It had been early in the spring of 1951 when father and daughter learned that Edith had cancer of the liver.
As Dr. Cross had expressed it: “Her liver is like your grandmother’s old lace curtain. But whatever you do,” warned the doctor, “don’t tell her she has cancer or she’ll give up immediately. Actually, however, there is nothing we can do except give her enough drugs to relieve her pain. She may linger or she may go quickly. There is no way to tell.” Her weight at this time was seventy pounds, down from 168.
Some weeks before Edith was hospitalized, she and Louise had begun to attend the services at Carnegie Hall. “It was there,” says Louise, “That Miss Kuhlman taught me the value of fasting, explaining that it was an expression of the fervor of one’s prayers. 99 “Now that mother was so desperately ill,” Louise continued, “All that Miss Kuhlman had ever said about fasting came back to me. Mother just couldn’t die.”
From the time it was established that her mother had cancer, Louise could be found every Friday afternoon at the Miracle Service—fasting from sunup to sundown. It was not of herself she was thinking when she pleaded before the throne of God for her mother’s recovery, but of the three little sisters at home. She was touched and moved when she learned that they, too, unknown to her, were going without food all day every Friday. “On Wednesday night,” relates Louise, “Daddy had taken a little radio to the hospital so that mother could hear Miss Kuhlman’s broadcast the next morning, feeling that it would do much to strengthen her faith and give her the hope she needed.”
As Mr. Erskine left the hospital that night, he only hoped that Edith could get the broadcast the next day. The poor little old radio was so antiquated and powerless, that most of the time all it would do was crackle and pop, but he had left it in Edith’s hospital room just in case. Perhaps it, too, would experience a conversion! “Miss Kuhlman didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on,” says Louise, “We had sent in a prayer request for mother several days before, and lo and behold, on that Thursday morning she read it over the air and prayed for ‘the Mrs. Erskine dying of cancer in Tarentum Hospital.”
Louise, listening at home in Bakerstown, was terrified that her mother might have heard her name over the air and thus for the first time found out the nature of her disease. She rushed over to the hospital, fearful of the emotional state in which she might find Edith. Sure enough, for the first time, the little radio had played without crackling, and the broadcast had come over as clear as a bell. Her mother had heard every word…
Miraculous Monday: 24th April 2023
Miraculous Monday 037
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