Greetings!
As some of you know, I had a stroke. But why? Why did I have a stroke? And why am I an Evangelist after the stroke? These are all good questions. Let’s look into them.
“As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, and carry out your ministry fully.” (2 Timothy 4:5)
Program Director – Oh, so good! (Starting in September, 2015)
I was a Program Director at work. I started with this company a year beforehand and they were very good to me. I was working anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week on project details and assembly. Toward the end of the year, the company made me an offer to come and work for them on a full-time basis, and I accepted it in September. Before this, I was a contractor, but the company was willing to offer me a full-time position, and I took it in September, but as I accepted this job, my responsibilities increased dramatically. In my new position, I was responsible for my whole division. In October, of 2015, I was the Program Director for producing a product that the company needed for financial purposes. I was the lead designer and the Program Director for 40 people who worked for me. And I was busy! Boy, was I busy!
I was working hard, at the time. As this project started, I started working 100 hours a week, and sometimes more. I had been doing this for fourteen or fifteen weeks. What does that mean? That means that I was only sleeping about 40 hours a week. So, honestly, I was really tired. Now, I was working for my Senior VP, who had a mission from our CFO and Technology Executive VP to fix our finances. With this “fix”, all the departments could maintain their budgets and forecasts. The company had 22,000 employees and its systems were, well, a bit old. This fix, I was to build, was to be a website that I produced and then I worked on maintaining it. All of this pressure was focused on me. I was a Program Director who was delivering all of the products (i.e., the source code and the process for production). And so, I was really busy.
As I was working, I met a man who had a hard time expressing himself. He was slow but, yes, he could talk, and he did understand the issues. He was a salesperson and a friend of mine at work. He was a nice guy, but at this time I didn’t care about any “nice” guys, I cared about the people who got work done for me and this “nice” guy was not the person I needed. I talked with him for 15 minutes and I had a really hard time understanding him and what he was asking for. He was confusing. At one point he was talking about one thing, and then his mind would shift to something else. Now yes, I can keep up with him, I understood what he was saying, but did I need this in my life right now? The problem was that I didn’t have the patience to deal with him. And, I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Honestly, I had “more important” things to do.
Now, I have always been a Christian, and this attitude is wrong. As a Christian, I should have behaved differently. I should have tried to understand him. I should have given him time to talk. But I DID NOT give him anything.
For six weeks I was trying to fix the code we had, and it was really hard. Now, I don’t want to bore you with the details, but around 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning, one of the cleaning women I knew came up to me and asked, “Why was I here so late?” Because she had seen me here working for weeks and she didn’t understand why I would stay. I tried to tell her about some of the problems I was having, but she said “I was nuts and that I should go home!” An hour later, I was heading to the hotel where I was staying. I was staying in New Jersey, right by the city, and that is the problem. The problem was, that I had a wife (her name is Linda), and two boys, and I wanted to see them, but no matter what I tried or did, I couldn’t move this project forward at all.
That night, I prayed, “Please help us … I can’t do this anymore! We are working as hard as we can, and we are failing! Badly! So, Please Help.” And then I fell asleep, in my clothes, lying in a hotel bed. It was a few days later that I had my stroke.
The Stroke (January 24, 2016)
What is a stroke? A stroke is a piece of your brain that somehow is deprived of blood. In a stroke, part of your brain is bloodless for a while, and things begin to die. In any brain, things die quickly, like within minutes. For me, it was my speech, but it was more than this, it also was how to arrange the words, and this is usually called “proper speech”. When I say proper speech, I mean educated, well-formed, and imaginative, with all of the commas and expletives. Reproducing real speech is difficult, because real speech takes a process to understand, and then the ability to deliver it to those who are hearing. It wasn’t something simple. This form of speech that has taken me 50 years to grasp and be able to say and this was now gone.
