 |
| From Fate Magazine February 1957 |
On September 23, 1954, my physician advised me to visit Dr. Penrod G. Hepfer, a leading psychiatrist of Columbia, S.C., where I was working. My own doctor told me that further medical treatment was useless, as my trouble was psychosomatic and not responsive to ordinary treatment.
I had been of this opinion for some time. I knew that I was suffering mental distress. I had planned to teach, but circumstances had prevented me, and I detested my work. Even worse, my domestic situation was unhappy. Divorce seemed inevitable, and I felt sure that the court would award my wife custody of our two daughters. We never had a son and that fact, with the apparent certainty that we never should have any more children, plunged me into profound melancholy. I felt that I was to blame for my troubles. I suffered a relentless shame and feeling of guilt because of my past actions. I dreaded having it known that I needed psychiatric treatment, but my doctor offered hope from it, mentioning certain tranquilizing drugs that Dr. Hepfer was prepared to administer. I felt that if any relief was possible, it was worth any price, so I agreed to see him.
I visited Dr. Hepfer on October 4. We had a long preliminary conversation. At the end of it, he smiled and shook his head. "I supposed you to be disturbed," he murmured, "but on the contrary, you are very stable. Basically you are quite religious and your trouble may be aggravated by feelings of guilt because of that. However, if deep religious feeling accounts for your problem, it also can provide the means to treat your case. As I see it, your trouble is not mental at all, but if I may say so, spiritual, and I advise you to turn to spiritual means to remedy it. You are an unusual man; a sensitive man; a very distressed man, but a thoroughly rational one. I could give you drugs, but they could only allay symptoms. They could not reach the cause. I could psychoanalyze you for you years and perhaps help you understand the cause for your feelings, but psychiatry is expensive. You are already quite conscious of what causes your trouble, and you are able to cope with it. You know what will give you peace of mind. Find that, and your symptoms will disappear. I do not wish to treat your case."
As I listened, I realized that Dr. Hepfer was an honest man. I needed him.
"I must come back!" I protested. "I must have someone to talk with. I have no one!"
"No one?" he smiled.
I understood him. As I walked out into the late afternoon sunlight I squared my shoulders. Yes, there was One. I looked down the street where the sun filtered through flowering crepe myrtle trees and touched the bright roses of late autumn. They glowed with unusual beauty and I tried to awake myself to a sense of belonging to the creation of which they spoke. Instead, I felt that I was the only thing there that did not share the joy of God. I lifted up my face and cried silently, "Lord, you know that my cross is heavy. Have pity upon me. Forgive my sins, and give me some token of your presence. Help Me! There is no other help. Hear me, and help me, for there is no other one left to whom I can turn!"
Presently my black mood lifted a little, and I went on to Olympia Armory to a National Guard meeting that I was obliged to attend. During the evening, talking with my fellow officers, I felt respite from my depression. After I left the armory I went for a walk through the deserted streets before returning home.
As I walked I reviewed the day's experience. My trouble was recognized. I knew where I stood. "I ought to have turned to You for help in the first place!" I muttered. I considered the nature of God: Love and Intelligence, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The word omnipresent mocked me. It seemed difficult to believe the words of Jesus,". . .I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."
"Perhaps He is," I thought, "but who can say? Who ever saw Him?"
I walked up Olympia Avenue. It is a shadowy street. Trees hide the street lamps. But ahead of me I noticed a light. It seemed to move. At first I took it to be a trick of stirring shadows. However the trees were motionless as if painted on a stage backdrop. Not a leaf moved. The light grew brighter as I approached it. I quickened my steps and a thrill of excitement ran through me. Before I had gone half a block further I saw clearly what was causing the brightness.
The entry in my daily journal describes it as thus: "I saw, as if it were tangible, a large shining cross before me. It remained as I advanced two or three blocks, floating upright, somewhat taller than a man, at a slight distance above the ground. It was a distinct form, of a clear golden color, and it appeared to be made of light transmuted into a substance. Gleaming from this luminous center, it radiated shimmering light that passed through the spectrum to a soft blue at the outer limit of visibility. It was incredibly beautiful."
It finally faded but I was still conscious of radiance. To one side, slightly behind me, I saw a figure, a man, standing under the trees. It was very bright and I was spellbound. I felt breathless and as if I might faint.
As from a great distance, or as from within, I heard a voice say, "No man comes to me except by the Cross." His lips moved to shape these words but I am certain that I did not hear them with my physical ear. My spirit heard them.
Then the glorious one smiled and raised his arm in a gesture of benediction, after which the vision grew dim and vanished.
I was dazed, but I found myself in front of the familiar gate and blue house of my friend, Mr. W.C. Lamb, at 1140 Olympia Avenue. The house was dark, as were all its neighbors, and their occupants were sleeping. I shall never know whether anyone else could have seen the vision that I saw but I do believe that had they been awake they could have seen it.
For I truly believe that Christ actually stood under the oaks at 1140 Olympia Avenue, in Columbia, S.C., long enough to heal a sick soul, and to bless it for all eternity.
This happened two years ago and I might now consider it to have been subjective, an hallucination induced by my state of mind, my nervous tension, my fatigue, and the suggestion created by prayer, were it not for the fact that since then every condition of my life has been transformed. And during the transformation I have had the certainty that I am not alone. I have seen no more visions but I have had other experiences almost as extraordinary.
