Torch, Winter 1991

hen I was two years old, my sister spent nine months in a hospital while she recovered from serious burns. Through my sister's tragedy , a number of people in my fam ily, including my mom and dad , were saved, and later others received Jesus as their personal Savior. All my life, my parents reminded me of how God worked through my sister's suffering. Though she is scarred on much of her body, she is very grateful to God for using her to accomplish His plan in the lives of my family and others. What I did not reali ze is how this experience helped prepare me to trust God for the suffering that I personally would endure later. Three years ago I began to have dizzy sensations . They lasted two to three seconds and occmTed about three times each day. I put off getting medical help. I was raised on the fam1 , and you just did not go to the doctor unless you had a serious accident. One day my wife, Jane, asked me to check with the doctor to find the cause, so I did. My doctor recommended a CAT scan. Three days later he called me in a panic mode and said, "Corne see me immediately." When I aJTived he gave me the news that I had a tumor larger than a golf ball in the middle of my head . I recall thinking, "There's no quick way out of this one, Dave." When I aJTived home and shared this news with my wife, we cried together and prayed and asked Goel to use us no matter what happened, because we truly wanted Hirn to receive glory and honor. We called our f1iends and they responded wonderfully. As the word spread, our phone rang off the hook . F1iends from college and seminary called from all over the country to offer us the assurance of their prayers. Specialists I did not even know offered me advice about what to do and where to go for the best help. One doctor who was a close fri end of a close friend told me, "David, I've checked around the country, and the name of one man from the Cleveland Clinic keeps coming up. So I made an appointment for you. " When I called the office of this specialist who was so highly recom– mended, the secretary said, "Sir, I don 't know how you got an appointment on the doctor's schedule. He has over 300 patients waiting to see him. But he will see you at 8:30 tomorrow morning." My wife and I knew how we got in to see this man. God responded to the prayers of a host of our friends and sent us "help in time of need. " The next morning as we were about to walk out the door, my tlu-ee-year-old son asked me if he could sing a song to me. His song was called, "Keep Your Eyes On God." He had made it up just for me. I don ' t think he has sung it since. My precious little son was used of Goel to "help in time of need. " Then he asked me if he could pray for me. Thi s is what he prayed, "Dear Goel, please help the nurses to be good to Daddy and please help the doctors to use the right needle! " If I had known then that I would soon begin the first of hundreds of shots and 18 spinal taps , I would have shouted, "AMEN, and keep praying, Son! " Then he closed hi s prayer with, "Goel, please bring my Daddy home soon because I need my Daddy and I love him." Boy, th at was hard! But how beautiful it was to know the Lord bad prepared his heait for this time of trial for all of us. The specialist informed me that my tumor was the Jai·gest of its type he had ever seen or even heard of. Further– more, this was the second most difficult operation known and would