“To be born a human is a great gift for the human has the option of
earning karmic merit and undoing negative karma.”
Siddhartha Gautama
A MOUNTAIN MIRACLE
“Do you know my story?” Barbara asked as we sat in a coffee shop across the street from where our vehicles were being repaired, in the mid 1980s, in Redding, California.
“I heard you had been through chemotherapy a few years back, and had come through it,” I said.
Barbara was not then a close friend, but someone I had met over the years at social gatherings in the mountain town where we lived, forty miles north of the city we now were in.
“Twice,” she replied, “and during the second stretch of therapy, when I became sicker than the first time, which had been awful, I decided it was better to just pass on, and I stopped trying to get well, I gave up living.”
Easter Sunrise
“But friends who didn’t want to see me leave or suffer anymore invited me to an Easter sunrise service that Spring, at the cabin on the mountain where therapy and massage work are done. And even though I‘d given up, I finally said yes to their invitation.”
“And you went that Sunday.”
“Before dawn,” she said. “We all met at the cabin, and after they helped me onto one of the massage tables there they held hands around me and started singing songs and hymns as the sun arose. And as I lay there with my eyes closed listening to their voices, suddenly I saw a golden hand appear, full of Light, and it passed slowly from the top of my head down through my body and out the bottoms my feet. And I knew that in that instant I’d been healed, that I was feeling no more pain or discomfort, that Jesus had taken away the cancer. And when I went to see my doctor that week he confirmed the tumor was gone, that he didn’t know why, but it was gone, when he had given me only a few more months to live.”
“After I told him what had happened he just shook his head and said it was a mystery to him, but that spontaneous healings like this were known to occur.”
I just looked at Barbara for a few seconds then and mumbled something vacant along the lines of, “that’s really something.”
“And I wasn’t even a Christian,” she said, “I considered myself a Buddhist and told people that even though I was a follower of Buddha that Jesus had healed me from the cancer.”
“But after a year of that I realized I was being boastful to make that claim and I became a Christian. How could I not be? I knew it was Christ’s hand that took away my sickness.”
