August 25th, 2007 by admin

            I was sinking fast and was losing hope that God really wanted me well. I had experienced every emotion in the book. I had faith, hope, excitement, joy, anticipation, comfort, but I also had depression, despair, fear, anxiety, pain and hopelessness.  The only thing left to do was to look to God and cry for mercy. I realized that even though I had been in faith oriented churches all my life and had enjoyed youth pastoring, missions, and associate pastoring, I had nothing on healing figured out. Suddenly, everything that I had believed was in question. It was a soul searching time — a crystallizing time where the big question was: What is truth?

            This had to be the search, because whatever truth is, that is the way it was going to be. Nothing will change truth, and I might as well come to that conclusion. So everything that I had learned in my past was going to be questioned on the basis of whether or not it was truth.

            As aforementioned, the pushing on the eye, the taking of the multiple eye drops, the taking of the pills, and the massive amounts of office visits lasted for about 3 months. It only stopped when I was rushed to the hospital with the most horrible pain in my lower back. The pills I had been on had created a wonderful kidney stone that was trying to get out. I will avoid the details, after a couple of days I was able to resume normal life.  Consequently, the doctors immediately removed pills from my treatment regimen, which then put me on a fast track for a second valve surgery. This time it would be a different doctor and a different type valve. In December of that year I had the second valve surgery — my third surgery overall. The scary thing about this surgery was the possibility of double vision. With that much hardware in the eye, there is a tendency for the eye to lack strength for movement in comparison to the other eye, therefore, causing double vision. This could only be corrected with special kind of lenses in glasses.