November 9, 2005

Imaging

I'm reading Norman Vincent Peale's book, "Imaging". Here's a story from the book.

Harry was in the insurance business – quite successful at it, too. But the day came when he was told he had cancer of the bladder cancer. In operable cancer. Whe he asked how much time he had to live, the doctors couldn’t tell him. They gave him some painkillers and sent him home to die.

Harry had never been a very religious man. As he put it, “I had only a nodding acquaintance with God.” He thought about praying, but he didn’t know how. “I knew God was there,” he said later, “but He was some kind of mystical Being, far away. It didn’t seem right to start begging after ignoring Him for so money years.

Then two things happened in rapid succession. Someone set Harry a get-well car and wrote on it, “With God all things are possible.” Somehow that phrase stuck in Harry’s mind. It kept coming back to him. Then he picked up an inspirational magazine and read two stories in it. One was about a seriously injured soldier who had recovered from near-fatal wounds by creating mental pictures of himself as a healthy, whole individual. The other story was about a cancer victim who claimed that total believing and total faith were the keys to answered prayer, that Christ meant exactly what He said when He told his followers, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and be thrown into the sea.’ And does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so hat your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

Harry Decamp was not a churchgoer, though he was a nominal believer that God could do anything, and that constant prayer backed by real faith could put him in touch with enormous healing power of the Almighty. In addition to that, he decided to visualize the healing process taking place in the most dramatic form that his imagination could supply.

He began to image armies of healing white blood cells in his body cascading down from his shoulders, sweeping through his veins, at attacking the malignant cells and destroying them. A hundred times a day, two hundred, three hundred, he went through this imagining process. He worked at it constantly, day and night. “The images,” he said later, “were just as clear as if they were coming in on our TV Screen. I could see an army of white blood cells cascading down from my shoulders into my stomach, swirling around in m gladder, battling there way into my liver, my hear. Regiment after regiment they came, endlessly, the white corpuscles moving in and destroying 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 the last battle was over. Day after day I replayed that battle scene in my mind. It made me feel terrific..”

Harry Decamp also kept on with his chemotherapy, although he was convinced eh didn’t need it. Six months later, when he went back for a checkup, the malignant mass was gone.

Food for thought.

Posted by The Vorlon at November 9, 2005 1:27 PM