Christian Leadership Training Program CLTP 16
Power for Healing!--True Stories of God's Power to Heal!--Part One
(Recommended reading for 12 years old and up. Selected stories may be read with younger children at adults' discretion.)
DFO.
Excerpts from "Guideposts"; "Beyond Reason--How Miracles Can Change Your Life" by Pat Robertson; & "Making the Miraculous Part of Your Life," by James McKeever. (Christian Leadership Training Program publications are circulated free of charge on a strictly non-profit basis.)
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1
The Miracle Day
2
Believe, Believe, Believe
5
Power to Heal
7
Encounter with an Angel
8
With God, the Impossible Is Always Possible
9
The Healing of Maude Blanford
9
Discussion Questions
12
Glossary for Young Readers
12
Introduction:
The stories in this first issue of "Power for Healing" are testimony to a major message of the Gospel--that with God, nothing is impossible--absolutely nothing! (See Matthew 19:26; Luke 1:37.) And though we don't know or fully understand the process of healing, we do know that God is the Great Physician Who can & frequently does cure even the most "incurable" diseases, as evidenced by the testimonies that follow.
These stories describe in some detail the extent and toll of each illness on the person's body, some of which are unpleasant to read. While this certainly testifies to how miraculous and supernatural their healing was, it could possibly cause those who are more sensitive to such graphic details, to fear or worry that they too might one day succumb to one such debilitating disease. So please remember to pray first before reading this publication, that these stories won't affect you adversely.
For instance, in the first story, Barbara Cumminsky, a girl who contracts a very severe case of multiple sclerosis, experiences dizziness at the onset of this disease. This does not mean that any one of you experiencing dizziness at times is in the beginning stages of multiple sclerosis. Neither is the presence of one of the symptoms described in some of the other stories an indication that you have the mentioned disease. In fact, it would be very unusual indeed for you to have any of the diseases talked about in this publication. And in the rare event that it would be a serious illness like this, you can be assured that the Lord is doing it as a testimony, & all things truly work together for good to those who love Him. We've included the details, not to strike fear of the disease in your hearts, but to show how great a miracle of healing the Lord performed in these people's lives.--Total victory out of seeming defeat!
We know that "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love" (2 Timothy 1:7), and most of all of faith. We know and have full assurance that we are in the palm of His loving hand and have nothing to fear.
So we pray that these stories will engender faith, and that you will remember that He knows, He loves, He cares. He knows our needs, hears our prayers and is able to heal according to His Will and in His perfect time. It may be an instant healing, it may take months or even years, or it may even come in the Next Life; but if we call on Him and trust in His promises, it will come.
"Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you"; "He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him." (Matthew 7:7; Hebrews 7:25.)
The Miracle Day
By Barbara Cumminsky
"And He took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, `Talitha Cumi'; which is, being interpreted, `Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.' And straightway the damsel arose, and walked..." (Mark 5:41-42).
I still remember the whispers as I struggled through the halls in high school. "Look at her stagger!" I'd hear them say, "I'll bet she's drunk." Kids can be cruel. They didn't know me, or know what was really happening to me.
I definitely wasn't walking a straight line. Occasionally I was even banging into a locker. But I wasn't drunk. And I wished I could tell all the gossips how hard I tried to walk like a normal person; how much I wanted to write a letter without my hand trembling. But if they asked me what was wrong, I'd have to tell them I didn't know. Not even the doctors knew.
And as time went by, it was to get drastically worse. But back then in school I was making a painful discovery about serious illness that I hadn't expected: It can sometimes make you feel like an outsider in the human family. The sickness of your physical body can undermine your feelings of worth and usefulness. So you become sick in spirit, too--at a time when you most need to feel close to God.
How to be spiritually well--how to regain my sense of wholeness and value--was a search that became as critical to me as finding ways to cope with my deteriorating health.
In 1965, I'd been a typical, active 15-year-old who loved gymnastics, played the flute in the high school orchestra, worked at an after-school job and headed the youth group at my church. My mother said she hadn't seen me sit still for 10 minutes in three years.
But then weird things started happening. One day in gym class I couldn't get my left hand to grasp the flying rings. That night, I slipped on the stairs at home, and I slipped again the next day at school. "Just part of growing up," the doctor said. "Your symptoms will disappear in time." But they didn't.
So I lurched down hallways, every step taking me farther into the unknown. After a while came double vision, then a brace for a left arm that was turning more and more into itself. I underwent one test after another, but nothing led to a diagnosis. I started college but had to drop out; I just wasn't feeling well enough. More tests. More symptoms. More problems.
