By Nancy Pickard
There were six of us to start with: six part-time poets who met as strangers and became friends over several years of getting together once a month to read our work. But then our youngest member, Annie, died of a brain tumor. Miranda took a fall that left her with brain damage. Sarah developed Parkinson’s disease. Tory, who wrote wickedly funny and sometimes raunchy poetry, joined a fundamentalist religion that didn’t approve of that talent, and so she left us. Ruby stayed healthy but went bankrupt. That left Bess and me as the only two who weren’t sick, dead, or broke.
As Sarah’s Parkinson’s got worse, I suggested that since nothing else was helping her, maybe we could try a laying on of hands? Sarah was game. So was Bess. Miranda was, too, but couldn’t attend on the day we chose. Tory dropped by to hand me a pamphlet that warned we’d go to hell if we did this thing.
So on a Sunday afternoon, three of us met at my house.
Sarah got comfortable lying down on a couch in my living room.
Bess stood behind the couch, at Sarah’s feet, with a hand on our “patient.”
I stood at Sarah’s head and placed my right hand on her.
Being novices, we didn’t have a plan, but we had love and faith.
We each said a silent prayer, according to our individual spiritual leanings: Bess is a Presbyterian; Sarah was a Baptist; I was and am a student of A Course in Miracles, and I flirted with Buddhism, too, in those days. I remember asking for help from God or the Universe, and that Thy Will Be Done.
And it was done, just not at all how I expected!
When I closed my eyes to concentrate on healing, a remarkable thing happened: Annie appeared to my closed eyes, just her face, up close, looking just like herself. You may recall that she was our youngest member who had died of a brain tumor a few years earlier.
She looked real and alive, though expressionless in a neutral way.
In a matter-of-fact tone, she said four words: “Miranda will be fine.”
Miranda?
But it was Sarah on my couch!
I was really glad to see Annie—looking so young and just like herself–but this was confusing.
When we finished with our “healing,” Sarah reported no change, no effect, nothing.
I decided right then not to tell her or Bess that I’d seen Annie or what she’d said to me. I thought it might be crushing to Sarah to find out that, well, no, there’s nothing for you, Dear, but Annie came back with a message for. . .Miranda?
Miranda will be fine?
For the next twenty-four hours or so, I dithered about what to do about that message.
Should I call Miranda and risk looking like a credulous fool, or worse, a cruel “friend” who held out a promise of something that could never happen? The brain damage from her fall had slowly and mostly healed, but there were still residual effects. What if she interpreted the message to mean she would now fully recover, and then, what if that didn’t happen? Would she hate me for getting her hopes up? I cringed at the thought of raising and then crashing her optimism.
Or, maybe I was making way too much of a. . .a what?
A Vision? Was it a Vision?
A fantasy? A hallucination?
Maybe I just wouldn’t tell her.
Finally, I realized I had to tell her.
If anything was cruel, it would be to let my fear of appearing foolish stop me from giving her the message I had been trusted to relay to her. (I shudder now, years later, to imagine: what if I’d chickened out, and chosen ego, instead?)
So, still nervous, still not sure it was the right thing to do, I phoned her. When I told her, she gasped and burst into tears. She told me what I hadn’t known, which was that she’d had a mammogram a few days before that returned ominous results. She’d undergone a second test; she was going to get the verdict from her doctor in a few days, and she’d been miserable with fear until this moment. She was overwhelmed with relief. Later, she told me it gave her peace of mind so that she wasn’t afraid anymore.
The mammogram turned out to be a false positive.
We didn’t heal Sarah, but Miranda was, indeed, fine.
Recently I came across some guidance that Helen Schucman, the “scribe” of ACIM, received, and it reminded me so much of my experience: “…This does not mean that you cannot get messages for another, if it is God Who chooses this way of reaching him. This will usually happen unexpectedly, generally in the form of a sudden feeling that you have something to tell him; a message to deliver.”
So receiving an unexpected message to pass on is apparently a thing.
I learned that if I ever again receive a message from a trusted, loving Source, I must pass it along, promptly and without fear, to its intended recipient. There’s something else I see now, too: when we ask God for help, we may get surprises!
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