We explore the inspiring redemption story and lessons from Joseph Canfield’s book. He wasn’t lost. He was found. By Love himself. Meet this overcomer, from an unwanted person neglected by all to a faith healer who openly serves the people around him.
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A Healer’s Redemption Story With Joseph Canfield
A good and beautiful day, you beautiful souls. This is Charla Anderson, host of The Charla Anderson Show, Collector and Connector of Fascinating People, and Everyone is Fascinating, especially YOU! We are here on WinWinWomen.com and WinWinWomen.tv platform. We are going to be on all the streaming services. Podcasting is coming along soon with Podetize.
I’m excited to have you with us. We are always honored. I got an amazing guest. We are going to meet someone overcomer. We all have stories of that, and you are going to love this one. Every week, I want to get myself grounded and help you get grounded. What we do is do a 22-second breathing exercise. We are going to breathe in for seven seconds. We are going to breathe in calm. For 4 seconds, we will hold, and for 11 seconds will breathe out gratitude.
Join me if you will, and you can do this anytime, day or night. It will help center you. It is a 22-second mini-meditation. Let’s breathe in calm, hold, and breathe out gratitude. Thank you. We don’t do enough of that, be still and know. Sometimes we keep going in this busy world. That is helpful to me. I hope it is helpful to you to take us a few seconds.
The show is recorded live, and we have a conversation at the end. If you hang around at the end, we are going to have a conversation with the guest, Joseph, and we can continue that. I’m grateful that you are here. I’m always grateful. Our amazing guest miracles are everywhere. This guy is a witness. Joseph Canfield is an author, a pastor, and a healer. In my estimation, he was abandoned. He is redeemed. He has used that redemption for the purpose of serving God with skin on people. People need people. God needs people with skin on to make a difference. Joseph is one of those.
He was born premature and with cerebral palsy prosy. He was abandoned. His future parents didn’t want him. He was about ready to be awarded of the state. The attending nurse ended up taking you home. It is what I understand. I’m going to let you tell the story more than I do. You have been there and done that. You, Joseph Canfield, live in Fort Worth. Tell a little bit about who you are and how we can get to know you.
I will begin by saying thank you for the opportunity to meet and share both with you and your audience. I met you through a common denominator we share. The story and the testimony that God has honored my life with. I want to return back to him. I vowed to make my mother famous. I authored my book a couple of years ago with the mission and the purpose of making my mother and Jesus famous as best I could.
I fished around and bumped around with a variety of different titles, but we landed on the title that we had. Baby Boy Klapal was my given name on my birth card. I was never issued a birth certificate or a Social Security Number when I was born because the family that was supposed to take me had lined up to take me and left me at the hospital when I was born almost two months premature.
It is still dangerous in 2023, but in 1968 in a small town in Central Kansas, there were not a lot of options or resources to make sure you could sustain a baby that was challenged that way. The little girl that gave birth to me was only seventeen. She was a senior in high school who had gone down to one of the colleges that she was looking to attend as she graduated and moved into her college lifestyle. She chose to go to a party and came home pregnant with me.
It was not good news on their family’s side of the equation. Her mother was a bitter woman toward her daughter. My birth mother is still alive. I still stay in touch with my grandmother. She will be 101 in 2023. I moved her to a nursing home in 2022. She lived on her own until 2022. I didn’t have any relationship with my birth mother at all. She is a broken woman. We don’t have a lot in common. I’m her only child.
As I was born sick, a respected family prepared to adopt me left me at the hospital. The nurse who delivered me and was in the living room when I was born had compassion and drive inside of her. She grew up Methodist but got ahold of the Spirit of God Movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s over our nation. My mom was caught up in that wave of what God was doing back in 1968. She sensed in her heart that she was supposed to bring me home and tried to see a judge to adopt me.
You never were legally adopted.
I’m not legally adopted.
She is your mother. There is a connection of the heart.
She was gracious enough to bring her home. She was almost 40 years old. She had four children. She was divorced from Canfield, where I got my name. She was no longer married to him. I met with the birth family several weeks after I was born. My mom sat me down when it was time to get a driver’s license to say, “You have always been adopted. It has never been legal. We need to go to court to get your name and Social Security Number. You want an adult future until you get those things.” I had to go to court to do those things.
In the meantime, I grew up in this single-mother home. My memories of her were an old leathered Bible and her devotional sitting outside every morning. She was faithful the whole of her life to spend time in the word and with the Lord every morning. I grew up in a home where if I got sick, my first challenge or reaction response was to go to my mother and ask her to pray for me. That is the lifestyle I grew up in.