Finally, in 1970, my doctor had some concrete information for me. "We've identified your condition, Barbara," he said. "You have MS--multiple sclerosis [1]. It usually doesn't strike people quite so young as yourself."
"What do we do now?" I asked.
My doctor shook his head. "I'll tell you the truth, there's almost nothing we can do. This disease is slowly going to short-circuit your central nervous system. The wrong messages go to various parts of your body and they don't function as they should. The severity varies. We can only hope your case is a mild one."
Very soon, the course my MS was taking became clear. Twice, in 1971 and 1972, my heart and lungs failed and I was rushed to the hospital, near death. Then there was a period of stability when I neither got better nor very much worse--a common occurrence in MS. I attended college as a handicapped student and later worked as a secretary. But the spread of the disease was merely interrupted. I went from a cane to crutches. Inside my body, vital organs were beginning to fail.
By 1978, I was in a wheelchair--my feet and hands curled and all but useless--and I required a constant supply of oxygen. That year, I went to the Mayo Clinic, hoping to discover new techniques to help my laboured breathing. There weren't any. Clinic doctors didn't hold out false hope. "Pray, Barbara," they told me. "Nothing we can do will stop the deterioration."
As a child of nine, I'd committed my life to Jesus. Then, as a teenager, I'd drifted away from the commitment until one of my doctors and his wife helped bring me close to God again. This happened when I was 20, around the time the MS was diagnosed. Over the next few years my church pastor became a special friend, visiting me day after day in the hospital and when I was bedridden at home.
It was this same pastor who helped me discover what I needed most: a goal, one even a disabled person could strive for. And the goal was to grow in faith. It became my "job", something I could do despite all the pain and loss of bodily capacity, and I worked at it. Sometimes I failed, and felt like giving up. Yet always, no matter how low or sick or abandoned I felt, I'd eventually get a little spiritual nudge--a reminder of all the times I nearly died, but didn't, of all the people in my church and community who were praying for me.
Now, after the grim visit to the clinic, I felt a new urgency about my connection with God. The less physical health I had, the more I yearned for spiritual health.
I cried out to God. "Please! Please! I can't even read Your Word any more. I need something to do."
Over and over I pleaded for something to counteract the fact that I could barely move. I craved activity. Action. I called out to God for it.
His answer came. Not in a flash, not overnight, but through prayer itself: Praying is action. Pray for others.
How simple. How possible! Until that thought came to me, I had seen prayer as passive [2]. Now I saw that praying for others could be my gymnastics, my flute-playing, my special activity.
I had prayed for others before, but now it became a compelling need, a vocation [3]. I spent hours in prayer. When friends came over, I would ask them to read to me or pray with me. I talked to God, often out loud, as if He was standing right beside me.
My condition continued to worsen. A lung collapsed. Most of the time I could barely see; technically I was blind. My parents had made changes in our house to accommodate my needs--ramps for my electric wheelchair, a hospital bed for me, and tubing running through three rooms so I could hook up to an oxygen concentrator in different locations. Everyone knew I was dying. My doctors confirmed it.
Then came June 7, 1981.
It was a Sunday, my sister Jan's 29th birthday. She was coming over to celebrate and I looked forward to giving my mother at least some token help with making the cake. I remember thinking what a bright, clear birthday it was when my mother came into my room. "Ready to give the cake batter a few licks?" she asked. I nodded. With my mother helping, I began the struggle to hitch myself out of bed and into my wheelchair; my legs had begun drawing into a fetal position [4] and it was impossible for me to put my feet flat on the floor.
In the kitchen, I managed to stir the cake batter a couple of times despite the fact that my hands had turned inward to the point where my fingers almost touched my wrists. But now, even that small effort was enough to exhaust me and I asked my mother to help me get back into bed. She did, and went back to finish the cake for Jan's birthday.
After a while, my Aunt Ruthie came to my room to read letters and cards from people who listened to a Chicago radio station, WMBI. A program called Cup of Cold Water had featured me as an invalid needing cheer. Most of the well-wishers mentioned that they were praying for me. My aunt left to help my mother, and shortly after noon, two friends, Joyce Jugan and Angela Crawford, popped in after the morning worship service at my church. Then, as the three of us chatted, I heard a fourth voice. A firm, audible voice over my left shoulder.
My child, get up and walk! Startled, I looked at my friends. I could see that they had not heard the voice. But I was certain that I had heard it.
"Joyce! Angela!" I blurted, "God just spoke to me. He said to get up and walk. I heard Him."
The two women stared at me.
"I know, I know, it's weird," I said. "But God really did speak to me. Please, run and get my family. I want them!"
