullen: I had been teaching him this method called the rapid prompting method. I had watched a documentary and decided I have to go get that for my son and figure out this particular method. So I had been doing this method for about a year. But one particular night I’m sitting at the kitchen table and we’re doing a lesson from the Children’s Bible.
I read him a short lesson about when Jesus healed the blind man. And I said, “Josiah, Jesus healed the blind man. What did Jesus do? Did He heal the blind man or play with the blind man?” He chooses heal appropriately. I said, “Okay, let’s spell ‘heal.’”
I put up the iPad and there are letters in big alphabetical buttons. And I said, “Josiah, can you spell ‘heal’?” He touches “G,” then “O,” and I’m like, “go?” He goes on to spell his first independent sentence: “God is a good gift giver.”
Sid: Oh that is good! That is good. What went on inside of you at that moment? What happened?
Tahni Cullen: I thought I was on Candid Camera or something, or I had cracked or had been punked. But no, I was just like, what is happening right now? And I thought, I think he’s being healed right now. After all these years of praying, I think he’s being healed right now.
I said, “Josiah, that’s true. How do you know this?” And he types, “God is very capable.”
Sid: How does a kid like that spell? You had to learn. I had to learn. How did he learn?
Tahni Cullen: I asked him one day, how is this happening? And he typed, “Jesus taught me the order of sounds.”
For the first time we were getting to know our child—things like your favorite toy, your favorite color, what do you like to do. But not only that, he started coming out with the most profound wisdom words.
Sid: He knew things from science, from history, theological concepts most people don’t understand. Give me an example.
Tahni Cullen: I brought him home a rubber lizard and asked what he wanted to name it. He named it and then started explaining things about lizards—things I knew he hadn’t been taught. I knew it was supernatural.
He even explained the triune nature of God. He typed: “In the Trinity the Father is the manager, the Son is the lover of operations, Holy Spirit is the worker. The three in one getting things done.”
Sid: Someone could preach a whole sermon on that. I understand he has a guardian angel. Tell me about that.
Tahni Cullen: He explains that at night he’s taken into the Spirit and educated in Heaven. An angel named Nathan told him, “Boy of God’s fire, you will help light God’s fire in His people again.”
Sid: Your son prophesies. Tell me about the lady at the mall.
Tahni Cullen: Josiah told me to take him to the Mall of America because God had a surprise. He typed out a word for a young woman involved in Wicca. When I finally spoke to her, another woman with a pentagram tattoo said, “That’s not her—that’s me.” Everything Josiah typed described her life exactly.
I told her, “Do you realize that God intercepted time and space to bring me and my autistic son to you?”
Sid: Josiah goes to Heaven and sees relatives he’s never met.
Tahni Cullen: Yes. He spoke about family members and described Heaven—mansions, places, and joy.
Sid: Does Josiah believe he will be healed?
Tahni Cullen: Yes.
Sid: You made a decision not to cope, but to hope. There are people watching who are just barely getting by. Extend a rope of hope to them.
Tahni Cullen: Romans 15:13 says, “The God of hope will give you peace and joy in believing so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” There is no coping in Heaven’s language—only hope. Hope in Hebrew means a cord, a rope. Grab onto that rope.
I pray right now by the power of the Holy Spirit that as you grab onto that rope, you will be led into an intimate relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. In that hope you will find faith like never before, and it will move mountains.
Sid: Start expecting again. Start believing again. Don’t look back. Press on. We’re entering a new time, and if you ask Jesus to live inside of you, the best part of your life is ahead of you.