I remember going to see different ministers that she would take us to as a kid. I fall asleep on a sticky movie theater floor to see a local Fort Worth minister who lives here. We grew up in Kansas, and we went to see him in Omaha, Nebraska. I grew up in this faith culture that donated an ability to have sensitivity, awareness, and cognizance of the things of God. I will never regret the woman’s desire to raise me in a home that way. She wasn’t hyper-religious, flaky, or weird. She loved Jesus. I tell people, “I wanted to love Jesus. I try not to be weird about it.”
There is a common denominator among the people I have been talking to. We are overcomers here. The people that seem to have these amazing stories also have amazing faith. I typically say on my show, “This isn’t about religion, God in a box, small god. No, this is about relationship, bold faith, and living good, and righteous.”
For your mom to have brought home a kid that she couldn’t even adopt, there is something huge that was divinely appointed. I might add that it was divinely appointed because of the way you and I met. My first show with guests was Gale and Michael Parker. Michael had a less than 1% chance of living from Sunday night to Monday with a split aorta stroke. Several years later, we celebrated dinner with them. That story is powerful. Please go back and read it if you haven’t. Miracle Michael, we call him.
You were on the phone with someone who was trying to connect you with Gale in that situation. She was on the phone with someone who was trying to connect her with you. You can say that, but we are both standing in the hospital lobby, unknowing of each other at that same moment in time. You don’t make that up. How divine is that?
There are 7 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Every one of those 7 million people has 1,440 minutes in their day. The mathematical or statistical odds of her and I meeting and standing 50 feet apart on the day that the connection was being attempted were overwhelming. I tried to take days off and donate that to my wife and family.
I had gone down to the DMV to get a driver’s license renewal. I didn’t have the right paperwork. I stood there for 45 minutes. I was mad. I went to the passport office. I stood there for 45 minutes to learn I should have grabbed a number like you do at a deli when you come in. I only learned that it is late to get a number. I won’t get my services for my passport. I was frustrated. I had already wasted a big chunk of my day off.
I was going down on behalf of one of my families in our church. They asked me to go down and visit their grandmother, who had fallen and broken her hip. I had agreed to go. Sometimes you can get a day off, and sometimes you can’t as a pastor. I went down to meet this woman. I went up to her room. She was as naked as the day she was born. She was standing there. She said, “Pastor, I can’t come now. They are taking me down to physical therapy. Can you come back and see me? Give me 45 minutes.” I’m angry.
I’m downstairs in the lobby. I’m calling my wife to complain and say, “I have wasted half my day. I got to sit here for an hour to wait for this woman.” That is when the phone rang and said, “A friend of mine is dying. Can you pray for him?” I said, “Where is he?” She said, “He is in Harris Downtown Hospital.” I said, “I’m in Harris Downtown Hospital.” She said, “You are kidding me. Would you let my friend call you?” I said, “Sure.”
A few minutes later, my phone rang with Gale, your guest. When my phone rang, I could see her across the lobby of the hospital talking on a phone. We realized that we were 50 feet apart. I told the story Friday night that she was calm as she was explaining. She looked exhausted and she was calm. She told me the story without tears.
We went up to Michael’s room. Not to be weird or flaky, but I do my best not to come in there and machine gun a prayer or vomit up and regurgitate Christianese speaking. I always try to be thoughtful and mindful of what God wants me to do. That requires a developed skillset of learning how to stop, listen, and divorce yourself from the surrounding environment or what your eyes are measuring, or what your ears are hearing because those things can dictate and have an influence on your faith. Faith divorces itself from the see, taste, hear, smell, and touch world.
Sometimes we have to divorce ourselves from what we can see because when Jesus is telling Peter to get out and walk on water, his eyes, his knowledge of water and gravity are telling him one thing, “Faith has to suspend what your eyes can tell you, your ears can hear, and your mind can know.” It can put you in a parallel situation because sometimes you can look outside the norm. That is what I looked like because, in my heart, I heard these words. I need you to lay on top of it.
I climbed on the bed and onto this man I didn’t know. I’m meeting him for the first time. I was surprised to see he was conscious, but he was unaware. He couldn’t speak. I laid over him and began to let my heart pray. I’m not regurgitating some Christianese speaking. I wanted to pray what God needed me to pray at that moment. When I got off of him, I looked at Gale, his brand-new wife. They got married the night before
She was sitting there and there were tears flowing out of her. They weren’t tears of fear. It might have been stress. What I was measuring at that moment was the availability of the heart, the goodness, and the power of God to the situation. I’m inviting her to participate in this because she knew what the doctor said. She knew what medicine said.
