Me: Here is a reminder.
Prodigal: Those are good.
Me: Don’t ever go back to anything you had to pray your way out of.
This is from Catherine Marshall
Healing through faith remains a mystery to me. I have ben part of prayer campaigns where it was gloriously granted, others where, at least in this world, it was not.
Why? There are no glib answers. Yet in my experience, as God has closed one door, He always opens another.
Last summer, a new friend from Louisville, Kentucky, opened a door on this difficult question by telling me of Maude Blanford’s healing from terminal cancer eleven years ago. 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,” the patient read the unspoken thought–malignancy.
Mrs. Blanford was referred to Dr. O. J. Hayes. He examined her on June 29th 1959, and prescribed radiation treatment. 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 narcotics to control the by now excruciating pain and sent home to die. Over a six-month period, while consuming a thousand dollars’ worth of pain relieving drugs, she took stock of her spiritual resources and found them meager indeed. There was no church affiliation, no knowledge of the Bible, only the most shadowy concept of Jesus.
In January 1960, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was rushed back to the hospital. For twelve days she lay unconscious . But Maude Blanford, oblivious 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 meant? As she puzzled over it, a Presence seemed to answer her. Today she has no hesitation in calling Him the Holy Spirit. “He seemed to show me 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 first 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 relinquishment. 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 narcotics, 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 2:00 A.M., she drifted off to sleep with the Bible lying on her stomach. She felt that she was being carried to Heaven, traveling 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 that Baptist church across the highway form 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 narcotics, still suffering pain, she nonetheless knew that the Holy Spirit was telling her to rely from now on 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 perfectly well 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 his patient had expired. 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 was gone. She had full use of her leg; she had no symptoms whatsoever, and on examination I was unable to ascertain whether or not any cancer was left…..
“She was seen again on November 5, 1962, at which time her examination was completely negative….She had been seen periodically since that time for routine examinations…..She is absolutely asymptomatic….This case is most unusual in that this woman had a proven, far-advanced metastatic cancer of the cervix and there should have been no hope whatsoever for her survival.”
No hope whatsoever….No hope except the hope on which our faith is founded.
The miracle of Maude Blanford reminds me again of that scene of the night before His crucifixion when Jesus spoke quietly to His despairing disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (John 15:16). He is still saying that to us today, while His Spirit–always working through human beings–sometimes confounds us, often amazes us, and is always the Guide to the future who can bring us joy and excited fulfillment.
Son of man, thy brethren, even thy brethren, the men of thy kindred, and all the house of Israel wholly, are they unto whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, Get you far from the LORD: unto us is this land given in possession. Ezekiel 11:15 (KJV)
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
