Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Category: Sacred Stories

Contains sacred stories

  • The Game of Life

    He took The Game of Life & How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn with him to the beach. They were not going to spend the whole day as they were planning to visit a friend. Arriving on the friend’s porch, he mentioned the book adding that it was a small book and perfect for beach reading, plus, it was something he had wanted to read for a long time.

    Soon their sharing became deep enough he was making a few notes on his phone. As their visit was winding down he said, “Earlier you shared a quote — until it is felt in the body, peace is just a word — and you did not give an attribution.” Then he asked, “Where did that come from?”

    “I don’t have an attribution,” she replied, “because someone shared it at church on Father’s Day without an attribution. I have not tried to find out where it came from but I find it to be very powerful.”

    He began reading to her the conclusion from his AI search for the attribution:

    The quote “Until it is felt in the body, peace is just a word” is most likely attributed to Florence Scovel Shinn….

  • Another Quarter!

    She had reached out to a friend inviting her for a bike ride but the friend was not available, and she was feeling a bit lonely as she headed out alone.

    Last year this time her close friend was navigating end-of-life. After her friend had passed, she had come in spirit saying she would send quarters.

    Crossing the street at the four-way stop, she saw a quarter!

    She motioned to the approaching van to stop and she reached down and picked up the quarter. Spontaneously, she motioned to the driver of the van to roll down her window.

    “Thank you for stopping for me. I had to pick up a quarter. Last year this time my good friend died. She promised me she would send me quarters from heaven,” she shared.

    “You are giving me chills,” the driver of the van responded.

    Peace is only a word until it is felt in the body…. She had heard those words at church the previous morning and another quarter allowed her to feel that peace now.
    People do leave their bodies, but they do not leave their loved ones.

  • I’m Here for You

    Her daughter had a biopsy on her leg and it came back squamous cell carcinoma. She was to have an excision that would be done by a plastic surgeon to minimize scarring. She sent a message to a prayer list, saying, “Our daughter would use words asking for prayers for those doing her procedure; requesting that she have peace of mind and minimal discomfort and also that they be able to remove all of the sick cells, and that she would heal easily and completely.”

    She continued, “I would add that anything else be removed along with the tissue: anything that blocks or limits our daughter’s health and well-being on any level. Let this be a healing on all levels over all times: memory, belief, attitude, behavior. May the ultimate result be freedom from all that she and all beings would be better off without. Pray that this experience will be a deep healing blessing Stacey, her family and friends, the whole earth and beyond. Let it be a feeling-based prayer. Amen.”

    Included in the message was information on feeling-based prayer by Gregg Braden:

      Prayer researchers identify multiple kinds of prayer, and everyone has a place. For me, prayer is like a tool. It’s like if we have a toolbox, different tools can be used for different things. Different prayers may be used for different things. There are prayers of supplication. For example, when we feel powerless to do anything in our world and we ask for intervention, “Dear God, if you let my car get to the bottom of the freeway, this one time I will never let my gas tank get this low again.” That’s a prayer of supplication. There are prayers where we literally petition a higher power. “Almighty I Am, I petition the Lord for the right to heal and be healed now in all past, present, future generations.” That’s a petitionary prayer.

      There is a form of prayer that typically has not been recognized by modern prayer researchers, and it is the form of prayer that is used by the indigenous peoples to do seemingly miraculous things, including healing of the body. It is feeling-based prayer. It is feeling the feeling as if the prayer has already been accomplished, rather than asking an external force to perform this thing, this healing or this miracle, for us. The difference in this mode of prayer is we become part of the solution rather than feeling powerless and asking for an external intervention.

      When we feel the feeling that our perfect relationship is already present, our abundance is already present, the healing in our body has already happened, we set into motion a cascade of events that reflect that feeling that modern physics is only beginning to bear out through quantum theory. Entanglement, the principle of interconnectedness, of us being connected to the world beyond our body, as well as the world within our bodies. The heart – and the heart-brain connection – these are the tools. They provide the mechanism for us to make these communications.

      So, prayer, when we say prayer, [we mean] a feeling-based prayer, does have the potential to influence the world outside of our bodies through electrical and magnetic and quantum forces we’re only beginning to understand. But it also has the ability, through that feeling, when we feel the feeling that we are already healed, for example, that we go into the heart-brain coherence without the attachment to the outcome, okay, and we’re feeling the feeling, and we can see that in our mind, our mirror neurons are seeing the healing in the presence of a field that supports that healing without the judgment, without the attachment, without the goodness or the badness or the rightness or their wrongness.

      And this is what frees us, frees our body to respond very, very quickly.

      Healing, what we call healing, is harmony. It’s bringing our body into harmony with itself and with the forces of the planet that we live upon. And heart-based harmony, heart-brain harmony and heart-based prayer are ancient tools that have been validated in modern laboratories, now that tell us precisely how this works and what to do.

    Following the surgery, an update on her daughter reported the surgery went well and she has showering restrictions for two days and directions to follow for wound healing until the stitches come out in two weeks and thanking everyone for the prayers. She soon received an email from a friend on the prayer list:

    Please tell your daughter “Thank You” for me. I will follow her example on Friday with surgery with the same diagnosis. The location on my aging body (all 82 and 3/4 years of it) is on the back of the left leg below the knee and on the upper right arm just below the shoulder joint. You have shaped my requests for the better. I wish my husband was here with skin on to walk with me through this also but I know he will coach me through this as he has all of the other past hiccups since he passed.

