Faith Walking

The MSM Cream Story

At the end of the farmer’s market season in 2000, we rented a kiosk in the mall to sell the soaps and lotions. When people saw our sign “Goat Milk Soap and Lotion”, we were often asked, “Since you have goats, do you make cheese?”

No, we did not make cheese. Making cheese to sell to the public would require a Grade A Milk Processor’s license. We figured it would cost us about $40,000 to do what we needed to do to get that license. The pasteurizer alone would be about $20,000.

But the goats kept having kids. As the herd grew we knew we either had to get rid of some goats, or go for the Grade A license. We went for the license.

At the time we started the goat dairy Tim and I lived on the farm my grandparents had purchased when they came back to the States after 25 years as missionaries in China. I used to say that I was practically conceived in that house. My mother lived in that house when she married my dad. Every summer my family would come to spend time with my grandparents there. I loved that place!  It was on the water in Blaine with a view north to the Canadian mountains over Drayton Harbor. My first husband and I bought the house from my grandfather’s estate. We used it as a rental until about the time our marriage was failing—then I moved in to it. I really thought that I would be there for the rest of my life! But that is another story.

To create a Grade A Dairy here we started by converting the little garage on the left hand side of this picture to a milk house and milking parlor for goats. We were milking only six goats at the time, so we didn’t need much room. That little building would work, but it needed a new floor and foundation. Tim and his son, David (age 13) propped up the building and fixed it up as a milking parlor.

Before long we had a Grade A Milking parlor, milk house and I was making cheese.

Then my feet collapsed. I was making cheese, standing on a concrete floor. My feet were extremely painful. As I worked, I talked to the Lord. “It’s just pain,” I said, “I can handle it.” Suddenly I could not handle it. My feet refused to hold me up. I turned around with my back to the table and pulled myself up from the floor. Tim brought me a wheelchair. I didn’t walk for six months. I went to all kinds of doctors and therapies, but nothing helped.

My brother sent me a story to encourage me. The story was about a Christian girl who was making a rock climb. On the way up, she lost one of her contacts. “Oh, no!” she cried, “Lord, I don’t suppose there is any way I could get it back!?”

When she got down to the bottom of the climb, another climber called out, “Hey! Anybody here lose a contact?”

“What!” the girl exclaimed, “you found my contact!”

“Yeah,” he said, “but wait until I tell you how I found it! An ant was carrying it across the rock in front of my face!”

The girl went home and told her family what happened. Her father made a cartoon of the ant and the contact. You can easily find this picture, and story on the internet.

I told that story many times during the six months I was in the wheelchair. I knew I was in the palm of the hand of the Lord. If he wanted to heal me, he could do it anytime. I knew I was in the chair for his purpose, but like the ant, I didn’t know why.

After six months I went to a birthday party for one of my granddaughters. A man at the party asked me why I was in the chair. He suggested that I take MSM to help whatever was causing the problem. I had never heard of MSM, so I went home and looked it up. MSM stands for methyl sulfonyl methane. It is a form of sulfur, like you would find in a mineral bath. At that time, in 2005, it had become a popular supplement for horses. In fact, the man who told me about it, said I could buy it at feed stores.

In my research, I learned that there was at least one company making a pain-relief cream with MSM.

“Well, I am a cream-maker,” I though. “I’ll make my own.” But I am also a disciple of Jesus, so I asked him to help me.

I knew I would start with the formula for the skin care cream that I had been making for about five years. I had received many testimonies on how helpful it was for various kinds of skin problems. So I added as much MSM crystal to that cream formula as I could before the cream began to feel grainy. As I rolled my chair along in front of my essential oils, I asked the Lord what else I should put in the MSM cream to make it effective. I believe he told me exactly what to put in it, and how much of each. I put five different essential oils in it.

By now Tim was standing behind me saying, “All right. You can make this stuff, but don’t even THINK about selling it!” He didn’t want to have to get involved with the Food and Drug Administration. I didn’t blame him.