I reached the end of man, medicine, and machine. I’m never opposed to man medicine and machine. I will never tell somebody not to take their medicine or not obey a doctor. I know you refer to me as a faith healer. I’m a vessel. Jesus is the healer. I’m available for him. There was a meekness and humility to her. The scripture reminds us in 1 Peter, “God gives grace to the humble.”
A faith healer is just a vessel. Jesus is the true healer, and they are only making themselves available for Him. Click To TweetHe is not trying to exclude himself from our daily situations, regardless of how minute or small we think the situation might be. I don’t want to waste God’s time with that prayer or petition. That is how you practice. I tell my church, “You feed your faith with the right diet, environment, and exercise. Like your muscles, if you give them the right diet, environment, and exercise, your muscles will grow.”
My little granddaughter is five years old. She has the same amount of muscles in her body that I do, but she can’t lift what I can lift. She can’t do what I can do. Why? It is because she hasn’t had the right diet, environment, and exercise to mature those muscles. Sometimes we get lost in the misconception that faith doesn’t grow. It does grow. In 1 Peter 2:2, he wrote, “To desire God’s word like it is milk so that you can grow.” In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul reminded the Corinth church, “I got to feed you milk because you are not grown yet. You are not ready for the meat of the word. You have to mature into.” When you are praying and asking God about ridiculous things like parking lots at the mall.
You said in the beginning, “People think they are going to waste God’s time by talking to him.” He loves it.
He loves to be participatory in our lives. The scripture says that he cares about every detail of our lives. If this is the God that has chosen, numerically known, the number of hairs on my head, he cares about the details of my life. I tried to introduce that again. I like atheists, agnostics, and the unbelieving world. I have decided I want the rest of my life to be a lifestyle that causes the doubters to doubt their doubts. I want them to embrace their doubt. If they embrace their doubt, I want them to be able to say, “I don’t want to believe in God. I don’t think I can believe in God. The things that God has allowed me to participate in and to serve him, for him to demonstrate himself to me.”
There are many to count and to say there was another explanation that could have done something like this other than the hand, heart, and goodness of God. That was the case with Michael, not only that day. What I said Friday night at our dinner, and I believe that, in 1968, when I was being abandoned at that hospital, God measured Michael Parker. He already knew that whatever he was installing and instilling in me, my calling, destiny, purpose, and mission, one day would intersect with Michael’s, and he measured that need at that moment. I happened to be the one that he used to meet that need and fill that gap at that moment.
I try to live my life like that every single day. I don’t think you meet anyone on accident if there is a purpose and mission for the connection or the intersection. I want to honor God. I want to honor my mother and all that she invested in my life to reflect that and say, “Lord, is there a reason you need me to meet this person or to come across their lives?” In that case, that day, we got to see the goodness of God demonstrated. Michael Parker went home a few days after that.
Before that, it was sometime during the night, I watched them do an ultrasound on his heart. I was the only one in the room. I said, “If God can create it, he can heal it.” I never let that. I was telling Gale, “Only speak what you want. Don’t speak what you don’t want. Speak life. Not death.” We had already gotten there, and you showed up with all this amazing stuff.
One of the things you talk about, I have all kinds of little quotes I have, but one of them is, “Unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, not unconditional boundaries. The harder people are to love, the more they need it.” Jesus said, “You can do what I did.” Even more, if that is the truth, we can do a lot. We can do anything. When you step into that and do all the things that Jesus did and even more, we should be walking in that authority and letting our light shine. We don’t have to say a word to let that light and energy to love people.
People are hungry for it. Every human being has an appetite. I tell people, “There has never been a culture of atheists.” It doesn’t matter if you find a tribe in the middle of the Brazilian jungle or the African jungle. There is always an awareness of the supernatural. They might worship a false God or a witch doctor, but at the end of the day, every tribe, culture, and part of human existence has a history someplace in the awareness and acknowledgment of the supernatural.
There has never been a culture of atheism. Even a tribe in the middle of the jungle has an awareness of the supernatural. Click To TweetJesus came to occupy the flesh and to demonstrate the heart and the hand of God. Philip asked him in John 14, “Show us the Father.” Jesus was referring to God. He said, “Philip, I have been with you for three years. How can you say, ‘Show me the Father?’ If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” He said that he only speaks what he hears and only does what he sees.
