The Stethoscope Over Becky Sharp

The Stethoscope Over Becky Sharp

by Dr. Bill Reed

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I awakened this morning with the heaviness of my heart. I didn’t know why. I’ve had this since the death of my wife. But it seemed to be a heavier thing than ever because it’s almost as if I sensed that our lives are in many ways just hanging with a delicate thread. And that our preservation and our strength and our power can only come through what we’re experiencing here. Not the United Nations, not our government at this point, although we certainly will be involved, but we individual Christians with our hearts oriented toward God through Jesus Christ.

And having within us the power of Jesus’ resurrection. And the ability to pray in the spirit. Because we don’t know, really, just what is going on and what this means. But it surely does have a very great and grave meaning, I sense.

Last night, during our prayer time, I was asking the Lord just how to approach this meeting today. And I had the sense that I should sing in the spirit. Weird thing. But I was at Sumatanga camp up in Alabama, oh, maybe two or three years ago. And there was a lady in the congregation who had a magnificent voice. And I asked her if she would come up. And so we sang a duet. Not in English, but in the language of the spirit. To me it sounded like grand opera or something. But it was the exaltation of our Savior. And the sure knowledge that He is our hope. And He is our strength.

I’m an old Navy man. I’ve been out in the Pacific. I’ve been in the Navy in various capacities here in America. I’ve been in London. I’ve been in Europe. I’ve been down the Danube in Vienna. Watched the Soviet vessels plying the Danube River. And I’ve seen this world in a sense of precariousness. I saw the children here.

And it touched my heart. Because, you see, everything is for them. Oh, it’s for us. But the young people who are here. What can we do for them? And I suggest that the greatest thing we can do for them is to make certain that they are saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. And that we are saved. There’s something funny about Episcopalians. I happen to be one.

But there are some Episcopalians that don’t like the term being saved. There are a lot of people that the greater the intellectual capacity of the individual, the more he dislikes things that sort of seem like the old time religion. The funny thing about me was that when I was in medical school, I longed for the old time religion. When the Full Gospel Businessmen began to arrive on the scene back in the 1950s, why, I had to get involved in it.

And whatever that was, that wonderful unity that brought us Episcopalians and Catholics and Jewish rabbis, I remember, coming into our meetings in Atlantic City and things like that. Very unusual things. The unity of godly love occurring. Not thinking about the little things that kind of tended to divide us. But the unity of godly love and love toward one another. And here’s the word. I don’t remember the time here.

As the goal of the other people who built for ways far the only the opposite. But the small difference is that only do the same number not to be balanced. The unit of sacred Umaabotik

Oh, I’m coming soon, I’m coming soon. I’m coming to straighten these things out of their crookedness. I’m coming soon to pour love and care and compassion upon the people of My blood. I am coming, I’m coming soon. I’m calling some out already, one by one. The day will come when multitudes are called to meet Me and those who died in Christ. The Lord would say unto thee, be ready. Be ready in your hearts. Prepare yourselves. You’re on the right track in Camps Farthest Out. And many of your churches are beginning to see that My word is the answer to the problems of this earth. So take strength and power from My word, saith the Lord, and worship and glorify Me as you’ve been doing here. Only let it increase. Let it be a crescendo, not a diminuendo. Let it be magnification of the love that you’re demonstrating to Me. Jesus is calling for you and for me. See, at the portal, He’s watching and waiting. Watching for you and for me. Come home. Come home.

You are weary. Come home. Come home. Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling, O sinner, come. Oh, for the wonderful love He has promised. Promised for you and for me. Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon. Pardon for you and for me. Come home, come home, come home.

You, God willing, come home. Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling for you. Jesus, we pray for those in London and in England at this moment. Those who are suffering, those who are dying, those who are despairing. And we pray for the body of Christ over there and here.

And we thank You, Lord, that You’ve privileged us to be here. I thank You. I thank You, Jesus. I thank You for my country. Our Father God, to Thee, Father of liberty, and the Lord of liberty. The Lord of liberty. Long may our land be bright In freedom’s holy light Protect us by Thy might Great God, our King.

To the prairies, to the ocean, white with foam. God bless America, my home sweet home. God bless America, my home sweet home. The flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Amen.

I have to take you to Bay City, Michigan, where I was in the practice of surgery. And it was St. Patrick’s Day. And I’m not an Irishman, I’m a true Scot. But we went down, my little family and I, and we stood on the steps of the First Presbyterian Church on Senator Avenue there. And G. Mennen Williams and all the politicians, Irish and whatever else they were, paraded through the streets of Bay City.

My little boy at that time, we had two boys at that moment. My little boy, Robbie, was not, well he was in his second year. And I suppose that since it was chilly on that day, he was exposed to the cold. And that night when we had turned in for the evening, the little fellow was in his crib. And I noticed that he had a fever and also he began to cry. And I went into his little bedroom and picked him up and I carried him about our home. We had a beautiful home.

