Hello my fellow hubbers. Following is absolutely true. You may or may not believe it. This really happened. What else could I do but believe in God? Sorry about the long narrative
Thanks for reading
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I used to flaunt my agnostic credentials though in private I was not an absolute nonbeliever and had my doubts. There were many unexplained things which could only have been some external agencies' doing. On the other hand, how could you accept illogical explanations with just faith as a convenient prop? How could Jesus have brought Lazarus back from beyond? More importantly, why single Lazarus out? What is so special about Lazarus that he deserved to be accorded this special treatment?
On a different level, any number of faith-healing related stories floated about all around. And, to add to the chaos, indulgent and complaisant stories abounded about UFOs, ESP and clairvoyance . Umpteen other occult-like phenomena were making their rounds. When you seriously thought about it all, it was all so mind-numbing that you just wished that you had left them alone and minded your business. I spent hours and hours everyday delving deep into books, plain and esoteric. Obscure literature was fished out of both ordinary and unlikely sources.
That is when something happened that turned my world upside down. Without any effort on anybody's part, I was transformed into a believer. My all-knowing postures dissipated into nothingness and I was humbled into submission. This is what happened.
My wife, a good woman of faith, in spite of my occasional barb (though not uttered with absolute malice), loved me immensely and chose not to take my adverse comments about religion to heart. Her attempts to bring about a change in me more in line with her beliefs failed all the time.
One morning, she felt a pain just above her right breast and when we ran our hands over the area we could feel a rather large lump inside. We looked at each other with apprehension and a prompt visit to our small-town physician, sympathetic but not one given to delicate manners, having been an army man all his life, resulted in his telling us bluntly that it could possibly be a malignant tumor. We were still sitting dazed when he contacted an oncologist friend of his and fixed an appointment for next morning.
Gloom understandably descended our lair and sleep was hard to come by that night. I lay on my bed with my wife praying on the floor by the bed. For once, I found myself wondering if her prayers would be heard by some one somewhere at all and whether Jesus would answer her prayers. Last I saw, my wife was murmuring her prayers with tears flowing down on her cheeks. I was so miserable, I was close to crying myself. I must have drifted off to sleep some time around 3am.
I woke up with a start and found my wife looking down at me. The smile on her face was as radiant as the morning Sun outside and it immediately dawned on me that something has happened to make her smile so wantonly, given the circumstances. She silently took my hand and put it on the area where the lump had been.
I sat up with a jerk and ran my hand over and over again but the lump simply was not there! I looked at my still smiling wife in incomprehension. She asked me" Do you believe now?" I realized she was talking about believing Jesus. I looked straight at her without blinking and said "Yes, I believe now".
"What do you believe?" She continued.
In answer to that, I got up and knelt beside the bed and started thanking God. The doctors were amazed but still carried out the tests. They found no evidence of the tumor ever having been there! My wife told me that she had not slept a wink the previous night and was praying throughout.
Was it cancer that my wife had? Had it not been, why did it have to disappear in a night of prayers? It did not dissolve gradually. It just vanished! As far as I am concerned, it was a carcinogenic tumor. Had it been simply a pus formation, it had no business disappearing. It would just have caused immense pain and would heal one way or the other in course of time. It is not life-threatening. Cancer is. It had all the reasons to disappear. And, it did. How did it disappear? Some one had to make it disappear.. So, why couldn't it have been God, in the absence of any evidence pointing to any other entity having done it? There was no conflict of interest here.
I found the transition to a believer smooth and without any hiccups. It was so natural that I never felt odd that I was now propagating something completely incompatible with my previous stand. And. I thank God for that!
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