They flew out to the hallway, called my sisters and parents and rushed back into the room. I couldn't wait any longer. I took the oxygen tube from my throat, removed the brace from my arm and actually jumped out of bed. And there I stood, on two legs that hadn't held the weight of my body in over five years.
This wasn't possible, of course--there were 1,001 medical reasons why this couldn't be happening. Yet there I stood, firmly, solidly, feeling tingly all over, as if I had just stepped from an invigorating shower. I could breathe freely. And I could see--I could see me. A whole, healthy me. My hands were normal, not curled to my wrists. The muscles in my arms and legs were filled out and whole. My feet were flat on the ground, like a dancer's. And oh, the steps I danced as I headed toward the doorway. I met my mother in the hallway. She stopped short and then she lifted the hem of my nightgown. Her eyes widened, her arms flung wide. "Barbara," she cried. "You have calves again!"
Dad was on the wheelchair ramp to the family room. Speechless, he wrapped me in his arms and waltzed me around and around.
Angela Crawford, an occupational therapist [5], hardly knew what she was saying: "B-but, Barb, you can't..." She took my pulse and exclaimed, "Barb, you've just wrecked everything I learned in school! You're absolutely normal; it's really a miracle!"
We all started praising God right there. Then quickly I was going outside. Since my clothing was stored at my sister Jan's house, I went out into the front yard in my robe, revelling in the fresh green lawn under my bare feet, the warm sun on my cheeks, the good, sweet air that filled my lungs. I could not believe the beauty of the spring flowers. I held them to my face and praised God.
Everyone promised to keep the incredible news a secret, and we made plans to slip into the evening service at church that night, after Jan's birthday dinner. It had been perhaps three years since I'd attended church. The pastor had visited me a week before, and, I learned later, was convinced he would never again see me alive.
When I walked up the stairs to the church that night, the pastor was asking the congregation if anyone had any announcements to make. Then he saw me walking down the aisle and fell against the pulpit, stunned. "This is nice, this is very nice," he kept repeating. When he composed himself, he invited me up to share the wonderful news.
Next day I phoned my doctor's office. His nurse was puzzled. "You say this is Barbara Cumminsky? But..." When I walked into Dr. Thomas Marshall's office later that day, he stared as if he were seeing an apparition [6]. He had never seen me up and walking and dressed.
For the next three hours, with other doctors invited in, Dr. Marshall put me through a series of tests and X-rayed my lungs. The film showed normal lungs; previously one lung was collapsed and the other was functioning at only 50 percent of its capacity.
Finally, Dr. Marshall shook his head in amazement. He found no signs of MS. He removed the tube in my neck and told me to forget my medications.
One of my surgeons, Dr. Harold Adolph, summed up my case in a written report: "At the present time, the patient has no findings of multiple sclerosis, walks normally, speaks normally, and is very happy, as is her family, over the obvious answer to prayer and the good hand of God in her life."
I don't know why God healed me. I don't believe I "earned" or "deserved" a healing. I only know that on the morning of June 7, 1981, God made my body whole.
Believe, Believe, Believe
By Harry DeCamp
"What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24).
I am a man who lives today in a state of amazement. For 66 of my 69 years I had only a nodding relationship with God; how extraordinary, then, that when I was dying He would bother to reach down and heal me. And yet He did just that.
Even when I was told I had cancer of the bladder, my first thought was not that I should pray to God. In fact, I wasn't all that desperate; it didn't seem like the end of the World to me. Actually, it was harder for my wife, Bess. Her mother had been a nurse, and Bess had been brought up hearing all the cancer horror stories. But I felt that somehow medicine was going to save me. I had confidence in my doctor, and I followed his instructions.
I eased up. I sold my insurance business to my son-in-law. Although I was in and out of the hospital several times, the cancer moved slowly. Life seemed fairly normal until February, 1978, when I went to the hospital for exploratory surgery. When I returned from the recovery room, my doctor was there. "Harry," he said, "I consider myself a competent [7] surgeon, but you need somebody much better than I am."
For the first time I was afraid.
The doctor went on to say, "We're sending you to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It's the best in the World." The idea that one of the finest surgeons in the World was going to operate on me gave me hope.
I knew when I went to New York that my bladder would have to be removed. As terrible as it was, I was prepared to live with the inconvenience of all kinds of medical contraptions. I was ready for anything if only I could be rid of the cancer.
But back from the recovery room on the day of the operation, through a haze of pain, I learned the truth. The great surgeon had sewn me up without removing my bladder. I cried in great racking sobs: My cancer was impossible to cure by a surgical operation!
That afternoon, one of the surgeon's assistants came to talk to me.
