Finally ... the cure

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Imagine that you’re a research scientist employed at the Learning Life Laboratory of a prestigious medical university. You have just one assignment, and only one goal: find a cure for cancer.

Although hundreds of thousands of scientists across the globe are trying to achieve the same thing and may have better educations, more experience and better resources than you, there’s one little difference setting you apart.

You’ve known your entire life that you’ve got cancer. You just don’t know exactly when … and the nature of your particular affliction means today might be your last day on earth. There’s simply no way of knowing.

Because of your familiarity with the disease you live with the agonizing fear that ultimately, unless something radical happens, one day you’ll draw your last breath knowing your life’s been wasted. And that all your efforts and ambitions had been in vain.

There’s only one prognosis for your condition, and the outcome has never been in doubt.

Then one night you’re alone, working late at home and feeling way overwhelmed with your situation. You’re struggling, too tired to keep up with the newest trends and suddenly remember the life and work of a mysterious foreign doctor who lived in another century.

You’re familiar with his words and many of the books written about him, but what you’ve previously read seemed out of date and totally inapplicable to modern methods and techniques. Your associates unanimously feel he was a quack and have summarily dismissed him, largely because he claimed he alone had the cure for all forms of cancer.

You’ve ignored him before because his cure is so simple it can’t possibly be true. Modern science insists there simply must be something else. Something complicated and impossible to produce in large quantities.

But tonight his words make sense and take on new meaning. The longer you look the more his words come to life, as though he’s speaking from the pages directly to you. Until finally you realize his cure is real … and actually works once it’s applied according to his instructions.

Oh wow, the cure is really real … and it’s permanent.

What would you do then? Would you go back to work Monday morning and announce your findings to your peers, or keep quiet and pretend to keep looking for another cure … from fear of being ostracized and ridiculed?

Your life had been spared after all; that’s what matters most … so maybe the smart thing to do would be to keep the cure to yourself and go on about your business- pursuing all the goals, pleasures and achievements in life that were important to you.

Or maybe you’d become arrogant (claiming you’d done all the work) and build your own clinic, with your name in proud letters over the door, giving preference and titles to wealthy contributors … so you could carefully manage and dictate who’s allowed inside to be cured?

Would you want to see everybody’s suffering ended, or just the people who looked, dressed and thought the same as you? Would you decide who’s deserving to learn about the cure, forgetting to mention and give credit to the man who was the original source … to make it easier to serve your own interests and ambitions instead?

Heck, you might even start thinking about using the cure to get rich (and attract new sexual partners) … and not worry too much that you're benefiting yourself at others’ expense.

Would you teach others that the cure was conditional and might be revoked at any time … hinting that you alone knew all the cure’s rules and conditions?

Or would you be so grateful and humbled with joy because your life was changed that you could hardly sleep for wanting to share the cure with sick people all over the world … no matter that they looked, talked and dressed differently than you?

Oh yeah, there’s one more thing you found in your research. The foreign man who lived 20 centuries ago, known as The Great Physician, also opened the way to eternal life … and he left amazingly clear instructions, not suggestions, about sharing everything he gave us.