THE HEALING POWER OF LOVE
The sister of former President Jimmy Carter, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a well known speaker and facilitator of spiritual inner healing, often called “healing of memories.” Her 1st book, The Gift of Inner Healing, describes her own experience of emotional healing and the ministry into which it launched her.
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Ruth Carter Stapleton |
After reading the following story in her 2nd book, The Experience of Inner Healing, I immediately felt led to share it, to reinforce to young moms and dads the importance of parental love and perhaps to help older adults seek inner healing for repressed wounding from deficits of that love. This is quoted from her chapter on “The Healing Power of Self-Acceptance,” p. 95-97:
From the
moment we become conscious in our mother’s womb, immense emotional and
spiritual forces emanating from our mother and, to a much lesser degree, our
father begin to mold our pliable sensitive emotions which will one day be the
adult self. People have tended to ignore the significance of that first nine
months in our mother’s womb. Every new parent ought to be instructed that what
they think and feel is more important in the care of an unborn baby than how
they care for themselves physically.
The mother
of a two-month-old baby boy had to rush him to the hospital. For no clinically
explainable reason he was feverish, dehydrated and starving to death.
Intravenous feeding did nothing to stabilize his condition which continued to
deteriorate. Visiting in the home of a Christian friend while her son was
hospitalized, the mother met a man who, after hearing her story, said, “I think
it’s important for you to know that I’m a Christian doctor. Christ has shown me
the absolute importance of love.” Possibly, he informed her, the baby was in
its serious condition because it didn’t feel loved.
The mother
broke in tears. “You’re probably right,” she said. “I don’t love the
baby and I don’t love his father. I never wanted to have the child in the first
place and I’m divorcing my husband as soon as I can.”
When the
doctor asked if he could pray for her, she consented, and with deep tenderness
he asked Christ to heal her broken spirit. As he spoke, she felt enveloped in a
terrible shroud of bitterness that, over the years of antagonism, she had woven
into her marital relationship. She realized she was killing herself with hate
because of her own problems and was starving that innocent baby to death in the
process.
After the
prayer the doctor instructed her to go to the hospital, take her son’s face in
her hands, look straight into his eyes, calling him by name, and say, “I love
you.”
When she
got to her son’s crib in the pediatric ward, she saw her little boy more dead
than alive. Suddenly she was filled with a new sense of tender love for him.
Reaching down she gently held the baby’s face in her hands and told him, “Michael,
I love you. O Michael, my baby, I love you.”
At that
moment the hospital doctor came into the room and asked her what she was doing.
She told him the whole story.
He looked
straight into her eyes. “I believe everything you say,” he told her. “I believe
your baby is dying because he has no will to live. What you’ve just done may
possibly save his life.”
It did.
The next
day the fever broke. The child began to assimilate nourishment and fluids. A
week later a loving mother brought her nearly recovered baby son home from the
hospital.
“God is love,” says
the Bible in 1 John 4:8. When we think, speak or show love, we serve as
channels for the eternal love of the Triune God. Whether
expressed through an attitude of gratitude, a pronouncement of blessing, and extension of forgiveness, or an act of kindness, this divine love has healing power.
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