"No lies," I said.
"Well..." he said, his brow furrowed with concentration, "the cancer has spread so extensively to the surrounding tissue that to remove it all would mean..." he trailed off lamely.
"How much time do I have?" I whispered.
"We can't promise you anything: a year, a month...or even a day."
I swallowed and licked my parched lips. "Where...do I go from here?"
"I don't know," he replied.
Now I was facing the reality I hadn't faced before. I was going to die. They gave me some pain killers as big as thumbnails, and a supply of sleeping pills.
Bess, bless her, put on a brave show. "Now, Harry, we'll beat it yet," she said, as she propped me up in my easy chair in our living room. "We'll try the chemotherapy [8]: And there are all sorts of other theories..." Somebody sent us some literature from California about cancer patients being injected with massive doses of Vitamin C. Bess pounced on it as if someone had thrown us a life preserver.
But I knew I was dying. Whenever I lay down, I felt as though I were smothering, so most of the time I sat in my easy chair and stared at meaningless images on the TV screen.
The smell of food made me ill. "Harry!" Bess fumed. "I don't care if you're not hungry! EAT!"
I waved her away. What was the use? I'm a big man, but my weight plummeted steadily.
Occasionally I thought about praying to God, but I really didn't know how. I knew God was there, but He was some mystical Being, far away. It didn't seem right that after I'd ignored Him all these years I should start begging now. The words I said seemed to bounce off the ceiling.
Then two things happened, one right after the other.
The first was the card. It didn't seem to be that much different from all the other get-well cards. Yet for some reason, I kept returning to it. A friend had scribbled a message beneath her name: "With God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26).
How I wanted that to be true! Again and again I'd take out the card and look at it. Suppose it were true.... How do you go about making contact with God?... Isn't it too late in the game to think about going to church? Should I pray harder?... Read the Bible? I floundered; I was so confused I didn't know what to do. Yet the phrase kept coming back to me: "... all things are possible."
Then the magazine came--an issue of Guideposts, with a cover story about a cancer victim. She, too, was sent home to die--just like me. But she refused to die. Instead she began to read and reread about the healings of Jesus in the New Testament. She prayed constantly. She went to God determined that He was going to heal her. "Most of the time," she said, "we knock on the door so timidly, and open it just a little crack. We really don't expect God to reply."
Wasn't that what I was doing? Wasn't I knocking timidly? Should I knock more boldly, like the woman in that story?
In the same issue of that magazine, there was a story about a seriously wounded soldier who recovered simply by believing Jesus' Words. The soldier went to Jesus with utter confidence. He trusted the Words of Jesus that "what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24).
For the next three days I spent all my waking hours reading and rereading those two articles. I read them a dozen times--three dozen times. I saturated my consciousness until the details of what these two people had done became part of me. The thing that both of them had in common was a simple, childlike trust that God loved them and would heal them. I decided that I was going to believe the same way they did. Right there in our living room, while Bess was clattering about in the kitchen and the TV was blaring with the noise of a game show, I bowed my head.
"God," I said with conviction. "I am knocking on the door. I am here before You to say that I know without any doubt in the World that You are going to heal me."
Don't ask me to explain, but in that one incredible moment, the door swung open. For the first time in my life, God was close to me. He was at my elbows, literally. He was there. And for the first time in prayer I felt as if I was talking to Somebody, not just to myself. A deep joy stirred within me.
"Bess! Bess!" I called out. Bess came running. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but I didn't have the words yet.
"Yes, Harry? What's the matter?"
"I'm hungry," I said.
She looked at me peculiarly. "Would you like a cup of tea?"
"No," I said, "I want food." At first she thought I was kidding. I hadn't asked for anything in over four weeks. So she kidded back. "Well, why don't I run out and get you a nice big submarine sandwich?"
"Fine," I said with a grin.
And Bess did just that. She ran and bought a sandwich of ham and cheese and tomato and lettuce and watched in astonishment as I ate every bite of it--with gusto. She was only a bit less surprised when I ate a full breakfast the next morning, after my first full night's sleep in bed in weeks, and then took a walk--just a short one.
For the first two days after I found God, I prayed, not in the old, stilted, self-conscious, unbelieving way, but in my new informal faith way. I prayed as I walked, I prayed while I sat in my easy chair, and I prayed when I went to bed. I was having a non-stop conversation with God, in Whom I now believed and trusted with all my heart.