And I just carried him about the house and comforted him. And I thought that this was going to pass. Took him into bed beside me and throughout the night listened to his breathing. I don’t know whether they’ve ever done that, but just to listen to make sure that their respirations are alright. And I had surgery early the next morning and I got up early.

And little Rob was there in my bed. And his fever was still present, but he was breathing okay. And so I went and got ready to go to the hospital. But when I came back into the bedroom, I noted that he was not breathing well at all. And he was… his little lips were blue and it looked to me like he was just not getting enough oxygen into his system.

And so I picked him up and as I picked him up his little head fell back. And I remember calling out and saying, “Oh, come on. Please don’t take my little boy from me.” My wife was at that point trying to get our pediatrician. He was on the way to the hospital, unavailable. In those days we didn’t have 911.

And I took him in and put him over a footstool in the living room. And in those days we… Johns Hopkins hadn’t come up with the form of resuscitation that we use today. We used to have what we called artificial respiration that we use for people who drown and so forth. And I began trying to help his breathing by that type of maneuver and crying out to God. And nothing was happening.

And I had this terrible feeling that he was not going to recover. And the point of this story is that I said to Jesus, “If You give my little boy back to me, I’ll serve You all the days of my life.” And with that the little fellow took a breath. He came back to life.

And my other little boy, I had him go out and get in the car and we wrapped Rob up in the blanket and took him to the emergency room and found out that he had a little spot of pneumonia. We treated him in pediatrics and in a few days he was well.

Well, you know the way doctors are. I mentioned this to some of my colleagues and they said, “Well, you know, Bill, you were probably just very upset. Maybe even a little bit hysterical. There probably was a pulse there.” I couldn’t feel a pulse. But they said you were probably just unable to function. Because of your emotions. And I began to think that, you know, my intellectual man began to overpower my spirituality. Didn’t have much spirituality then. I hadn’t gotten filled with the Holy Ghost at that point. I was a vestryman in the Episcopal Church. I thought that that was going to take care of me. No matter what my problems were.

But anyhow, I began to kind of negate it. But I remembered what I had told the Lord. I had operated on a Monday. And I had operated on into the afternoon. At Bay City General Hospital. And after surgery I went down to the East Wing. And I was making rounds down there.

And I heard over the loudspeaker, “If there is a doctor in the hospital, please go to pediatrics immediately.” And so I looked around. I wasn’t a pediatrician of course. I looked around to make sure, where are the pediatricians? Where are the other doctors? And it seemed like I was the only one. We had no interns or residents there. I thought I was probably the only doctor in the hospital. On the Monday afternoon. Or whatever day it was. And so I went up the back stairway. And down the hall. And the nurse was there. And she handed me a stethoscope. And she said, “Dr. Reed, we’ve just had a little girl. About two and a half to three years of age.” She gave me the exact age, I guess. “And she has just died. And would you just go in and declare her?” That’s what a doctor has to do. They call it declaring them. They don’t say declare them dead. Just they say, “Would you declare her?”

And out in the hall, there was a little mother out there, outside the room. Crying. And I walked in there. In those days, we used oxygen tents. And the little tyke was in an oxygen tent. And I pushed the oxygen tent back. And listened to the little child’s heart. And I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Nor were there any respiratory sounds. And she obviously looked as if she was gone, since she had died.

But I suddenly thought about Robbie. And with the stethoscope in my ears, and still with the bell of the scope on the child’s chest, I put my hand up on the little girl’s head, and I said, “Jesus.” I said it out loud. And the little mother was there, and the nurse was there. And I said, “Jesus, You gave my little boy back to me. Would You give this little girl back to her mother?” And with that, I heard that little heart go, thump.

And I went to the telephone, and the nurse said, “Dr. Knobloch, the pediatrician’s on the telephone.” And I went to the telephone, and Howard said, “Bill, we haven’t been able to determine just exactly what was going on with that little girl. She ran a temperature of 105, 106.

And we couldn’t bring it down. Nothing we could do seemed to work. She had little petechial hemorrhages here and there, little hemorrhages in her skin, in her conjunctivae, her eyes.” And gave me all these negatives. And he said, the only reason I’m saying all this is I want you to get an autopsy permit on the child so that we can see what the world was going on. And I said, “Howard, she’s not dead, she’s alive.” And, of course, he thinking that I was a surgeon in those days, we thought nothing of incising somebody’s chest and putting our hand on the heart and massaging it. I had done that. And I have done that, of course. And he thought I’d probably done something radical. I guess maybe praying is radical.