Unfortunately, with a stroke comes mental issues. Now, these mental issues are difficult, but they are limited. At this point of my stroke, I was very “slow” to react to things around me and to understand the world that I knew (my world was very small, right now). Although these mental issues won’t last a long time, it does affect you at the beginning. You also have something called Aphasia, which for me was a nightmare. Aphasia is an aspect of the brain not being able to grasp, or explain, a single concept clearly and decisively. In effect, you can’t explain anything, even if you had speech, because your brain can not synthesize the words that you’re trying to describe. Because in my instance, I also have dyslexia, which is the jumbling of words within your brain in reading and writing. So, between dyslexia, and aphasia, I had real problems being able to read and write, and with my speech problems I could hear what you were saying, understand, appreciate the differences, and be able to think through a solution, but then I couldn’t say anything about it because I had at aphasia and then also dyslexia. This is called “memory loss” in our real world and I must say, memory loss is very hard to understand, because it’s deep-seated within the stroke, and not a function of age. I can understand something, but I couldn’t actually “say” what was happening around me.
When I had my stroke, I stayed in the hospital for seven days. During my hospital stay, I was concerned about what was happening to me. The world seemed disconnected to me, and Linda was the only one helping. With my wife at my side, I asked, or you might say, that I asked her to ask questions about my stroke. We asked if the stroke would, or could, return. The answer we got, from all of my doctors, was an “unknowing” sentiment about why I did have a stroke and about its return. They (all four of my doctors) didn’t know why I had the stroke and they (none of them) had any idea of what this meant. So, we asked them to do everything they could to help us, and we understood that we would have to pay for all of this. I had four or five different vials of blood taken and we talked to six or seven new doctors. In the end, no one could tell us why I had the stroke, and that they were very confused as well.
While at the hospital I could not talk, at all. I tried. For an hour I tried to talk to my brother about a painting. I couldn’t do it. At the same time, Linda had a conversation with my neurologist. They talked for about half an hour about what I should do next. At the close of their discussion, my neurologist said, “You’re lucky he is here.” “Why”, asked my wife. “Because this kind of stroke kills more than 90% of the people who have them. He is very lucky.”
Two Months Later – One Day at a Time (March 2016)
When I came home, I was thrown into a world of silence, and I was quiet. I couldn’t say anything at all and only after some time, I could start to talk. As I started, I could only say small words and only a few of them, and for only a short time. No one could understand me at all. My wife could, because she had spent so much time with me, and she was the only one that could help me to understand the world around me. Without her, I was nothing. Do you remember the man I talked about at the beginning? Now, I was like him. I could not explain myself. I could not talk to anyone at all. I could only pray, and I did that so often.
My life was very quiet. However, my life was not only quiet because I couldn’t talk, my life was quiet because I didn’t understand what was going on around me. With a stroke comes “confusion”, and this confusion is what the world is, or could be. When you have a stroke, you don’t understand the news, you don’t understand what other people are doing around you because you don’t understand their way of life, their interests or their frustrations. This confusion is very real because it’s only inside of you, and now you don’t understand the world at all.
When you’re in this framework of thinking, you don’t think ahead, you only think of what is happening in that moment. You have no plans to move forward. The interesting thing is, you don’t even think of it. Why would you want to move forward? The whole concept of “moving forward” is actually beyond you. And so, you can only do what is in front of you at this time. This is what quiet means. This is why quiet is so hard to comprehend. It’s not that you’re quiet because you can’t say anything, it’s because you can’t say anything, think about anything, or understand anything about what the real world is trying to do. And that’s quiet. That’s quiet. That’s so quiet that you can’t understand what else you can do. To be honest with you, this is the quietest I’ve ever heard the world to be, and it’s very frustrating, because there are so many other things you could do, but you can’t, because of the confusion that’s in your mind. And therefore, my world was very quiet.
How many minds? (February 2016 – January 2017)
Early on in the stroke, but months after I got home, I’d tried to “get better”. I started with speech therapy at Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, NY. My speech pathologist was Sandy. She asked questions about the pictures that were on paper, and I could usually describe what they were. I usually got them right, but at times, these were difficult, because I needed to say a set of words. Performing speech tasks still was hard, and I struggled with describing what the pictures were talking about. Yes, this got me bothered, but I really understood that my speech needed some real help. And through the speech program, I was hoping I would get it.