I began to picture my healing with images just as clear as if they were coming in on our TV screen. I could see an army of white blood cells, led by Jesus Christ, sweeping down from my shoulders into my stomach, swirling around in my bladder, battling their way into my liver, my heart. Regiment after regiment they came, endlessly; the white corpuscles [9] moving relentlessly on the cancer cells, moving in and devouring them! On and on the victorious white army swept, down into my legs and feet and toes, then to the top of my body, mopping up stray cancer cells as they went, until, at last, the battle was over and Jesus Christ stood in triumph.
Day after day I replayed that battle scene in my mind. I felt full of health. My energy returned dramatically. I walked, drove my car, played 18 holes of golf and walked all the way. I dutifully went through my chemotherapy treatments, but more to please Bess and my doctor than myself.
Six months later, I went back to my original doctor for an examination. He seemed surprised to see me looking so healthy and well.
I tried to prepare him. "Look, Doc," I said, "you're not going to find a thing. Believe me. I'm all better!"
Smiling indulgently [10] he replied, "Well, Harry ... let's just take a look anyway, shall we?"
He performed several tests and found that the malignant [11] mass behind the bladder had disappeared. Everything seemed to be normal. The doctor was astounded but, nevertheless, cautious.
"Harry," he said, "the only way we can prove without a doubt that you're free of cancer is to do another exploratory operation. But you look so healthy we're not about to do that. We'll keep an eye on you, but it looks very good."
That was over a year ago and today I feel fit as a fiddle. So I continue to live in a state of amazement. I'm amazed at His Love. I'm amazed at His closeness. I'm amazed that it's all so simple, while I've spent my life making it so complicated. Jesus told us the way to be healed--simply, powerfully, in two words: "Only believe."
Power to Heal
By James McKeever
"According to your faith be it unto you" (Matthew 9:29).
In years gone by, Jim Spillman, a friend and a man of God, was one of the pastors at Melodyland Church, across from Disneyland in Southern California. One time a young lady whom he knew came up to him before a service and said, "Pastor, I think this is my day to be healed!" He noticed that one of her eyes was a little irregular and they did not move together.
After the service, during the time of healing, he prayed for her.
Later he saw her excitedly pointing at various objects, reading distant letters and exclaiming about colours and things that she was seeing. She had her hand over her left eye. Her right hand was closed except for the index finger, with which she was zealously pointing at things. Jim felt this was a little unusual, so he had her come back up onto the platform to tell him what was happening. He had assumed that she had simply had a wandering eye and that the Lord had healed it, so that her two eyes would move together. She moved her left hand from over her left eye and he saw two beautiful brown eyes staring at him. But then she opened her other hand and there, in the palm of her hand, was a glass eye!
It turned out that she had not had an eye in that empty socket from birth. While she was being prayed for, one of the ushers saw the glass eye come out of the right socket and begin to roll down the aisle. He retrieved it and put it in her right hand. He then noted some white, swirling substance in her right eye socket and saw an eye being formed under her eyelid.
This is well documented and was reported on Channel 9 in Los Angeles (1972), including testimonies by her parents and her doctor.
Isn't it exciting that God can do incredibly wonderful things if we trust Him? All Jim did was to pray a simple prayer, "Lord, make her eye perfect."
Encounter with an Angel
Excerpt from "Time" Magazine, 27/12/93
"Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not" (Jeremiah 33:3).
Ann Cannady recalls the day in July 1977 when a third test result confirmed she had advanced uterine cancer. "Cancer is a terribly scary word," she says. Her husband Gary, a retired U.S. Air Force master sergeant, had lost his first wife to the same type of cancer and did not know whether he had the strength to go through it again. "We spent the next eight weeks scared and praying, praying and scared," says Ann. "I kept begging God, saying, `Please, if I'm going to die, let me die quickly. I don't want Gary to have to face this again.'"
Ann knows that her prayers were heard. Even years later, the memory remains as vivid as it is out of this World.
One morning, three days before she was to enter the hospital for surgery, Gary answered the doorbell. Standing on the step was a large man, a few centimeters taller than her 1.95 metre (about 6 feet, 5 inches) husband. "He was the blackest Black I've ever seen," Ann says, "and his eyes were a deep, deep, azure blue." The stranger introduced himself simply as Thomas. And then he told her that her cancer was gone.
"How do you know my name, and how did you know I have cancer?" stammered Ann. Then she turned to her husband and asked, "What do we do, Gary? Should we ask him in?"
Thomas came inside and again told them she could stop worrying. He quoted Scripture to them--Isaiah 53:5: "...and with His stripes we are healed."
Ann, still confused, looked at the man and demanded, "Who are you?"
"I am Thomas. I am sent by God."