    You don’t always know so directly how much your experiences touch others but there is always someone saying, “I’m here for you.” Feeling-based prayer going forth!

  • A Cute Young Boy

    Her grandmother was being cared for in a facility. Meanwhile, she and her husband and two daughters had been renting her grandmother’s home. Although her grandmother’s will gave her first option to purchase the home, when her grandmother passed and the house came up for sale the situation was complicated because of her divorce.

    Thus, her grandmother’s home ended up being sold to someone else. Her mother told her, “I sold your grandma’s house to a cute young boy. He would be perfect for you.”

    Interestingly, he never came down that road. His home was being bought as part of a property development. He saw the For Sale sign, and as life would have it, she ended up married to that cute young boy. Their family lived happily in her grandmother’s former home!

    “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” ~ Jeremiah 29:11

  • The Invisible String

    A friend had been out-of-town for the birthday celebration of a six-year-old granddaughter and was just heading home when this message popped in: “We just left. She was crying so hard she couldn’t get on the bus. Her mom is consoling her and then driving her to school when she settles down.”

    I responded with understanding and shared that when our older grandson was 3 or 4 he had gone through this if he was not asleep when we left. I said I had taught him to feel us together in his heart.

    The friend wrote back, “She’s working on feeling us (me) with her heart but not quite there yet.”

    Later that morning, at a reunion luncheon, a colleague mentioned the The Invisible String, a series of books written by Patrice Karst and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff. The series is a tool for children coping with all kinds of separation anxiety, loss, and grief. Although both grandmothers had significant experience with grief work, The Invisible String series was new them and the discovery was divinely timed.

    What wonderful ways Life works!


  • 37

    “Heading to Mayo. Appointment is tomorrow. Setting intention for hope for more time and relief of pain in my arm.”

    “Prayers pave the way. Thank you for the update,” came her friend’s reply. “Do you have time for a Stories of Jesus this morning?”

    No quick replay came, so her friend fired off two more brief text messages, “Pick a number between one and 47,” and then, “I’ll share the highlights with you.”

    “37” appeared in the text window.

      There was a child who was brought to Jesus because the child had fallen into a fire as a baby and lost his vision in the accident. The child’s face showed signs of burns. The child was placed in Jesus‘s arms. Jesus simply asked him, “Do you wish to see again?”

      “Yes.”

      “Do you believe I can heal you?”

      “Yes.”

      He held the boy in his arm so tenderly and put his hands over the boys, eyes and face. In a few moments, when he took his hands away, the terrible scars were healed, and the boy could see.

    “Wow!!”

    “I wish to be healed.”

    When she had been diagnosed with and was being treated for stage four breast cancer a number of years earlier her friend would ask her to choose a number between one and forty-seven. That story would be shared from the Forty-Seven Stories of Jesus book.

    “Yes,” her friend wrote back with praying hands and a heart.

    “Thank you,” she wrote and she said her husband had picked that number….

    (Prayers happen in divine timing. Whenever you read this Sacred Story, please offer up a prayer for anyone asking for healing. Pray in the way that your heart speaks most naturally.)

  • Croquet Set

    They stopped in to browse a small resale shop near their home when a couple entered shortly inquiring about a croquet set. “Let me ask the guy in the back,” responded the woman working the register.

    The man who was working in the back room told the couple, “I have one. Let me get it.” As he carried the set to the front of the shop for the couple to see he added, “It only has one wicket. I was trying to decide what to do with it. It just came in this morning….”

    Smiling broadly, the woman said, “Guess it was meant to be.”

    A common quote about synchronicity, particularly attributed to Carl Jung, is: “Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”

    Another quote from Jung emphasizes its acausal nature: “Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence of two or more events in which something other than the probability of chance is perceived.”

    Talk about timing.

  • Ace of Hearts

    As she flipped over and placed the very last card she realized somehow she had won the game of solitare even though she was still missing the Ace of Hearts.

    Looking into the box, there it was!

    What an unusual outplaying of cards that every other card could be played without that ace. Curious, she did an internet search for the corresponding card in the tarot deck. The Ace of Hearts corresponds to the Ace of Cups and signifies the beginning of a new chapter, a fresh start, particularly in the realm of emotions and relationships.

    “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.
    That will be the beginning.”
    ~ Louis L’Amour

  • Paul

    The keyboard on her cell phone had been acting up for weeks when she was texting about the details of a mutual friend’s passing the previous day.

    It was generally easier to use voice-to-text and, so, “Do you have any sense of how Rob’s dad is doing” were the actual words she said. However, the letters appearing in the text message spelled, “Do you have any sense of Paul Rob’s dad is doing” replacing the word how with the name Paul.

    Screenshot

    Paul is Rob’s dad’s name….

  • March 5

    She was swimming in memories of the previous year when their dear friend had undergone back surgery while they were all “snowbirds” in Florida. The surgery on her friend’s back was successful but it proved to be too much for her friend’s ailing heart and her friend had passed not long after returning to Michigan.

    “It has popped into my mind to look and see what day it was I went to the hospital,” she shared with their mutual friend. “I have not yet taken time to, but I know I have the voice memo I had recorded.”

    She looked on her phone. It had been exactly one year ago — March 5!

    (Her friend passed four months later on July 5.)

    John Lennon said, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be”.