I have said for years, “Jesus never put sickness on somebody and said, ‘God is trying to teach you something.’” He only took disease and sickness away. We know God’s opinion of disease because Jesus exercised or demonstrated that opinion during his time on the earth. Everywhere he went was to be a peace bringer. He brought peace to people’s bodies by eradicating disease or demonic influence. As a result, peace or wholeness was the product.
We know God has an opinion of it. He demonstrates that opinion. That is going to lead people down the question, “Why is there a disease? Why is there brokenness?” The reality is it goes back to the origins of creation when authority and dominion were given over to Adam and Eve, and they traded it because they were deceived. When they did, everything was lost, all the authority and dominion. Now they were aware that they were naked, vulnerable, and exposed. That changed the trajectory of the human race. Every one of us was born into sin. We were born into brokenness.
That is why Jesus said, “You have to be born again.” Paul called him the inner man. Peter called him the hidden man of the heart. In Proverbs 20:27, he said, “The spirit of a man illuminates almost always from his spirit to our spirit.” That is how he brings light to us. That spirit needs the right diet, environment, and exercise, and it will grow. If it does, you will end up looking-like, functioning-like, thinking-like, loving-like, and forgiving-like, the hand in the heart of God because he is the one that lives on the inside of you, and you end up reflecting him to the world.
All that to say everyone has an appetite for this. Most people ask for love in unlovely ways. A lot of times, believers are not good at greeting that moment and giving that person what they need. I was greeted at a store. I went into an AutoZone. The man seemed like he was having a rough day. The guy was checking me out and he was gruff. He didn’t have a lot of kindness coming out of him. He was short with me. At that moment, you get a chance to say, “Can I echo back to him how he is treating me? Do I disrupt that pattern and be part of his piece?”
I simply asked him. I said, “It looks like you are having a rough day.” He softened a bit. I said, “What can I do to make you smile?” He said, “I don’t know. You are right. I’m having a moment.” He asked me about the product I was buying. He says, “Is this good stuff.” I said, “It is good for your fuel systems.” He said, “I see.” I softened him. That is a byproduct of maturation and spiritual growth.
Often we get offended and upset. Hurt people hurt people, right? Instead of giving them grace, that hurt five-year-old that never got over it or whatever it is.
You end up loving and looking like Jesus. You do it in an organic way as opposed to a synthetic or mechanical way.
That doesn’t work and it never did. We tried it and I don’t feel like it worked well.
I tell people, “If you feed your spirit, you will grow out of most of your shortcomings. You will grow out of your sin.” Every one of us used to play with toys, and not many of us remember when we laid those toys down. We eventually grew out of them. We quit participating with them. Your shortcomings, sins, mistakes, habits, and brokenness, if you continue to be faithful to the diet of the word of God and exposure to the people of God and believers, eventually you will find yourself growing out of the things that have kept you bound for the totality of your life.
It is called maturity and spiritual maturity. When we can relax, we think there are many rules. I have talked to somebody. I was like, “Every religion, lightworker, and all these people are judging everybody else because ours is the way.” If we can love unconditionally without strings and judgment, that is the way. I said before, “The heart of they are to love the more they need it.” Walking through and letting go that everybody else is wrong. It’s my way is the only way. I got the corner on the market of the truth if we could start letting go of that spirit of offense.
When we think about that healing of less than 1% chance to live with Michael, going back to that, when the doctors on Monday were like, “You are still here.” We didn’t find that less than 1% out after the surgery a few weeks later. That is how we met. We both were in that mindset of healing. I think you asked Michael. Didn’t you ask him when he was awake that he wanted to live?
It is always the first question I ask when I’m in situations like that because I need to know where someone’s will is and their choices are. It is an arduous fight sometimes. Some people either don’t have the strength physical, emotional, or psychological fortitude to embrace and endure a fight. Sometimes, it is easier for them to go to heaven. I have been in ministry for many years. I have seen both sides of the equation. People who are ready to stay and fight.
I wrote my book in the third person. You are going to read it like a story. To you, they are a character, but to me, they were real people. One of the stories I highlight is that my colon exploded on March 28, 2009. I was in a movie theater with my children at about 4:30 in the afternoon on a Friday evening. I felt it explode. I leaned over to my wife. I said, “Something happened, and it is not good.” I went down to the lobby of the theater to embrace, pray, and talk to the Lord. I said, “What do I need to do because I don’t feel right? Something happened.”
