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Bert Kerley asks whether “God is love” can still be true in the face of tragedy. He recalls a Welsh mining disaster that killed sixty schoolchildren, and a young pianist who said she thought of everyone who loved her as she played. He gave this talk on trusting that love has the final word to the California Healing CFO in 1982.
Bert Kerley recounts a lunch appointment canceled during the California Healing CFO in 1982. It led him, through what he calls “no such things as chance,” to a chance meeting with Hope Peale, a relative of Norman Vincent Peale. He then turns to teach that Christ dwells within every believer.
Alex McCullough asks campers “who is they?” and answers with two encounters from before he was even a Christian: comforting a homeless man in Manhattan and a trembling kitchen worker newly arrived from the Caribbean. Fear sees “they” while love sees “us,” he insists, and a true congregation, unlike a mere aggregation, becomes one. He preached it at the 1988 California Healing CFO.
Ruth Robison opens the 1964 California Healing CFO at Asilomar by telling campers “there is no such thing as a little handicap.” A toothache fastens the mind on self as surely as an incurable illness does. She recalls the two rose windows of a French cathedral as the eyes of the body’s temple, and she presses her hearers to say “I know” about God rather than “I think.”
Preparing to pray can take half an hour when the prayer itself takes two minutes, Ruth Robison tells campers at the California Healing CFO at Asilomar. Wrap the burden and tie it up beforehand, she says, instead of spilling it out unsorted in God’s presence. Five marks of vital prayer close the hour, among them unity in love and plain brevity.
On the second morning of the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar, Genevieve Parkhurst opens with John 15’s vine and branches. She recalls a childhood memory of watching a gardener graft and wax-seal a fruit tree bud as a picture of the new birth. A loosened wax seal, she warns, lets water and decay back into the graft the way sin lets decay back into a life. She closes with the line “God has no grandchildren”: no one enters God’s family except by a will of their own.
In an opening-night orientation to the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1966, Genevieve Parkhurst explains how Dr. Glenn Clark founded Camps Farthest Out. She argues that the same “great wisdom” that guides migrating swallows is at work as “the life within” the body, which does all real healing, doctors included. She notes that “one verse in every seven in the Gospels pertains to a physical healing.”
Genevieve Parkhurst tells of a Jewish man who survived a concentration camp as a boy. Years later, on Armistice Day, he suddenly smashed a store window display holding a German officer’s helmet. She pairs his story with that of a woman still shamed by a childhood piano recital gone wrong. Both show, she tells the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar, how Jesus can heal hurts still felt beneath the surface of an adult life.
Genevieve Parkhurst describes finding a personal “lever” for healing prayer at the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar. Her examples run from a woman’s faith in touching Christ’s hem to a Roman officer’s trust in his own authority. She closes with Edith Leonard’s eleven-month recovery from a diagnosed brain tumor.
Brother Mandus jokes that years earlier, at a different camp, a fellow camper found him scrubbing his shirts by hand in the tub and told him simply to wear the shirt in the shower, his picture of how Christians overcomplicate a simple faith. He closes his address at the 1966 California Healing CFO by leading prayer for a young camper named Harry, and an elderly woman recovering from a fall.