Walking the path

(5-minute read)

It’s back, and it’s getting worse. Fifteen years ago, I started getting sick, but the doctors, there were a lot of them, couldn’t figure out what was wrong. In May 2011, a doctor told me part of my brain, called the hypothalamus, was failing and there was nothing they could do. He said I would eventually pass out and just not wake up. He couldn’t give me a date but didn’t expect I would live out the year. I was too sick to continue working, and we lost our company. As I continued to decline, I realized I’d become a burden and began to pray that the Lord would either heal me or kill me. My wife, Jo, and our friend Dianne found two ministers with a history of praying along those lines, and the Lord healed me. I had no symptoms for seven years, but then they slowly began to return.

When I read how God told mankind through Adam and Eve to take dominion over the earth and then read how Jesus spoke about physicians, I see that physicians are the standard path to healing. I know, however, just like Jesus showed us, that God sometimes miraculously intervenes. I don’t know which, if either, this will be.

Once again, there have been lots of doctors. I ended up with a neurologist who was the first to put a name on it, Shapiro’s syndrome. A syndrome is just a unique grouping of symptoms. For this one, they don’t know what body part is causing the problem or how to cure it. My body temperature would suddenly drop below 95°F (35°C) into hypothermia, even in a warm room, and I would either begin shaking with chills or feel extremely hot and start sweating. Recouping from one of these episodes can take days. The neurologist referred me to one of the premier diagnostic clinics.

A doctor friend, Dean Karampelas, said he and his wife, Patti, wanted to go with us. I didn’t want to take advantage of his friendship because being a doctor was his profession. Still, despite everything I said, Dean insisted he wanted to go. Dean would go in with me to see the doctor, and Patti would be in the waiting room with my wife, Jo. The night before my appointment, Dean and Patti visited our hotel room to pray for me. I was hoping that the Lord would either say I was going to be healed or at least diagnosed. Though I didn’t hear a voice as they prayed, I suddenly knew that the Lord was saying, “I’m going to show you something.” It wasn’t what I expected or was hoping to hear.

The following day did not go as I had hoped. The specialist didn’t know what was wrong but felt comfortable that my problem was not within the area of his specialty. They sent an E consult to a different group of specialists, which is an e-mail with all my symptoms and test results. They said the group would respond to me if they thought they could help. I felt I had fallen through the cracks of their system. I kept trying to justify in my own mind why I wasn’t more disappointed. Dean was great, and as we traveled back home, he took all that was said in the meeting and laid out simple steps for me to take to figure out what was wrong. It was obvious that the Lord had sent Dean to be with me.

The following day back home, the Lord spoke to me again in the same way as before, but this time, he said, “I am not a system. I am a person who is with you.”

I immediately told the Lord, “I know you’re not a system. Everybody knows you’re not a system. I only act like you are. I often make decisions as if you were. You are not a computer or AI. I often confuse your eternal fairness with the thought that you treat everyone exactly the same.”

I thought about Moses at the burning bush. He tried to tell God that he couldn’t go back to Egypt and get the Israelites out because he wasn’t “eloquent of speech.” And the Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” The Lord prepares me for my unique path in life, although without the significance of Moses, and then walks with me on that path.

I felt the Lord saying, “Look at Dean and Patti when they went with you on that trip. That’s what I always do with you. I sent them so that you could see.”

I knew theologically that the Lord was always with me. I thought I knew it in reality but this suddenly came alive. I knew it in a different way, and it changed everything. Like Moses, I’m not deaf or blind but limited differently, and the Lord goes with me.

On multiple occasions, the Lord has asked me to go and minister to someone that I didn’t want to minister to. When I told the Lord I didn’t want to go, he would say, “They are in trouble; just go be with them.” I found out from experience that often, what religious people call ministry, friends call conversation. Dean and Patti did God’s work when they went to the diagnostic clinic with Jo and me. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate what was ministry and what was conversation.

The most important thing for me is to learn to walk with the Lord. Like most of us, mine is an ordinary life with extraordinary moments. God is always with me and helping me walk that path. I am just not always conscious that he’s there, and sometimes he sends someone to show me he’s there, and he cares.

This entire adventure isn’t about being healed either through the work of the physicians or miraculous intervention of the Lord but that I know the Lord is with me and learning to walk with him through it all. If I had to choose between being healed or knowing the Lord was with me, I prefer the Lord.