By the end of the movie, I was sick. Flu-like symptoms were overwhelming. The Jayhawks were playing that night and I didn’t want to miss the game. I was watching that game with the heating pad down my shirt, trying to stay warm, not knowing how sick I was. It wasn’t until the next morning. My wife was a board member of the PTA. She had gone to a board meeting. I called her and interrupted the meeting. I said, “You need to come home. Something is bad.” By this time, I was starting to lose consciousness. We went to one of these little urgent care clinics.
The doctor ushered me right in. I got past everybody in the waiting room. He took five minutes to examine me. He told my wife, “I’m not sure what is happening, but he is dying. He needs to get out of here. It is bad enough. You need to take him. You will be faster than an ambulance.” By that time, I couldn’t even walk. She had to get me out. She got me to an ER that I had been down to the week before at another part of town here in the metroplex. By the time she got me there, she had to drag me in. I couldn’t walk.
I knew to stay in my body. I focused on one tile in the hospital ceiling. A nurse came out and said, “You don’t look good.” I said, “I don’t feel good.” They took me back. My symptoms were off the chart. My blood pressure is through the roof. My heart rate is 180 beats a minute. It was bad. My white blood count was through the roof. When the labs came back, they said, “There is something going on.” It wasn’t until about 10:00 that night. They finally figured out I had a gash in my colon. It was about 4 inches long. I had been poisoning myself for 30 hours. The surgeon came in for emergency surgery.
Once they saw that, it changed everything. It went from, “He might have the flu,” to, “He is dying.” The surgeon came in at 10:30 at night with an attorney. She said, “Mr. Canfield, I’m the doctor. I’m getting ready to go scrub for surgery. You are very sick. Frankly, I don’t know how you are alive. This is the hospital attorney. You need to sign your will and power of attorney. You need to absolve me of your death because I do not believe you are going to survive when I’m getting ready to put you through.”
I did like Michael. Michael told that story. He said he apologized. I kept apologizing to my wife. I said, “I’m sorry we are here.” This wasn’t necessarily preventable. It wasn’t something we could calculate or ready ourselves for. We had a handful of people from our church, my worship leader, and a few other people. I called my mom. She went to heaven in 2022, but she was never afraid of anything. She was a retired nurse. She knew how bad the diagnosis and prognosis was. I said, “Mom, this is the scenario. I’m going in five minutes.” She said, “I will call you back.” I said, “Mom, I’m going in right now. This might be the last time we talked.” She said, “I will call you back.” She hung up.
I prayed with my team and apologized to my wife. I kissed her one more time. I told the Lord, “I’m not ready to leave yet. I feel like there is more work for me to be done I like to do. I want to raise my children and stay. I’m trusting that you demonstrate your love to me.” I could feel the twilight medicine hitting my IV. My eyes started to get heavy. My bed started to wheel down the hall. My cell phone rang and it was my mother. My wife ran down and chased the bed. She put the phone to my ear to hear my mother shout into the phone, “This is the word of the Lord.” I never heard anything else because the medicine hit me.
I woke up the next morning. I wore a colostomy bag for about half of 2009. I lost 8 inches of my colon that night. The surgeon came in around 8:00 and the next morning at 9:00. She said, “Mr. Canfield, I can’t explain how you are alive. The only thing I can tell you is that you were healthy enough when this happened. You survived it. You are a man of faith. Medically, I can’t explain why you are alive. This kills people in two hours, especially a gash this big, and they had to wear a bag.”
We had our team over every Tuesday night for dinner. I got the bag taken off at the end of the summer. Several days after that second surgery, my team was over on a Tuesday night. I had bled through 6 or 7 shirts. I called the surgeon. I said, “There is something wrong. I felt similar to the day it ruptured. I was getting cold and chills.” She said, “If you can make it through the night, come see me in the morning first thing at 8:00. If you can’t, you need to get to the ER.”
We didn’t have health insurance at the time. Most of our decisions were going through the filter of how much is this going to cost. I learned if I laid flat, I wouldn’t bleed out. We went the next morning. She came in and opened up my shirt. She said, “It is not good.” She left. This is in her office. She came back in and had an assistant. They began to dawn their gloves, masks, and gowns. She grabbed a scalpel. She said, “I need you to turn your head and grip the table.”
With no anesthetic and preparation other than turn your head and grip the table, that woman laid me open right there in her office. I could hear everything splatting on the ground. My wife’s eyes were as big as saucers. What is happening? I could feel her tearing, tugging, and ripping me open. She washes me out. She looks at my wife and says, “Come here.” She taught my wife how to field dress that wound and pack it. She said, “We can’t close him back up. It will have to close naturally. You will have to change this twice a day.”
