A Spontaneous Remission of Hatred

Real People & Real Stories of Courage, Strength, Faith and Forgiveness. #1Millionsurvivalstories

A spontaneous remission is the disappearance of cancer without any immediate medical cause. The rare but spectacular phenomenon of spontaneous remission of cancer persists in the annals of medicine, totally inexplicable but real, a hypothetical straw to clutch in the search for cure .... No one doubts the validity of the observation."

IT'S NO EASY THING TO watch a parent die. As Sharon learned, it can be even harder to watch a parent suffer. Sharon, now in her fifties, was the oldest daughter in a family of seven-five children and two working parents. She was raised to be a nurturer, caring for her brothers and sisters by cooking and cleaning. In many respects, she mothered them. It was especially hard, then, when her family was driven apart after her father sustained a brain injury in a horrific accident. One morning in early 2008, Sharon's mother went to wake him and found him incoherent. "She called the ambulance and they took him to the hospital. He had a massive hematoma in his brain, and it was inoperable. The doctor said that the prognosis was not good." They told the family that he would probably lose his ability to walk and would never again be able to function normally. "He had a living will. It said not to do anything to keep him alive." But when it came down to it, Sharon's mother disagreed.

"It doesn't matter what the children think," her mother told the doctors, "it's what I think. I'm his wife and I say do whatever you can." Sharon argued, but her mother insisted: "I'll do what I want to do." Sharon stormed out of the room and didn't return for several days. When she came back, she saw her father in a state of dependency that he'd never wanted. "They had tubes everywhere. He had a feeding tube in his stomach, he had a catheter in him, he had a trache in him, he had a tube in his brain to drain blood." And it would only get worse. "He ended up getting a bedsore, and it got so bad that you could put your fist in it."

#1Millionsurvivalstories - Immersion

Sharon became angrier and angrier with her family for putting her father through increasing misery. "He had a living will and it was totally violated. I sat and watched as my father was cut apart, picked apart, and the anger just built up. He was so embarrassed because he knew his daughter was seeing him like that. It hurt me so badly because I knew how proud he was. "You can imagine being a proud man and then having yourself brought to a level where people would take your covers off you and just leave you naked and exposed to your daughters," Sharon said. "I mean, the last thing he'd want is for his daughters to see him like that. It did a number on me."

Sharon's father passed away. She was diagnosed with cancer a short time later. When she was told she had cancer, Sharon said, all she could think was, My daddy's not here. He'd want to be with me; he'd want to help me because he loved me so much.

"But I was blessed," she said. "I have a wonderful husband, and he supported me as I was faced with a decision: whether to have my breasts amputated with a mastectomy or to remove the mass. I opted for the removal and the treatment." When the surgeons were unable to remove the entire mass, Sharon was devastated to learn that she would have to go back for a second operation. "Any surgery is upsetting, and to take a part of a woman's body that actually makes her a woman is bad enough-but then to tell her that they have to go in and take more is even worse." She said she believed her cancer was caused by something within her heart.

"I never felt that way about anybody," she said, referring to her family. "And if I did, I would always pray for forgiveness; but this was something that I could feel festering in my soul." "You know," I told her, "we have a program for forgiveness and it's not traditional-but it's one that I've found works. Are you will- ing to go through it?" Without hesitation, she said, "Sure. Definitely, because I don't want this in me. I can't have this in me because I don't want cancer again, and I know that it was brought on from that."

"Do you feel that your cancer was caused by your anger with your family?" I asked her. "Yes, I do," she said. "Yes, I do." I asked Sharon if she wanted to move ahead with the program: (she did), and if it was okay for me to pray with her (it was). I prayed for her, laying hands on her and anointing her with oil-which was, incidentally, exactly how her father used to pray for her. "We had prayer," she would later say. "I mean, we had prayer.

At the time, I didn't realize it, but my heart truly wanted to forgive those people. I didn't want those negative feelings in me anymore. They were not of me. But I couldn't seem to do it. Every time I turned around, that's all I could talk about. Everybody I talked to, that's all I talked about. I mean, strangers, everybody. It just wouldn't go away."

But something happened. "When we finished praying, I felt a heaviness come off of me. But I didn't pay attention to it." Instead, she went back to the rooms where she occasionally stayed during her visits to the hospital and sat down to work on her assignment.

"I started to write, and I wrote, 'These people did this to my father-' and I couldn't think of anything more. I couldn't think."

Supposing she was just tired, Sharon lay down for a rest. When she got up, she tried to write for a second time. "Nothing but gibberish came to my mind," she said. "Nothing. I was just sitting there thinking, My gosh, what is wrong with me? This must be some kind of trick or something. This must be something we know is going to happen to you, because I still was not aware of what had actually happened."

Sharon stopped writing again, got a bite to eat, and then sat down for a third try at the assignment. As she sat staring at the blank sheet of paper, she realized that she had nothing to write; so she went to bed.

When she came back to my office the next day, she asked me, "What was that? I couldn't write anything. I tried to start and it was babble. When I left here, I just couldn't think. When I woke up this morning, it was the first day that I did not think about my father and what happened to him. Every morning, when I would say my prayers, I would just start crying about my dad-and this morning I didn't." She said that, for the first time since her father's death, her heart didn't ache.

"Do you realize what happened?" I asked her. "Spontaneous Remission."

Sharon had experienced with her forgiveness what doctors occasionally see with cancer and other physical ailments, when a tumor or disease unexpectedly and inexplicably disappears. There is no satisfying medical explanation for this phenomenon-people of faith (myself included) recognize it as a miracle.

The only reason that someone like Sharon, who was consumed by her anger and un-forgiveness, might experience such an abrupt and instantaneous relief from her symptoms is through an act of God. Sharon wanted deliverance from anger and un-forgiveness. When we prayed, it was removed from her.

"The writing out - I think it is the actual revelation of what is in you," she said. "When you write it down, you can see it and feel it. I couldn't write anything, because I had been delivered from it before I left the office.

"It was like a miracle. That's what it was like: it was like a miracle." Of course, the process of forgiveness doesn't always happen so quickly, but that doesn't make Sharon's experience any less genuine, or her forgiveness any less life changing. "They don't consider you cancer-free until it has been seven years now," Sharon said with a laugh, "but if I'm un-forgiveness- free, I consider myself cancer-free."

Because Everyone's Journey IS Different