As the months went by, I started feeling better as a person. You see, “feeling better as a person”, means that you can actually “think” again. But I have to be honest here. Thinking again means that I can begin to remember different components of my life. It also means that I could think through problems much more clearly than I could’ve at the beginning. However, it takes a while for the brain to come back to full strength, and this took me a lot longer to come back from than I would’ve thought originally. When I first had my stroke, I was wandering around the hospital. I walked continuously in a loop, around the same floors of the hospital, because there was little else to do, and because I wanted to be with others. At one point I was trying to describe the brushstrokes of the painting that was on the wall of where I was walking to my brother. My brother stood with me for almost an hour while I tried to describe the brushstrokes. The words that came out of my mouth were one or two, but they were wrong. So, I tried again, and they were still wrong. As I said, it took me an hour to try to talk about this with my brother, but I never could describe the brushstrokes, and he never fully understood what I was saying. This lesson taught me that, although I wanted to speak, speaking was very difficult. Now as I got better, I could say a few words that made sense. However, these few words were only 3 or 4 to start with and then became 6 or 7. But if you can imagine somebody who can talk 5 or 6 words and then they’re done, the descriptions they can give you are very discreet. This discreteness was only about 9 months after my stroke.
One of the most interesting parts of my stroke was that I had three minds. The issue with a stroke is that it can change your perspective on the world around you. The first mind was a “thinking mind”, that allowed me to understand who and what I was doing at the moment. Yes, I could listen to others and understand them (hearing, some speaking, and a version of myself), I could move around or help my wife, like, setting the breakfast table for my wife and me. But, if I needed to go somewhere, like a store or to church, I was lost. I had no memories, or worse, I had no understanding of the world around me. If I had to go to Church, I could never get there and I could not find it on a map (even if I could use a computer, I couldn’t). I was focused on the Now and not the Then. Not because I wanted to be, but that was all my brain could understand. And, I could not tell someone where I went to Church and what it looked like, because these words were too complicated and I could not fathom how to say them.
My second mind was position-oriented. I could not ask it where I was, or where I could go, but this version of myself was location-centric and it could tell me a street to go drive down and then where to turn. But I had no idea of where I was going or what street I was on. This was hard because if I left my home, I was not sure I could get back. Yes, I did start driving a year after the stroke, but I had no idea what the second mind was telling me because I couldn’t figure it out. The ideas of where to go would just “pop” into my “mind” and I just followed them. The problem was, when I left home, I had to stop at places and wait, because I had no idea where I was and how to get back home, even in our “little” town. Truly, this was hard.
My third mind was for “higher level functions”, such as politics, banking, and ideas about the world around me. I could not talk to this mind at all. It gave me an understanding of what might be around me, and what the world meant to me, but it was unclear to me what this mind was doing. But because it was right all the time, I tried to understand it. But this is all I had.
This is the oddness of having a stroke. As time went on, the minds came together, and I could start to remember things again, but this took an awful long time (maybe two years, or more, and today, I am still bothered by this). Talking to yourself is pretty common in today’s world, however, if you want to talk to “one mind” versus another, most people don’t understand what this means, but I can tell you this is not only the way I felt, this is what I understood as my way of life.
Two steps forward, one step back (January 2017 – June 2018)
When I was starting to “feel better”, my neurologist, Dr. Hanley, wanted me to go for an examination. This was to be a “simple” examination for me to demonstrate my performance. This Neuropsychological Examination was set on February 22, 2017, in Ardsley NY, and I decided that I would drive to the examination by myself. It took me an hour and a half to get there and the same time to get back. The examination took about two hours. This was a very long day and a very hard day. It was hard because this part of Ardsley is three blocks from the Springbrook Parkway and hard to get to. The examination was hard and long and difficult. But the worst part of it was the drive. Remember, I could not tell where I was going and I needed my “second mind” to be right. This time it was right, and I only got lost a few times. What I got from this examination was not what I planned. The examination labeled me with “Major Neurocognitive Disorder and aphasia” from the stroke, and this would be a huge problem later on.
During my time functioning with “three” minds, I’d tried to “get better”. I was in Speech therapy two or three times a week, and I did homework every night. My dad, who picked me up and drove me down to White Plains every week, asked me what I was doing. It was really hard to talk about it. It’s not that I could not have the discussion, the problem was that I didn’t have the words to describe what I was doing or an understanding of how to frame the discussion of the tasks I needed to do. So, this made it very hard to talk about what I was doing and why. In the end, I told my dad that I just couldn’t talk this through, and he understood.