“OK, OK,” I said. “I’m just trying to get out of the chair.”

The cream was super effective for my feet. In a day or two, I was walking again. I had to put it on often, several times a day if I were standing on concrete, but it worked!

I had a friend at the time who was going through chemo-therapy for the third time. She had a condition called “hand-foot-syndrome”. It was causing the skin on her hands and feet to peel. It was extremely painful. I gave her a jar. “It can’t hurt you, Debbie,” I told her. “And it might help.”

After a week or two she came back to me and said, “Grace, you have got to sell this stuff. It is the first thing that has helped us cancer patients.”

So we slapped and FDA disclaimer on the back of the jar and Debbie started taking it to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Then. . . the stories started coming back to us about all the things it was helping: Carpal tunnel problems, knees, torn rotator cuffs, tennis elbow, arthritis pain, even headaches.

We knew we had something. I started selling it at the fairs: Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden, Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, and the Washington State Fair in Puyallup.

The response, and the testimonies were astounding!  I have binders stuffed with written testimonies.

We even saw some things that can only be described as miracles. I will include two of the miracle stories below.

After several years at the fairs, we started selling it on-line. Now we have an uncountable number of email testimonies, too.

Here is a link to some of the testimonies on our website: https://graceharborstore.com/testimonies

Miracle Story #1

When I sold the MSM cream at the Fairs, I handed out thousands of little samples as people passed by. Of course, I could not remember everyone I gave a sample to. One of the mornings at the Lynden Fair, a lady was waiting for me in the booth when I got there. I greeted her, then she said, “I know you get lots of testimonies, but I would like to tell you mine. Your MSM cream may have saved my daughter’s life.” I figured she must be exaggerating, but this is the story she told me. “My daughter has had the worst case of acne you can imagine. It has been so bad on her face, arms, and back that she has refused to go out of the house. You gave me one of those samples yesterday. I told it home and put it on her back. Today all the acne is gone!  Except one spot on her hair line, and I had not put any of your cream there.”

Amazed, and thankful, I told the lady, “The Lord healed your daughter. I can only give him the glory and thank him, thank him, thank him.”

Miracle Story #2

One year at the Puyallup fair a lady stopped at the booth to read the signs. She asked, “Do you think it would help a sunburn?”

I looked up at her and could see that her nose was burned. “Would you like to try some on your nose?” I asked.

“I want to try it on my legs,” she said.  She pulled up her pant leg. Her leg looked as if she had been standing in a campfire.

“What happened to you?” I gasped.

“I was in Mexico. I thought I was avoiding the sun, but I learned that a medication I was taking made my skin super-sensitive.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “It looks like you should be in a hospital.”

“I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said. “I figured I’d better get out and move around some.”

She said down in the chair in our booth and started to pat the MSM cream on her legs. I watched the redness disappear as she patted her legs. It was so painful for her that tears streamed down her cheeks, but she kept on until she had covered all the burns. I really don’t know how to adequately describe what I saw. Her legs were healed.

Then she said she wanted to try it on her shoulder. She pulled her sleeve back, and her skin came off with it! She did the same thing on her shoulder as she had done on her legs. Again, we saw a miracle.

After she left the booth, I watched her walk away. My knees trembled. I felt weak. “What did I just see, Lord?” He had done another miracle.

I have lots more stories, but I will finish this post with one more, a fun one.

Several days into the Puyallup Fair one year, a lady ran across the building and jumped into my arms!  I didn’t know who she was. She kept kissing my cheeks.

When she finally backed away she said that I had given her one of the samples a couple of days before. She had decided to try it on her “restless leg”. She said that she had had her first full night’s sleep in months, or years. I don’t remember how long she said it had been since she had been able to sleep. She told me that she thought it might be a fluke so she tried it again the next night. She said, “I can’t thank you enough for two full nights of sleep!”

The next year at the fair she came back. This time I recognized her when she started kissing me.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “for a full year of good nights’ sleep.”

Praise God.