CANCER HEALED

Don Challenger

When I started college I sort of went off in my own direction. I guess you could say I was a classic prodigal son.

Eventually, I became dissatisfied with my life and decided to return home. I also decided to cut my hair, which was pretty long, and to shave my beard. When I did this, I found that I had a fairly large and unsightly mole on my face. I went to a doctor to have the mole removed, and I thought everything was fine. But several days later the physician called and asked me to come back to see him. He told me that they had done tests and had found that I had cancer. He wanted me to see some specialists, which I did.

After three months of studying every day, I found I was completely healed.

They said I had lymphatic cancer (which had spread everywhere), and that they needed to schedule me immediately for radical surgery in order to remove it. I asked them what would happen if I underwent this surgery, and they basically told me that they gave me a 60 percent chance to live. At that point I asked them, "If I don't have the surgery, what will happen?" And they said, "Well, you may live six months at the most."

This was scary. But, interestingly enough, at that point a thought came to me. I remembered back to my childhood, when I was raised in Christian Science and had relied on God for healing and guidance. When I was about seven, for instance, I was healed of an earache by studying the Christian Science Bible Lesson, outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly. Memories of this and other healings reminded me that it was time to turn to God. These healings, although smaller in the scale of challenges, were proof to me of God's goodness and power. This reassurance enabled me to handle the initial fear that I was going to die and gave me some kind of hope.

I realized that these doctors were very conscientious and were following their highest sense of right, but that they really didn't have a cure for this disease. They couldn't really tell me what had caused it or anything much about it, except that it could kill me.

So I decided to turn wholeheartedly to God and to rely on prayer for healing. I contacted a former Sunday School teacher who was also a Christian Science practitioner and asked her to pray for me. She asked me to read Science and Health, and to contact her each day. Some days I would read one page, just studying it to understand what the words were telling me. Other days I might read a whole chapter. When I would call her to report my progress, we would discuss some of the things I had learned.

Here's one of the statements I found during my reading: "The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin" (p. 411). I started to understand that these negative states of thought, mentally entertained, were being manifested outwardly as illness.

My initial reason for reading Science and Health was to be healed, but I found after a while that I was becoming more interested in simply knowing God. In fact, I almost forgot about my original reason for doing this reading. Then after about three months of studying every day, I found I was completely healed. There were no further problems.

Since that time, more than twenty years ago, I've been required several times to undergo fairly rigorous physical examinations by doctors—for the military, for example—and there has never been any trace of a disease or problem.

Don Challenger
Glendora, California

(From a testimony originally aired on the Christian Science Sentinel—Radio Edition in September 1993.)

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