Next, Ann recalls, "He held up his right hand, palm facing me, and leaned toward me, though he didn't touch me. I'm telling you, the heat coming from his hand was incredible. Suddenly I felt my legs go out from under me, and I fell to the floor. As I lay there, a strong white light, like one of those searchlights, travelled through my body. It started at my feet and worked its way up. I knew then, with every part of me--my body, my mind and my heart--that something supernatural had happened."
She passed out. When she awoke, her husband was leaning over her asking, "Ann, are you alive?" and pleading for her to speak to him. Thomas was gone. Ann, still weak from the encounter said, "I crawled over to the telephone and called my doctor's office and demanded to speak to him right that minute. I told him something had happened, and I was cured, and I didn't need surgery. He told me stress and fear were causing me to say things I didn't mean."
In the end they reached a compromise. Ann would show up at the hospital as scheduled, but before the operation the surgeons would do another test. They would keep her on the operating table ready. If the preliminary test came back positive they would proceed as planned. When Ann woke up after the test, she was in a regular hospital room, the doctor at her bedside. "I don't understand what's happened," he said, "but your test came back clean. We've sent the sample off to the lab for further testing. For now, though, you appear to be in the clear."
There has been no recurrence of the cancer. At first Ann was hesitant to talk about it for fear that people, including her children, would think she'd "lost it". They didn't. Even her doctor, she says, acknowledged at one point that he'd "witnessed a medical miracle".
With God, the Impossible Is Always Possible
By Pat Robertson
"Jesus said unto him, `If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth" (Mark 9:23).
One night in early May, 1979, Barbara Burak heard her nine-year-old son, Paul Junior, call to her in panic: "I can't see--and my head hurts!" He had been suffering from an ear infection, and now his condition had become much worse. Sobbing, the youngster told his mother he couldn't even focus his eyes.
This event marked the beginning of their ordeal. Within twenty-four hours, Barbara and Paul had rushed Paul Junior to a hospital in Miami. Because of a diagnosis of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain caused by injury or infection, the boy was in critical condition and was not expected to live.
The people at the Buraks' church started a prayer chain and began to pray continuously around the clock. "We had people praying all over the country," Barbara recalls. Of course, it would have been easy just to give up and sink into despair. But as far as God is concerned, the Buraks don't know the meaning of the word impossible.
Paul Junior remained in a coma [12] for four days and then stayed semicomatose [13] for fifteen more days. His condition went up and down. Sometimes it seemed hopeful; other times, hopeless. Barbara couldn't bear to see her son suffer like this, and so she went off alone to talk to God in prayer. She told the Lord she wasn't losing her faith, but she emphasized that He had to help her and give her the strength to get through this ordeal. "You have to help that boy!" she prayed. "You can't let him come out of this a vegetable!"
A definite answer to this prayer seemed to come the next morning, when an EEG [14] showed normal results. But the tough times weren't over by any means. A brain scan the following day showed what a doctor described as "definite brain damage." But when Paul Senior heard this report, his faith in God's ability to overcome the impossible seemed to grow even stronger. He said, "The Lord has kept him alive this long. He's brought him this far. He's going to perform a miracle, and He doesn't do halfway jobs." As for the diagnosis of brain damage, he said flatly, "I'm not going to accept it!"
These weren't hollow words, either. From that point on, when his father took such an unwavering stand of faith, Paul Junior began to recover. His improvement baffled the doctors, but the boy knew the source of his help: He told anyone who would listen that it was Jesus Who was healing him. Finally, he recovered totally, in defiance of a doctor's prediction that he would be mentally impaired. A child neurologist [15] has confirmed that he's completely well, and since his release from the hospital, he's been an "A" grade student in school.
In short, the lesson from the Buraks' experience is that it's never wise to accept any physical condition as "impossible" to heal. In fact, the first step in tackling an "impossible" problem is to recognize that with God all things are possible.
The Healing of Maude Blanford
By Catherine Marshall
"Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me: nevertheless not My Will, but Thine, be done" (Luke 22:42).
Healing through faith remains a mystery to me. I have been part of prayer campaigns where healing was gloriously granted, others where, at least in this World, it was not. Why? There were no quick answers.
The story of Maude Blanford is one case where God granted that miracle.
Last summer, I heard through a new friend about a miraculous healing from terminal cancer. I was so intrigued that I flew to Louisville and got the details from Maude herself.
The woman across the dining table from me was a grandmotherly type, comfortable to be with. "How did your--ah, illness begin?" I asked, feeling foolish even asking the question to someone obviously in such radiant health.
"My left leg had been hurting me," Mrs. Blanford replied. "I thought it was because I was on my feet so much. Finally my husband and I decided that I should go to the doctor."