After two years of therapy, I ran into a problem. You see, my insurance changed. That is, Linda’s insurance changed and, therefore, I didn’t have Speech Therapy as part of my insurance, so, I had to drop my Speech therapy within a week. This hurt, but I had two years of therapy, and I knew that I could use other insurance that I could work with. But I was starting to talk a little, remember, this was two years after my stroke. I was hopeful, even though my therapy was canceled, I was hopeful to get more help.
Trying to Move (December 2018 – June 2019)
I had a real problem: reduced mental capability, a speech problem that you can’t say more than 1,000 words and sometimes less, and a brain that won’t function the way it’s supposed to. I could not read and I could not write at all, and I still can’t do these things, even today. After my stroke, I could not even turn on my computer for two years. So, everything I did, I had to live through. I could not gain experience theoretically, I had to live through it all.
At two years I was able to start to use my computer and work with it, just a bit. Now with my computer, I can read and write, through the use of speech programming. Using the programming, I could use the voice functions to hear text and I could speak into the system and the computer would write the words down on paper. Then I would listen and speak and listen and speak again to correct the text. Now, I know this sounds good, but can you imagine this? It took me months to get my speech to work correctly so that I could edit text. At times it would take me hours to complete a paragraph, and sometimes I got so frustrated that I had to quit and come back and finish it later. The speech that we have is different than writing. If you speak into a computer it takes most of what you say as an accurate statement. But there are times when you say something different, and that’s still in the text. This is what was hard. Understanding is simple, but writing with speech is very difficult.
Although this helped, it took a long time to only write one paragraph. Yes, this started to help me to hear, or reed, and to speak, or write, more effectively than what I was doing. Now, I know that I have written sermons before, but this is the first set of text, my first text, I have ever written through typing it into the computer, since my stroke. And, I still need to listen to it. I still can’t read all that well.
This is fighting the stroke, even though it is really hard. When I was going through my CLM (Certified Lay Minister) classes, it took me an hour to finish one simple paragraph. And, there were pages I had to finish in my books.
But, why? Why do you think I am fighting this stroke? Why do you think I care about this fight? Why do I need to fight for who I am?
Fighting Back! (June 2019)
The effect of a stroke is a total breakdown of what is you! It’s a fault in your system that directs how and what you are. And, it affects everything you do. It’s not just one thing or another, it’s everything, all of it together and it’s hard to understand one thing from another.
Remember, when I said that I had “reduced mental capability”, well, that is because I was a bit slow. I was very “slow”, it was not funny. But I was slow because my brain needed time to understand what had happened (the stroke), within my brain and to try to move past the problem and to find a better place to help me and the work I wanted to do. Think this through. God provided us with a body that can fix itself, and I understand how wonderful that is. So, over time, I have become smarter and more capable of understanding how I can share this miracle with all of you! This is why I fight the stroke. I don’t want to be “left behind”! A stroke can kill you, and mine was close. There are things I want to do in my life and I didn’t want a stroke to put me down.
As I started with my computer, reading, and writing, I also worked on other things I could read and understand. This helped me understand the world around me. I started with things like webpages, and “soft books” (books from the internet, online text like webpages, and books from Bookshare). Soon, I was reading, or listening, to lots of things on the web. And as time passed, and I was getting smarter, I didn’t want to sit at home. I wanted to work.
My speech was part of this. I was unable to say a simple word, and now I can talk. With my world understanding, I wanted to love my wife and kids, and I wanted to do something. “Work” is not just a thing for one person to do, work is a philosophy for what men are. If I cannot work, am I worth anything? What can I do? What can I strive for? Work is what I was striving for. So, here I am trying to do some work. And the stroke was holding me back from my work and from being with my wife and from being with my kids and from going to Church and from … well you can fill the rest in. So, fighting the stroke was me trying to fit into the world around me and trying to do something that matters.
I wanted to Work! (October 2019)
“Baci” Chocolates is a wonderful candy. It is a wonderful rich chocolate with hazelnuts and nougat within a delightful chocolate ball. I truly enjoy it. Within the bag each ball has a foil wrapper, and there is a printed saying within. This is the saying that I got when I opened the foil cover for my first chocolate ball:
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you have imagined.”
