There are six words that no doctor wants to say and no patient wants to hear: "Go home and get your affairs in order."
They said them to Shirley Williams. Terminal cancer. The treatment had failed. The options had run out. The medical system — with all its technology, all its expertise, all its billions of dollars of research — had reached the end of what it could do for her.
Go home. Call your family. Make arrangements. There is nothing more we can do.
The Verdict
Terminal. The word lands like a gavel. It is not a diagnosis anymore — it is a sentence. Shirley Williams was sent home not to recover but to prepare. The doctors were not being cruel. They were being honest. They had done everything they could.
But Shirley's church disagreed. Not with the medical facts. With the finality.
The Twenty-One Days
When Shirley's church heard the news — that one of their own had been sent home to die — they did something that the modern world would consider extreme. They committed to twenty-one days of fasting and prayer.
Twenty-one days. Three full weeks. Not a weekend prayer retreat. Not a single all-night prayer meeting. Twenty-one consecutive days of denying their bodies food and bringing Shirley's name before God with a persistence that refused to take no for an answer.
This is the kind of faith that costs something. Fasting is not comfortable. It is not glamorous. It is a deliberate physical sacrifice that says: this matters more than my comfort. Shirley's life matters more than my next meal.
The entire church participated. Not a prayer chain where everyone takes a slot. A corporate fast where the whole community said: we are in this together, and we are not stopping until God moves.
The Scan
After twenty-one days, Shirley went back for another scan. The kind of scan that, in terminal cases, usually confirms what everyone already knows — that the cancer is still there, still spreading, still winning.
But this scan did not confirm what everyone expected.
The cancer was gone.
Not reduced. Not stabilised. Not "responding to treatment" — because there was no treatment. Shirley had been sent home. The only thing that had happened between her discharge and this scan was twenty-one days of a church on its knees.
No cancer. The same body that had been full of it three weeks earlier was now clear.
The Testimony
Shirley Williams's testimony was featured on the CBN 700 Club. She told her story to a national audience — not with the polished delivery of a professional speaker, but with the raw, unfiltered gratitude of a woman who was supposed to be dead and is not.
Her doctors had nothing to explain it. The medical file tells a story that science cannot finish: terminal cancer, no further treatment, patient sent home, twenty-one day gap, cancer gone. The file has no chapter for what happened in that gap. But Shirley's church does.
What This Means for You
If someone you love has been sent home — if the doctors have said there is nothing more they can do — that is not where the story ends. That is where a different kind of intervention begins.
Shirley Williams was not healed by a breakthrough drug or an experimental procedure. She was healed by a church that fasted for twenty-one days. Ordinary people. Ordinary faith. An extraordinary God.
If you are part of a church, and someone in your community is facing a terminal diagnosis, do not underestimate what happens when believers fast and pray together. It is not a magic formula. It is not a guarantee. But it is exactly the kind of costly, sacrificial faith that moves the hand of God.
Twenty-one days. That is all it took. And the cancer that medicine could not touch was gone.
