There are cancers that are bad, and then there is glioblastoma. It is the word that oncologists dread saying out loud. Glioblastoma multiforme — GBM — is the most aggressive and lethal form of primary brain tumour. The median survival time is twelve to fifteen months. The five-year survival rate is roughly five percent. When you get a glioblastoma diagnosis, the medical conversation shifts very quickly from "how do we cure this" to "how do we buy you time."
James Burgett was given twelve to eighteen months.
The Diagnosis
A brain tumour. Not just any brain tumour — the one that even oncologists approach with a heavy heart. Glioblastoma attacks fast, grows fast, and resists treatment with a stubbornness that has humbled decades of medical research.
James and his family heard the numbers. They heard the survival rates. They heard the careful, compassionate language that doctors use when the prognosis is grim. Twelve to eighteen months. That was the window.
But James Burgett's family did not hear those words and accept them as the final verdict. They heard them and decided to fight — not just with medicine, but with something that does not show up on an MRI.
The Mobilisation
What happened next was not a small prayer group meeting in a church basement. It was a mobilisation. Churches across the country began praying for James Burgett. Communities that had never met him — people who only knew his name through a friend of a friend — began lifting him up in prayer.
The scale of the prayer effort was extraordinary. This was not polite, once-a-week intercession. This was daily, persistent, corporate prayer from hundreds — possibly thousands — of people who had decided that they would not let this man go quietly into a grim statistic.
Social media carried the prayer request further than any single church could have reached. Prayer chains formed across state lines. People fasted. People wept. People got on their knees in their kitchens and their cars and their offices and prayed for a man with a glioblastoma who had been given a year to live.
The MRI
When James went in for his follow-up MRI, nobody expected good news. With glioblastoma, follow-up scans usually confirm what you already fear: growth, spread, progression.
But the MRI told a different story.
The tumour was shrinking. Dramatically. Not the slight, incremental reduction that sometimes comes with aggressive treatment. A dramatic reduction that caught the attention of his medical team. The tumour that was supposed to be growing was doing the opposite.
The doctors could see it on the scan. The tumour that had been there — confirmed, measured, documented — was receding. Where there had been aggressive growth, there was now retreat.
The Response
James Burgett's story was featured by CBN, bringing his testimony to a national audience. The combination of a glioblastoma diagnosis, massive prayer mobilisation, and dramatic tumour shrinkage was exactly the kind of story that defies tidy medical explanations.
His medical team had treated him. But the response on the scan exceeded what treatment alone typically produces for glioblastoma. Something else was at work.
What This Means for You
If you or someone you love is facing a brain tumour — especially the kind that comes with a timeline measured in months, not years — James Burgett's story says one thing clearly: mobilise prayer.
Not quiet prayer. Not prayer that whispers and hopes for the best. Loud prayer. Persistent prayer. The kind of prayer that mobilises entire communities and refuses to accept that a medical prognosis is the last word.
Glioblastoma is one of the most formidable enemies in all of medicine. Five percent survival at five years. But James Burgett's MRI showed a tumour in retreat — shrinking dramatically when everything in the medical literature said it should have been growing.
If two or three can agree in prayer and see heaven move, imagine what happens when hundreds agree. James Burgett found out. And the tumour found out too.