But I said, she’s not dead. And I told him that she was going to be somehow, she was going to be alright. And he said, no. He said, she’s never going to make it. And, you know, I would go in there day by day after that and that little tyke just went right on ahead and got well. And the other funny thing about it was that I was there for rounds one day and I said to the nurse, I’m looking at the chart rack. All the charts are in a rack, you know, and you can find your particular patient’s chart on that rack. And I was looking for Becky, that was her name, Becky Sharp. I was looking at Becky Sharp’s record. And I said to the nurse, “Where is Becky Sharp’s record?” And with that, I saw this Jewish doctor on the other side raise his head and he said, “I have the chart and she’s my patient.” Sam Horowitz was the general practitioner of that little girl.

And I said, “Sam, well, I’ve been following this case along and I… and I came in and prayed with her.” He said, “Yes, I’m aware of that.” I said, “Well, is that all right with you?” And he said, “Bill, you can pray for any of my patients at any time from now on.”

A P.S. on this story. I had a Jewish lady, one of Sam’s patients, a little while after that, who had a mass in her breast. And I did a radical mastectomy. I had to do a radical mastectomy on her for cancer of the breast. And she came to me with her husband who was a dentist there in the town. And she said, “My husband, Manny, and I have come to you, Dr. Reed, because we understand that you are a person who believes in prayer. And so do we. And we think that this problem of mine is serious.” And it surely was. I went in one day, while she was in the hospital. And she said, “Dr. Reed, please come in here and pray for me.” She said, “The rabbi was just here, and all he could say is, ‘You think you’ve got trouble, you ought to see Mrs. Ginsburg down the hall.’”

See, and these are the kinds of things that happen in medicine, when you don’t have spirituality, and when you don’t have Jesus in the center, and so forth. You’re thinking about comparisons, and you’re thinking about prognosis, and you’re thinking about diagnosis, and all of that. And, of course, you’re thinking of the scientific and the statistical, and all of that. But, you know, the patient is not particularly interested in all that stuff. They just want to know, do you think I’m going to be alright?

It doesn’t matter whether they’re Jewish, or of a different breed of Christianity than you, Roman Catholics, whatever, they want the spiritual. Well, the reason I tell these things is that there’s nothing impossible with God. Lee’s been using that, Luke 1:37. For with God nothing shall be impossible. That doesn’t say in God, by God, or through God, but it says with God, and when He’s got the word with, that’s some kind of a thing that connects two things together. My wife with me, for example. Lee with me, the leaders of the camp. With one another. We’re here with one another. With God. You see. We are sure that in God, and through God, and by God, these things are possible. But when it includes me, you see. Bill Reed, a surgeon with God, can do the impossible. A woman from over near Orlando came, this is another corollary of this whole thing. She came over from Orlando. Now they have very, very good surgeons over there in Orlando. But why she came over there all the way to Tampa to see me, some urologist’s wife over there had said to her when, supposedly her situation was hopeless, why don’t you go over to Tampa and see Dr. Reed.

And my nurse had come to me and she said, this lady has come all the way over from, really the other side of Orlando, and she’s got a serious, very serious problem. And I said, well, we will just go ahead and examine her and treat her like we would any other patient. I said, did her doctor refer her? She said, yes. She had wanted to see me and she contacted him. So I went in and examined her. And I found that she had an ovarian cancer that totally filled the lower part of her abdominal cavity. I won’t go into any anatomical details, but just simply to tell you that the situation was gigantic from the standpoint of the involvement of this cancerous growth.

And, totally inoperable. She even had a nodule in her umbilicus. I used that the other night. I used the word maple. But I thought, well, I’m going to find out what this thing is. And so I said, after I talked to her a bit about what was going on, I said, you know, so I think maybe I might just give you a little local and take that little nodule out of your umbilicus. And we’ll see what that thing is. But I said before that, let’s pray. And so I put my hand on her and I prayed and I asked Jesus to watch over her, to help her, and to touch her, to heal her. And I did this little biopsy. Put it in the formaldehyde and so forth. And then I said to her, this is a result of a doctor from London, England.

I had read that, Christopher Woodard over there in England, if that’s the name, that’s the name of the doctor, that he had a chapel in his office. And so I thought, well, if he can do it, I can do it. So I had established the chapel in my office. In fact, the matter is, by that time, it had grown to the point where it was a building of itself, where we held Christian lectures and things of that sort, and saw people for spiritual consultation, things like that. So anyhow, I said, why don’t we go over to the chapel? And I would like to have the privilege of praying for you and anointing you, and I’d like to pray for your husband, who was with her at that time. This lady was in her early sixties.

And we went over there, and she knelt at the communion rail, and I anointed her with oil. And also, I anointed and prayed for her husband at the same time. And you know what Jesus did? Bingo! Filled her with the Holy Ghost right then and there. She was an Episcopalian by the way. She, I’m sure she had never heard of anything like praying in the spirit, but, bingo! She just was praying in the spirit. And her husband, of course, he was totally emotionally involved in this thing. And she said, you know, I believe that Jesus has healed me.

