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Genevieve Parkhurst tells campers at the Boston Advance CFO in 1959 that she yielded her diagnosed breast cancer to Christ. She saw Jesus appear at the foot of her bed and felt the lump vanish in a stab of pain. She closes with her conviction that “our God is able.”
Closing the retreat at the Boston Advance CFO in 1959, Genevieve Parkhurst describes prayer as a love affair with God. She compares an audience with Queen Elizabeth to the far greater privilege of approaching him. She urges campers to carry Christ home with them.
Genevieve Parkhurst holds up small pictures of human love as glimpses of God’s greatness. They include a mother’s tenderness for her severely disabled baby and missionary John Peters’s move to India. This closes her talk at the 1959 Boston Advance CFO.
At the Boston Advance CFO in 1959, Genevieve Parkhurst preaches on Hebrews’ faith chapter. She contrasts the physical Jesus the disciples remembered with the invisible living Christ. She then traces how the sight of Christ in the dying Stephen’s face turned Saul into Paul.
Genevieve Parkhurst argues that most illness traces back to fear and other spiritual causes, since “perfect love casteth out fear.” She tells of interceding by phone from Alaska for a friend’s tumor, which turned from malignant to clean overnight. At the 1959 Boston Advance CFO she also tells of a war-injured schoolteacher whose crushed spine released its pain in a camp prayer group, leaving him joking that he now looks for pianos to move.
Genevieve Parkhurst walks campers through the Passover roots of the Lord’s Supper. She then describes the night Communion bread lost its taste and “became a sponge” to hold the wine, a sign, she says, that Christ’s own spirit longs to saturate the believer. She closes with two healing testimonies from the Boston Advance CFO in 1959: a veteran tormented by memories of the war, and a young woman who walked without crutches the morning after receiving the sacrament.
Ruth Carter Stapleton tells how Agnes Sanford traced a stalled prayer for a sick child back to a small dent she had put in a telephone company truck. Sanford felt free to pray again only after mailing in the three dollars the driver was docked for it. Teaching at the 1968 Boston Advance CFO, Stapleton connects the story to her own choice to thank God even for her son Scotty’s automobile accident.
Ruth Carter Stapleton pictures spiritual growth as an ear of corn whose husk must dry and turn brown before the corn inside is ready. She compares that browning to the trials that gradually separate growing Christians from the people and habits that once nurtured them. She recalls choosing to fly on to a speaking engagement in Atlanta rather than go home for Thanksgiving, an act of obedience she places at the 1968 Boston Advance CFO.
Tommy Tyson recalls a pastor who met his wife’s tirade with “I’m going to tell Jesus on you.” He then presses campers to accept the house, the neighbor and the failure they already have as gifts from God. Given to the Boston Advance CFO in 1970, the talk calls that acceptance finding an altar in the midst of the mess.