A Funny Thing Happened on my Way to Becoming A Pastor- Part 4- Recovering and Remembering That Book

This is Part 4 in a short series of posts about what happened on my way to becoming a pastor. Part 1 was about the decision and a key book in my life. Part 2 was about a discovering and decline in my health. Part 3 was about my health crisis.

Part 4 today is about my recovering and remembering that book I shared about in Part 1.

In Part 3 I shared about the night I prayed and experiencing the presence of Jesus. The pain stopped. The next day I had a doctor’s appointment. He was still puzzled by what could have been wrong with me. He told me he wanted me to go to the hospital to be admitted. When he was at the door to leave the exam room, I blurted out, “I am tired of feeling cold.” He looked at me and asked, “You feel cold?” I told him I felt cold all of the time. The light went on in his head. He told me to wait for the nurse. Side note this was in July one of the hottest months in the year where I live.

The nurse came in and took ANOTHER blood sample. She told me the doctor thought he knew what my problem was and that I could go to work. If it was what he thought, he would call in a prescription. If not, I would need to go to the hospital.

I got to the pizza restaurant where I worked and saw a note to call the doctor. The nurse told me the test showed the problem and the doctor had called in a prescription for me already and that I should start it right away. The problem was my thyroid stopped working. I got the prescription and that day began my long recovery.

Over the following months, I had to see the doctor for testing at first once a week for one month, then once a month for three months, then once every three months.

In April 1996, the doctor told me, “Matt you are now a healthy man, It is a miracle you did not die. I did not want to show you this last summer because I feared you would go into heart failure.” Then he showed me my chart. I was headed into heart, liver and kidney failure.

Those months of recovery were a constant uphill battle. It seemed like for every mountain peak of improvement, there were two valleys or more. I only knew one thing according to the bible in Philippians 4:

I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.

I got more involved with my church helping with the prayer ministry. I arranged to transfer to a school in Omaha to finish my education having to drive one hour there and back two nights a week. Progress had begun in my life.

Then one morning in December 1996 during worship service, my church which had sent teams to Romania in the years after the fall of communism, announced they were looking for people to go to Romania.

Boom. The memory of that book Tortured for Christ by Rev, Wurmbrand that I shared about in Part 1, hit me like a ton of bricks. The same urgency in my spirit before God hit me. I MUST GO TO ROMANIA. It was as if God was telling me the answers would be found there.

So I signed up to go…..

Thank you for reading. God Bless. More in Part 5