When her family doctor said words like "specialist" and "biopsy [16]," the patient read the unspoken thought--malignancy.
Mrs. Blanford was referred to Dr. O. J. Hayes. He examined her and prescribed radiation treatment [17]. The treatment began July 7, and was followed by surgery on September 29. After the operation, when Mrs. Blanford pleaded with Doctor Hayes for the truth, he admitted, "It is cancer and it's gone too far. We could not remove it because it's so widespread. One kidney is almost nonfunctioning. The pelvic bone is affected--that's why you have the pain in your leg."
Maude Blanford was put on drugs to control the by now excruciating [18] pain and sent home to die. Over a six-month period, while consuming thousands of dollars' worth of pain-relieving drugs, she took stock of her spiritual life and found it wanting indeed. There was no knowledge of the Bible, and only the most shadowy concept of Jesus.
In January, 1960, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage [19] and was rushed back to the hospital. For 12 days she lay unconscious. But Maude Blanford, oblivious [20] to the World around her, was awake in a very different World. In her deep coma, a vivid image came to her. She saw a house with no top on it. The partitions between the rooms were there, the furniture in place, but there was no roof. She remembered thinking, Oh, we must put a roof on it!
When she came out of the coma, Mrs. Blanford's mind was very much intact, but bewildered. What could the roofless house have meant? As she puzzled over it, a Presence seemed to answer her. Today she has no hesitation in calling it the Holy Spirit. "I was shown that the house represented my body, but that without Jesus as my covering, my body had no protection."
From then until July, 1960, her condition worsened. Heart action and breathing became so difficult, she was reduced to weak whispers. Even with drugs, the suffering became unbearable.
By July she knew she no longer had the strength to make the trip for radiation treatment. "On July 1st, I told the nurse I wouldn't be coming back."
But that day, as her son-in-law helped her into the car outside the medical building, she broke down and wept. "At that moment I didn't want anything except for God to take me quickly--as I was. I said, `God, I don't know Who You are. I don't know anything about You. I don't even know how to pray. Just, Lord, have Your Own way with me.'"
Though she did not realize it, Maude Blanford had just prayed one of the most powerful of all prayers--the prayer of surrender. By getting her own mind and will out of the way, she had opened the door to the Holy Spirit.
She did not have long to wait for evidence of His Presence. Monday, July 4, dawned beautiful, but hot. That afternoon Joe Blanford set up a cot for his wife outdoors under the trees. As the ill woman rested, into her mind poured some beautiful sentences.
Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free.... Then shall thy light break forth speedily.... Here I am.
I stared at Maude Blanford over the rim of my coffee cup. "But I thought you didn't know the Bible."
"I didn't! I'd never read a word of it. Only I knew this didn't sound like ordinary English. I thought, Is that in the Bible? And right away the words came: Isaiah 58. Well, my husband got a Bible for me. I had to hunt and hunt to find the part called Isaiah. But then when I found those verses just exactly as I had heard them--except for the last three words, Here I am--well, I knew God Himself had really spoken to me!"
Over the next weeks Maude Blanford read the Bible constantly, often until two or three o'clock in the morning, seeing the Person of Jesus take shape before her eyes. As she read, a response grew in her, a response that is another of the Holy Spirit's workings in the human heart--praise. At home she began very slowly climbing the stairs, praising Jesus for each step she attained.
Next, she tried putting a small amount of water in a pail. Sitting in a kitchen chair, she would mop the floor in the area immediately around her, scoot the chair a few inches, mop again. "Thank You Jesus, for helping me do this!"
Her daughter-in-law, who was coming over almost daily to clean house for her, one day asked in great puzzlement, "Mom, how is it that your kitchen floor never gets dirty?"
The older woman smiled. "Well, I guess I'll have to confess--the Lord and I are doing some housework."
But their chief work, she knew, was not on this building of brick and wood, but on the house of her spirit, the house that had been roofless for so long. Gradually, as her knowledge of Him grew, she sensed His protective Love surrounding and sheltering her. Not that all pain and difficulties were over. She was still on pain-numbing drugs, still experiencing much nausea from the radiation.
One Saturday night, when the pain would not let her sleep, she lay on her bed praising God and reading the Bible. About 2 a.m., she drifted off to sleep with the Bible lying on her stomach. She felt that she was being carried to Heaven, travelling a long way through space. Then came a voice out of the Universe, My child, your work is not finished. You are to go back. This was repeated three times, slowly, majestically.
The rest of the night she remained awake, flooded with joy, thanking God. When her husband woke up in the morning, she told him, "Honey, Jesus healed me last night."