Immediately after the vision I plunged into religious study both of the Bible and metaphysics. One book stated that when a condition is about to be changed by spiritual action, it seems to grow worse before it begins to grow better. Such was the case with all my affairs. My domestic situation grew stormier, my work more distasteful, my finances more limiting, and my health more precarious. Nevertheless, I felt inner peace, and the words of the Psalmist glowed like fire wen I closed my eyes: "God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble."
One evening in the winter I was returning home from the store a block from my home, when I stopped to look up at the beauty of the full moon. As I stood, I heard a voice saying "Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eye shall see thy teachers: and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, this is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left."
Startled, I turned to see who spoke but the street was empty. I was soon to know what this meant.
The next day instinct warned me that I was going to lose the job on which I depended and I felt impelled to inquire again about teaching. I meant to find out what I lacked to qualify for teaching but to my astonishment I was told that I had been fully qualified all along. I had been misinformed, had taken the misinformation for truth and had been working at unpleasant jobs unnecessarily for three years, since I first settled in South Carolina.
My job was terminated, my intuition had been timely and reliable. I decided not to take any action without further guidance, and made almost a game of testing various possibilities, rejecting several enticing offers.
Presently my wife grew vexed and asked me to promise to visit an employment agency on a certain date. The date arrived , but my plan was halted by a command, as I started to rise from my bed that morning, "Stay right in bed! Do not even get up."
I stayed in bed.
The man with whom I usually rode to Columbia drove up and blew for me. I heard my wife go out and tell him that I would not go. That morning on his way to town, he missed, by about a moment, an accident which seriously injured the occupants of two automobiles. I shall always wonder whether the moment's delay at my house prevented him from being involved in the accident, and whether, if I had been with him, I might have been killed or seriously injured.
The next day, however, I prepared to go to satisfy my wife but a the last moment the command came again, "Do not go. Wait for the mail to run."
I waited. The mailman brought an offer of a teaching position in Great Mills, Md., which I accepted by telephone. It was my first teaching experience. I taught there for six weeks substituting for a teacher who was in the hospital. The day that he returned I was asked to come to Camden, S.C. The school was Camden Academy, a fine private school for boys.
I came to Camden Academy in April, 1955, as a substitute teacher. Now I am the superintendent of the Academy. I have seen what God can do, for it is certainly unusual that a man should come to a first-rate school with only six weeks experience as a teacher, and after a few months find himself its superintendent.
My work is a great pleasure to me. My quarters are pleasanter than my former home; my finances are on a sound footing; my health is perfect; and as for the school itself, its enrollment is almost double what it was a year ago. Anything that a man blesses is blessed for him, and gives a blessing in return.
My satisfaction in my work alone would not make me happy if my family difficulties also had not come to an end. Only by reading my daily journal can I believe that less than two years ago divorce seemed a certainty. My home and family are a source of happiness to me; we have found love and harmony. No man could ask for a richer experience than our marriage has become.
About a year ago I began to study some obscure texts in the Bible concerning the ancient Hebrew ritual of placing stones of witness. My studies led me to perform a peculiar ceremony, after their meaning penetrated my consciousness. I said in the beginning that the great disappointment of my old life was that I had no son, and could not expect to have one. Now I said to myself I shall set stones of witness and pray to God and he will answer me with a son.
Accordingly, I found seven small stones and made them into a heap and said over them: "Behold, it is written, 'I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children." Then I prayed, and when I had finished, I said, "Be these stones witnesses that I say the words of the Lord: 'Whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.' As long as these stones are upon earth, they shall be witnesses that I pray believing. I shall yet have a son. Amen."
The entry in my journal shows that I did this on September 9th, 1955. For several days nothing happened but the stones were hidden in my room and occasionally I looked at them.
Then on October 4th, 1955, on the anniversary of my vision of Christ, these words came to me: "He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children. . . .For the Lord of Hosts hath purposed and who shall disannul it? And his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back? For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. . .For he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance."
It is all recorded in my journal.
Our doctor estimates that my wife conceived our son on the sixth of October. Before he was born I named him Michael Stephen---Michael, which means. "Who is like unto God?" and Stephen, "A Crown" for he is the crown of triumphant faith for me.
Soon after my wife and I knew we were to have another child. I was promised that hail should fall on the day of his birth, so that I might know that God gave him to us in an answer to prayer, that his conception was not by chance.
Michael Stephen was born on June 19, 1956. As my wife lay in labor, the sky turned an angry yellow, the air became icy. No hail fell in Camden but it lashed nearby communities. When my sister-in-law visited us from North Carolina she said that it hailed there on the 19th. When my mother arrived from West Virginia she complained of the bitter cold that had accompanied the great hailstorm that fell upon our ancestral home, Gandeeville, on the 19th of June. After I had seen my son the chilly wind seemed to blow from God, saying, "Henceforth call your stones stones of testimony!"
So I testify:
The Lord of Hosts is a loving God. He sent his son for the redemption of the world. He was crucified dead and buried. The third day he arose again from the dead. I know. I have seen him!
No comments:
Post a Comment