This reminded me of Jeremiah 29:11 saying: 11 For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. This is a wonderful saying, and it is completely right. We should understand what these sayings are telling us and why. But, do you understand what your dreams are? Do get a grip on who you are and what you need? This was me. I was frustrated with what my life was coming to, an unreal end. I could not see anything in front of me, and although these were only glimpses of where I was and what I was doing, they were real enough that I was deeply concerned. So, I wanted to move past the point of being worried, and I wanted to do something useful. But, what work could I do?
Because of my stroke, I also had health insurance for the stroke (this was through the health insurance that I thought was silly to sign up for, but I am glad I did). With part of my insurance, I joined a “career counseling” group that I hoped would help me get back into the Program Management field. I worked with a counselor for two months trying to understand what I needed to do. He helped me by setting up a school I could go to. This was a Program Management school that allowed me to understand how I was going to explore my job and to understand how demanding it was. It also helped me get a certification as a certified “Program Manager”. When we were all set, he went to get approval from his manager. He called me back and said that he couldn’t get any approval for me to attend school, and frankly, he didn’t think I could ever go to school again. The problem was that I had to submit the Neuropsychological examination to the insurance because they needed it for my insurance claim. The counselor had checked this on my record and when he and his manager saw this, I was done. But this was a year later, and my stroke was doing better and I could learn, but the insurance company would not take a risk on me. At the end of the call, he thought his boss was angry at him and that our sessions were done. So, this ended my hope for Program Management.
After this, I worked with another career counselor, this was a different set of insurance, and she was a good person. I wanted to write code that would sit on a phone, essentially a phone app. She helped me with what I needed to do to build a consulting firm that would let me build them. I worked with the SCORE (Originally SCORE was an acronym for the “Service Corps of Retired Executives.”, but today it is the largest network of mentors for small business owners in the United States.) team on how I could develop code and deploy it. And we started to work on building a business and developing new code. I worked three months on this, but nothing happened. My career counselor was cut off from me because my insurance ended quickly, and the work with the SCORE team ended as well because they did not want to work in Westchester. And, I was very confused about what I should build. So, my coding options were dissolved. Yes, I could do this again, but I don’t know what I could write and I wasn’t sure that I was ready for it.
A few weeks later, I thought that I could try to be a college teacher or professor. A good friend of mine, from Church, was really happy to help me out. He helped me to build a portfolio that was “teacher ready” and found me a few of his friends who could help me. This process took four months to complete. When I had an opportunity to talk to these people, I could feel God’s door was closing. After I sent my introductory letters out to the colleges in the area, and there were many of them and got nothing in return, I knew that these open doors were closed to me at this time.
I have had many closed doors in my life, a closed door is not a bad thing, it means you have to look differently at the market. But I have not had this many closed doors in my life. For example, I worked for months on Program Management, and nothing came of it. Writing code for phone applications didn’t pan out. Consulting work that I started, died as well. I thought that I could be a college teacher, and that door was shut. I also tried other ideas as well, and nothing happened. After all this, more than a year had gone by and I had nothing. I sat in the living room on my couch and asked my wife: “Is there nothing I can do? I have tried everything, and I can’t do anything!” This was a very hard time for me.
At this point in my life, I could understand love. I could love my wife and my kids and I understood how this worked within my life. Loving me is what my wife did, and this love kept me looking around at what I could do to help out. But I didn’t have anything I could do. “Is there nothing I can do? I have tried everything, and I can’t do anything!” This is a hard place to be.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you have imagined.” …
This was not as right as I had hoped, and actually, these dreams I had were completely wrong. So, now what?
What can I do? (November 2019 – December 2020)
As I looked at myself, I was unsure of what I could do, and looking forward through time into an unknown world was rough for me. I tried all kinds of things to work on, but nothing worked. “Is there nothing I can do? I have tried everything, and I can’t do anything!” And, I was mad. Mad at this horrible stroke. Mad at my future. Mad at my failure to understand my world and what was in it. And I was mad at the problems I was having, and I was mad at myself.