She could see that he did not believe it; there was no change in her outward appearance. "But I knew I was healed and that I had to tell people." That very morning she walked to the Baptist church across the highway from their home and asked the minister if she could give a testimony. He gave permission, and she told the roomful of people that God had spoken to her in the night and healed her.
A few weeks later she insisted on taking a long bus trip to visit her son in West Virginia. Still on drugs, still suffering pain, she nonetheless knew that the Holy Spirit was telling her to rely now on Jesus instead of drugs. At five o'clock on the afternoon of April 27, 1961, on the return bus journey, as she popped a pain-killing pill into her mouth at a rest stop, she knew it would be the last one.
So it turned out. In retrospect, physicians now consider this sudden withdrawal as great a miracle as the transformation of cancer cells to healthy tissue.
It took time to rebuild her body-house--nine months for her bad leg to be near normal, two years for all symptoms of cancer to vanish. When she called Doctor Hayes in 1962 over some small matter, he almost shouted in astonishment. "Mrs. Blanford! What's happened to you! I thought you were..."
"You thought I was long since gone," she said, laughing.
"Please come to my office at once and let me examine you! I've got to know what's happened."
"But why should I spend a lot of money for an examination when I'm a perfectly healthy woman?" she asked.
"Mrs. Blanford, I promise you, this one is on us!" What the doctor found can best be stated in his own words: "I had lost contact with Mrs. Blanford and had assumed that this patient had died. In May of 1962 she appeared in my office. It had been two-and-a-half years since her operation, and her last X-ray had been in July, 1960.... The swelling of her leg had gone. She had full use of her leg; she had no symptoms whatsoever, and on examination I was unable to ascertain [21] whether or not any cancer was left....
"She was seen again on November 5, 1962, at which time her examination was completely negative.... She has been seen periodically since that time for routine examinations.... She is absolutely asymp-tomatic [22].... This case is most unusual in that this woman had a proven, far-advanced cancer of the cervix and there should have been no hope whatsoever for her survival."
No hope whatsoever.... No hope except for the hope on which our faith is founded. n
Discussion Questions:
Following are a number of questions, some of which can be applied to each of the stories in this magazine. After reading each story, you can choose several of these questions for discussion. You do not necessarily need to ask or discuss every question after reading each story, but you may choose those which apply and are helpful.
1. How did the Lord use the Word to bring about this person's healing? What part did the Word play in their healing?
2. Was the person in this story healed almost instantaneously, or over a period of time. Discuss possible reasons why the Lord chose to heal this person in this particular way.
3. Was this healing at least partly the result of others' prayers? Please discuss.
4. Why do you think God allowed this affliction and sickness in this person's life?
5. Is there anything in this story that you don't understand? If you have any questions, please be sure to ask your teachers or parents.
6. Are there any points in this story which would be a help to you if you were afflicted? Do these stories encourage your faith? Please discuss.
Definitions:
(The meaning given is for the use of the word in the story & does not cover every meaning of the word.)
[1] multiple sclerosis: a disorder of the nervous system, attacking the brain and spinal cord, and characterized by the degeneration of nerve tissue, followed by paralysis, muscle spasms, disorders of speech, and tremors of the hand
[2] passive: without action
[3] vocation: a particular occupation, business, profession or trade
[4] fetal position: a position resembling that of an unborn baby in the womb, with the spine curved, the head bowed forward, and arms and legs drawn in toward the chest
[5] occupational therapist: a person who works with people having physical or mental disabilities, doing specific types of exercises or work, to promote recovery or rehabilitation
[6] apparition: a supernatural sight or thing; ghost
[7] competent: properly quali-fied, able
[8] chemotherapy: the treatment of disease and infection by means of chemicals; for example, the treatment of cancer with chemicals
[9] white corpuscles: cells which form a large part of blood and which destroy disease germs
[10] indulgently: giving in to another's wishes or whims
[11] malignant: something diseased, such as a tumour
[12] coma: a prolonged unconsciousness caused by disease or injury
[13] semicomatose: partly conscious
[14] EEG: an instrument used to measure and record the electrical voltages produced by neurons (nerve cells) in the brain
[15] neurologist: a specialist in diseases of the central nervous system of the body
[16] biopsy: the medical examination of tissue removed from the body
[17] radiation treatment: the medical practice of directing concentrated doses of radiation onto a malignant tumour to kill cancer cells
[18] excruciating: extreme, severe
[19] cerebral hemorrhage: serious internal bleeding of the brain
[22] oblivious: unaware of
[21] ascertain: determine; make sure of
[22] asymptomatic: without symptoms
(Definitions condensed from the World Book, Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary & Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary.)