My wife is the best woman I have ever known in my life. I’m humbled to have her as my best friend. That woman changed that wound faithfully for the next several months. It was 7 inches wide and 4 inches deep. We got home that night. She pulls the gauze out and says, “I can see your intestines. I have a high school education. I don’t feel qualified to do this.”
She has the love of a mother, wife, and God right there. She is capable. We all can do it. That is another story. You were abandoned at birth. You had cerebral palsy diagnosed at birth. You had that death experience. That is similar to Michael’s story.
Around Christmas time 1980, going into ‘81, I developed a big knot on my right leg. Our family doctor said, “It doesn’t look good.” He diagnosed me with bone cancer. He transferred me to the hospital in downtown Kansas City. I spent nine days in a small hospital and got out on a Saturday morning. I spent the night at my house that night. My mom took me to a church South of Kansas City on the Missouri side the next day, where they laid hands, prayed, and believed for me.
I got admitted into that hospital. That hospital was going to determine if I had any tumors or cancer anywhere else in my body. They went into, “How much of this leg can we save?” They were trying to adjust my leg severance based on the prosthetic. They were trying to give me the best prosthetic. It was the day Ronald Reagan was shot in March of 1981. I was in a radiology waiting room.
You were a teenager.
I was twelve. Like you were talking about Friday night at Michael’s dinner, my mom had developed this standard of expectation of God meeting her boy. She did not permit unbelief in my hospital room. My sister-in-law was there. I had brothers come visit me, but they weren’t ready to believe in God. My mom wouldn’t even permit him in the room. It was bulldog tenacity. I have a standard of belief. If you cannot equate yourself to my standard of belief, I’m glad you came to visit us, but you are not going to be welcome in the room.
The day Reagan was shot was the day before the surgery, March 30th, 1981. The surgeon was a man from Great Britain. He wasn’t American, but he met my mom was going down to the cafeteria that evening. The doctor was in the elevator. He had my X-rays and my CAT scans. He began to weep with my mother. He was trembling and shaking. He said, “I have made a huge mistake. I need to get him back down for more pictures. We have to take him back down tonight.” He held the pictures up in the light of the elevator. He showed my mom. He said, “The cancer is gone. Something is wrong. I can’t medically explain what happened here.” They dismissed me four days later with the diagnosis of spontaneous remission. That is what they wrote on the paperwork.
Miracle is all we need to say.
This is important for your readers. A lot of people begin to search, dig, hunt, and hope for a miracle. What we need to search and hope for is the presence of God. I tell my church, “There are no miracles in the presence of God. There is only his normal.” When we come into his presence, we may bring abnormality into his presence. As of his presence and who he is, and his potency, power, and love he has for us to see his whole, our abnormal lines up with his normal.
We call it a miracle. Jesus never did. Jesus never freaked out and said, “Look what I did. I raised this girl from the dead. I cured this leprosy. I healed this blind eye or a deaf ear. I cast out this devil.” He was never shocked or stunned. All he was doing was introducing the presence of God and his normal to the abnormal of the human race.
He wasn’t begging like, “Please help me, God. Please help me heal this person.” No, he said, “Thank you. Get up and walk.” There was no wimpiness in there. He took the authority. Deuteronomy 7:15 and many other places say, “You shall be free of every disease.” Most of us weren’t taught that. I wasn’t taught that growing up. The fundamental upbringing did not prepare me for the incredible bold faith that I somehow bold faith no fear. It is who I am.
When we can stand in that, speak the words. Every word matters. Speak the words that are important. Speak what you want. Speak life. Not what you don’t want. This is a message I’m constantly talking about. My little book, Outrageously Courageous: Bold Faith No Fear, Step Towards The Gun. You can do that without fear because who you say you are is bold faith, no fear.
The scriptures remind us. It is in 1 John 4 toward the end of your Bible where this is the only disciple that lived into the winter of life. Every other disciple was a martyr. John was the only one who lived old he wrote this book when he was old. He was young when he first started following Jesus. He was probably around 16 or 17 years old when he joined as a disciple. He wrote this to the churches of the day. He said, “Perfect love casts out fear. It drives out fear.” A lot of people know how to ask and how to believe, but they get handicapped in the receiving part. Being able to function, think, and believe like you have received it even before your eyes are able to measure it.
