Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 3, 1/11 by Estelle Roberts

CHAPTER THREE,
HEALING

My first patient for healing arrived unexpectedly at a Spiritualist meeting at Hampton Hill. A mother brought a little boy suffering pitifully from asthma, and asked me to do what I could for him. I saw the child’s laboured breathing and my heart sank. What could I, who knew little of spirit healing and had certainly never attempted it myself,

do for this poor little boy who gazed at me with anxious, trusting eyes? But I knew I must try. With a silent appeal to Red Cloud to guide me in what I must do, I laid my hands gently upon the child’s chest.

I have no idea what reaction I expected. I had never thought of myself as having healing powers. In touching the child, I did so more in response to the mother’s faith in me than any faith I had in myself. Yet what happened was nothing short of miraculous.

One moment the child was struggling for breath, and the next he was breathing easily and normally. It was as quick and simple as that and, of all those present, I’m sure I was the most dumbfounded. I could not believe the evidence of my eyes and stood unconvinced, certain that the spasms must be renewed at any minute.

The child went on breathing normally, and continued to do so for the next twenty years, when at last I lost touch with him. It was, by it’s unexpectedness and the permanence of the cure effected, a profoundly moving experience. Though I have since being the instrument of hundred’s of other healings – some much more spectacular from the point of view of the onlooker – none has ever made a greater impression on me than my first treatment.

I remember the anxiety of another mother who came distraught to my house one winter’s evening. Her son, she said, was suffering from meningitis. All that was possible medically for the boy had been done. The Doctor’s had reached the limit of their resources. Now the child’s life lay in the balance.

Was there not something that I could do, she asked, or Red Cloud, of whom she had read so much? She made tragic little figure sitting there, her eyes red from weeping, her shoulders bowed with worry. At such moment’s words of consolation bring hollow and I wasted no time with them. “Come,” I said. “We will see what can be done.”