And she said, I want to know if you think it’s alright if I go to Vienna. She said, my relatives are from Vienna and Salzburg, and I’d like to go over there at this point. And I’d like your permission. I said, well, it’s alright with me. You stay on the medications that your oncologist has put you on. Talk to him. Talk to your OBGYN person. And go over there. But I said, when you get back, come back and see me. Well, she went over to Salzburg and to Vienna, and she was over there for about six weeks. And when she came back, she came over to see me. And you know that tumor was down about, it shrunk down to about 50% of the size that it had been before. And I watched that whole tumor plain disappear. And you know that lasted for years. She just died at age 89. She was praying beside her bed. And her friends who were expecting her, I don’t know where, that morning, went over to see if she was alright. And there she was. She’d been called home. She was just lying there, next to her bed. And there was no evidence of any kind of malignancy in her, whatsoever. Jesus had just healed her and given her all those years.

And she even got involved with the Anglican movement over there in Orlando. And, talk about a turned on Christian. She spoke to our doctors meetings. You know, doctors, professors, all over the United States, Canada, even overseas, have come over to Tampa, to the Christian Medical Foundation for our meetings. And here was this little lady, from Vienna, cute as a bug’s ear, and always wearing a hat. And just immaculate and wonderful. Telling these doctors about her experience. How would you explain it? We weren’t giving her radiation treatment or anything. That had all been attempted.

Chemotherapy, that had been attempted. Oh, they took her off for chemotherapy over there in Vienna. Her relative, who was a doctor. Because her blood count was not normal at that point. When we sing the song, My God can do anything, anything, anything, that means that my God can do anything. Amen. And Jesus said, “Ask, and you will receive, seek, and you will find.” He doesn’t ask us to do this in any kind of a mental way, but just simply, it’s like a little kid that, you know, he wants a bicycle. I can remember when I was just a little fellow, and it was during the depression. And I said to my dad, “Dad, I would love to have a bicycle for Christmas.” And so my dad hunted around and found a little bicycle, and painted it red himself. And boy, when I went down there, on Christmas morning, there was my bike. And that’s the way God is. He wants to make us happy. He wants to answer our prayers. He wants to give us those things that we desire. He wants to give us wholeness. We doctors, of course, we have this string of diagnoses and statistics and so forth, that we’re aware of.

And those things kind of tend to taint our optimism. But the patient wants to have hope. In my book, Surgery of the Soul, in there, I’ve got the rules, the patient’s bill of rights, in which his various rights are listed there. And the last one is that we never take away a patient’s hope.

My wife said to me, when two of the doctors recently, there in Tampa, came in to see her, she had 13 doctors. You know, doctors don’t take care of the whole person. They just take care of this or that, this little place, the kidney or the ureter, or the fallopian tube, or whatever. But, so you get a doctor for this, and a doctor for that, and she, but these two doctors were the kind that, you know, flat out told the person what was wrong, bingo, that was it. You have cancer, one of them said. And the other said, that you’ve only got a short time to live. That was correct, but my wife said to me, “Bill, they took away my hope.” And I said, “Honey, your hope does not rely, as you know, in any other source but in Jesus.” And she said, “Oh, I know that.” But it had a profound effect upon her. I saw this. It’s like the old thing we used to say when we were kids, you don’t kick somebody when they’re down. You know. Yeah. You need to treat that person like little Robbie, who was mine, little Becky Sharp. I never had seen her before. A little Catholic girl. Jesus brought her back from whatever it was, from death.

Jesus, there are people over there in London right now that, some of them are hopeless, some of them are in prison down there in that system. Some of them are never going to make it out of there. I ask You to help those people, Jesus. And I ask that You help the people of this old world, straighten this mess out. That evil be bound to the precious blood of Jesus. And that we may see the wonder-working power.

When I got this news this morning, I was walking over here, and I thought, boy, somebody said, there just doesn’t seem to be any kind of an answer. And I said, well, Jesus will answer it. Jesus will answer the problem. And He’s going to answer it soon. Well, the time has come. I didn’t even throw my notes on the floor today. No sweet plum up here to pick them up. I even had a jug of water in my cap.

Thank you for letting me come and share Jesus with you. I’ve seen Him from perhaps a different angle than a priest or a minister or a layman or whatever. And, Christopher, you’ve seen Jesus that way. And every doctor has. But we have to let them know to begin to look for Him. And look for Him in this situation. Jesus, thank You for today and protect us and our nation and our people. And the people in London or wherever else in the world. Let this thing not be something that occurs elsewhere in this globe. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. Because of it. We do think of it which one of those things are going to be figured out of the state,