Many people know how to ask the Lord but get handicapped in the receiving part. You must function, think, and believe like you have received it even before your eyes can measure it. Click To TweetAs if it is and lay it at his feet. Releasing it, believe, ask, believe, receive, act as if it is already on its way, and let it go. I don’t think we need to beg. We have been taught, “Please, help me.” Thank you that we are helped. Thank you, it is already on its way. I believe that was not in my raising.
I won’t go into the details of how God got me to the private college. I went, but he got me there in a spectacular and supernatural way. I try not to use the word incredible in my vocabulary ever because it means this is not credible, and God is. He is credible. I was sick. I got glasses. In my first year at college, I never had glasses.
In the second year, as school started back up, I began to read quite a bit, and I was getting headaches. I went to see an eye doctor at the mall, and he said, “You have to see an ophthalmologist. There is something going on.” I said, “Okay.” I went to see the ophthalmologist. He rolled away from me after he looked behind my eyes with the light. He said, “You need to see a neurosurgeon. I won’t be treating you.” The campus opened an athletic facility that following Friday night. I fell over. I collapsed on the campus. It was an all-night deal for the new athletic facility.
I woke up with a bunch of people surrounding me. I didn’t know what had happened. I fell over, and someone said, “You got to talk to one of the campus pastors.” I went to a private Christian college. I told them I was contending with. I said, “My eyes are getting bad. Sunlight is painful. I get nauseous.” I don’t throw up at all. I hate throwing up. I have thrown up four times since 1976. Three of those were food poisoning. I don’t throw up. He said, “Let’s see my family doctor.”
I saw the family doctor because the wait to see a neurosurgeon was four weeks out. That guy got me to see a neurosurgeon the following Monday. By that time, I harvested X-rays and CAT scans. We went from the waiting room. We didn’t go into the exam room. We went back to his office. I knew when we went back there, something wasn’t right. He asked me to explain my symptoms. I did. He said, “I got good news and bad news.” I said, “All right.”
I’m nineteen at this point. He says, “The bad news is, Mr. Canfield, you got a brain tumor. The good news is it is right at the top of your sinus cavity. I don’t think I will have to violate the integrity of your skull to get it. I can go straight up your sinus, and we can get it, but I need to check your history. We need to do some exams this week.” I was in as an outpatient every day. I go to school in the morning, the hospital in the afternoon, and I go to work in the evening for the next few days. He said, “We are going to go get it next Thursday.”
You adopt a lot of fear, stress, guessing, and wondering. I’m like, “Lord, I’m right where I thought you wanted me to be.” At one point, I broke down and said, “If I’m going to be sick, I want to be sick with my family. I don’t want to be sick by myself.” I was in Oklahoma. I’m from Kansas City. The spirit of God spoke to me.
I want to make sure I’m not sounding weird, but inside my spirit, I heard this conversation. He said, “Son, what does my word say in Mark 11:23 and 24?” That scripture says this, “Whoever says this mountain be removed and be cast into the sea and doesn’t doubt the things in his heart that he says, he will have what he says. Therefore, I say to you, whatever things you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them and you will have them.” I quoted that back.
Inside this internal conversation, I hear this word again, “What does verse 22 say?” I thought about it. It says, “Have faith in God. Speak to your mountain.” He said, “Son, that is my faith you are using, not yours.” That is what the Greek language says. It says, “Be possessed with God’s faith. Therefore, speak to this mountain. Tell it to go throw itself into the sea.” Lord taught me something. He said, “Son, you have been doing 23 and 24 all week long. You have been asking and believing. The beginning part is you know that that is my faith, not yours. I have given you victory over this. Now speak to that thing inside your head and tell it to go.” I did.
Through your faith, you can gain victory over your sickness. Speak to it and tell it to go. Click To TweetThis is a Thursday at 11:30 in the morning, three days after the diagnosis. I went on Friday for an MRI. I went in on Monday for the results of those MRIs. The doctor brought me back to his office. He said, “Mr. Canfield joined me in my office.” I went back. He says, “How do you feel?” On Thursday, when I got to work that afternoon, I felt like I was going to get sick. I fell over and grabbed my head.
When I did, it manifested out of my nose. I didn’t sneeze or cough. It felt like this amazing amount of pressure building. It burst out of my nose and hand. It was snot and mucus, but inside the pool of junk in my right palm were two separate little chunks. I went and washed up. I called my pastor. I said, “God did something.” The next day I did the MRI. On Monday, I went back. I’m sitting in the same chair that he, seven days earlier said, “You got a tumor.”
