“Miracles,” Ensign, August 2016, 80
Until We Meet Again
Miracles
From “Miracles,” New Era, June 1975, 39–44, an article adapted from a talk given at a Brigham Young University devotional on February 18, 1953. Punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing standardized.
“Send for the elders; I don’t feel very well.”
A little over a year ago a couple came into my office carrying a little boy. The father said to me, “My wife and I have been fasting for two days, and we’ve brought our little boy up for a blessing. You are the one we’ve been sent to.”
I said, “What’s the matter with him?”
They said he was born blind, deaf, and dumb, no coordination of his muscles, couldn’t even crawl at the age of five years.
I said to myself, “This is it. ‘This kind cometh not out save by fasting and by prayer’ [see Matthew 17:21].” I had implicit faith in the fasting and the prayers of those parents. I blessed that child, and a few weeks later I received a letter: “Brother Cowley, we wish you could see our little boy now. He’s crawling. When we throw a ball across the floor he races after it on his hands and knees. He can see. When we clap our hands over his head he jumps. He can hear.”
Medical science had laid the burden down. God had taken over. …
I was called to a home in a little village in New Zealand one day. There the Relief Society sisters were preparing the body of one of our Saints. They had placed his body in front of the big house, as they call it, the house where the people come to wail and weep and mourn over the dead, when in rushed the dead man’s brother. He said, “Administer to him.”
And the young natives said, “Why, you shouldn’t do that. He’s dead.”
“You do it!”
… I had [a faithful old Maori] with me. … The younger native got down on his knees and he anointed this man. Then this great old sage got down and blessed him and commanded him to rise.
You should have seen the Relief Society sisters scatter. He sat up and said, “Send for the elders; I don’t feel very well.” … We told him he had just been administered to, and he said, “Oh, that was it.” He said, “I was dead. I could feel life coming back into me just like a blanket unrolling.” He outlived the brother that came in and told us to administer to him. …
God does have control of all of these elements. You and I can reach out, and if it’s His will, we can bring those elements under our control for His purposes.