He says, “How do you feel?” I said, “I feel good. I haven’t had a headache since 4:30 on Thursday.” I told him the story. He said, “Follow me.” We look at the X-ray lightboard. He’s got my X-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs. He shows everything on the X-ray. He was like, “Here is your tumor, the mass, and a layer of water around your brain. The brain will fill with fluid when there is an invader. It is a body’s reaction. It is going to stop movement. It is going to fill with fluid. That is what is here, but none of this is on any of these.”
My MRI was 40 different photos. He said, “None of this is here.” I explained to him again what happened. That man would not give me a clean bill of health for a year. I had to go back and see him once a month. I get lab work done and drawn. He had to admit spontaneous remission. There was nothing I could do other than that and I felt great.
What I noticed here is miracles are nothing to God. That is his normal. When we open ourselves to ask, believe, receive, and act as if it is done and release it, it takes the pressure off of us for him to do what he needs to do. It sounds to me that you have been abandoned and redeemed, but I believe you were abandoned, died, are near death, and have miraculous stories throughout your life. At age twelve, what a scary thing that was. To move on and still be here ministering and what I believe was a conduit in Michael’s healing as many other components there.
People need hope. That is what I’m trying to get across here. There are hope and ways. If we would turn off that media machine and propaganda that tries to keep us in fear and step out of that a little bit, be still, know, and listen because we have every bit of God’s wisdom in us. Every breath we take is the ‘I am’ coming into us. Part of my message typically is to speak what you want, not what you don’t want. There is hope, even when it is hopeless. This is less than 1 % of people I know. Several of them have come back. You are one of them.
I included Michael’s story in my book. I included a handful of others that God has allowed me to steward during this season because I will conclude with this saying that the purpose of my story is that a man gave me a DNA test for my 49th birthday. It led me down a path to be able to meet my father, which we were not attempting to do. We weren’t trying. It happened in an organic way. I got to meet the man my birth mother met at that college. He never had children. It turned into five years of a fantastic relationship. He left the Earth in 2022, two weeks before my mother. I buried both my mother and my father on Memorial Weekend, two hours apart, in the Great State of Kansas.
If your readers are looking for hope or a story that causes the doubters to doubt their doubt, if you have doubt and you want to starve that doubt, dive into the word of God as always. If you wanted something on a practical and relatable level, my book would be a benefit to anybody looking for hope and what we would term miraculous. It is all a manifestation and demonstration of how God loves. When you are developed in how much God loves you, the casualty of how much God loves you is fear. The fear dies. It meets its end if you can live in how you are loved. From there, you can position yourself to be a person who receives from him and talks with him based on the arena or culture of his love for you.
This is amazing. Find Baby Boy Klapal: A true story of finding fatherhood on Amazon. I am grateful to you. Thank you. I have to say bye-bye for now, until the next episode.
Bless you. Thank you for having me on.
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I’m Charla Anderson, host of The Charla Anderson Show, Collector & Connector of Fascinating People (and EVERYONE is Fascinating!) on live TV, streaming, and podcasts. As a Ziglar Legacy Certified Trainer, a retired award-winning flight attendant, Olympic Torchbearer, a personal development junkie, an Inspired Speaker, a Published Author, and Your Courageous Coach, I want to share my passion for living life full-out, saying YES to intriguing opportunities, and encouraging YOU to do the same. Let’s jump on a discovery call and get to know each other. Find all things Charla at CharlaAnderson.com/links.
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About Joseph Canfield
Born premature and diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy when two days old. Abandoned by potential adoptive parents, was headed to be a ward of the state. Rescued by the nurse that delivered him. Never legally adopted. Was diagnosed with a bone tumor in 1981. Was in two separate hospitals over 18 days and was healed the day Ronald Reagan was shot.
God called me into ministry 4 days later. Started college to be a doctor. Was divinely directed to walk away from scholarship and attend private college in Oklahoma. Developed headaches into second year at school and was diagnosed with brain tumor. Was delivered of that. Too long to type. Returned to KC after graduating and met my wife at the church I was working at.
Moved shortly after to TX and eventually ended up working for Kenneth Copeland. Successful 5 years there, moved to PA and continued youth ministry. Had 4 great kids in these years. Returned to TX in 2006, started ANC. Nearly died with a ruptured colon in 2009. Too long to type. Wore an ostomy bag half of 2009.
Received a DNA test for my 49th birthday. Led to meeting my dad, who never knew I existed and was without children. He loved us and we loved him. He left us some oil rights and some land. I love Jesus, my wife, children and grandchildren.