This is where I found my understanding of the Word. These doors, that could have been opened, were not for me. I needed to look somewhere else. So, as I was walking through the web, I found a BeADisciple site. This site was part of one of the email items I was getting. I saw a course on BeADisciple that was called “Evangelism for Non-Evangelists”. I thought this was a silly thing to do, but nothing else was working, so why not? I took this course. It was short and simple, but I loved it! I also found out that another member and the pastor from the UMCSO (United Methodist Church at Shrub Oak) were taking it too. This class helped me so much. It was this class that got me started in moving in the right direction.
While I was taking this class, I was still really mad. I was on the web a lot and looking at emails. I know that I can’t read and I can’t write, but I can listen, and I can listen on the web. Most people can’t read as they should, so what do they do? They go to YouTube. So, I went to YouTube and I found lots of things there. This is where I got my understanding of the New Word. YouTube had all kinds of wonderful things for me to look at. I found a Podcast from Carey Nieuwhof, who the pastor talked about with us. I started to dive in and understand what and who he was. I also found Timothy Keller, who was a Presbyterian pastor in New York (Tim Keller died a few months ago, and he is sadly missed). There are also a huge number of other preachers who were also on YouTube, and I went through many of them.
As I started to listen to some of these preachers and what they were saying, I thought of who I was and what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to work. Could church-work fill the void I have within myself? Maybe.
What is a calling? A calling comes from God, and it is particular to what we are supposed to be doing. However, a “call”, a real “call”, is to come and be part of God’s creation and to use the gifts he is giving you to attend to and to grow the world around you. Now I am a Christian, and I’ve been a Christian for many years since I was a very young child, but more importantly, since I was 13. And since I was a Christian, I always knew God was my way and the way I wanted to go. But this calling was about what to do today, and moving forward for the rest of my life. This calling was specifically about what I should do in God’s season today.
Now these thoughts were in my head for a few months before I got my calling. This was about four years ago and I had to work through what this meant for me, my family, and the people around me (wife, children, nieces, nephews, and cousins). I had to learn about what it meant to be a “pastor” and what all of the issues were around it. There was much to learn and I was not really up for it. This was all new for me and I had never done this before. So, I needed to learn what it was I could do.
As I started to look at Church-work, as a profession, I was really confused about where I was going and what I was trying to do. I am a layperson. Is that something good? Does God care about the laity? And what can I do? I can’t be a Bible teacher (in our church, there are too many other Bible teachers in our congregation), so what else can I do? With these questions in mind, I talked with our pastor and I asked what I could be within our church. She told me that she would pray on it, and I should do it as well. OK, I get that, but I prayed all the time. Does that count?
NO! I didn’t pray enough and not for the things I wanted. I needed to talk to God in a way that I understood and that I was clear on. Prayer is a wonderful opportunity to talk with God, but our prayers need to have reality in them. Prayer is who we are and what we understand and God wants to hear from us. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to get it. Think of it this way: we are not gods and we can’t be. So, if we ask for something that God doesn’t want to give us, do we want that?
Let me give you an example: if I were a little boy and I asked God for an ice cream here at home. Do you think that asking for an ice cream is good? What happens if He says “No”? What if God wanted to give me three ice-creams, but in two days? Is that good? What happens if I start to get fat because I have too many ice-creams? Do you think that God would allow me to get fat? If God is telling me to stop eating all of my ice cream, but only for a little while. Is this good? So, if I were a little boy, and I asked God for an ice cream, why do I want that ice cream, or should I wait for my ice cream in two days?
This is a choice. Can we make that choice? No. Because God is making huge choices for us with our life and not just for ice cream, He can make all kinds of choices for us and we don’t know them. Because, we are not a god, and therefore, we can’t think like one, so, do we want what we ask for? I think not. So, I needed to pray for what I was about and ask Him what He thought. I asked God for what I thought I wanted and asked what I needed and then asked Him what He wanted me to do. But God “will give me the desires of my heart” (Psalm 37:4). And so, I prayed again. Sometimes for understanding and sometimes for meaning.
Moving on. With a new sense of purpose!
As I started into God’s word, I loved it and I love what it did for others. I like what a pastor was. As I started, I understood the world around me, and I started to see the world as God was seeing it. I began to see many options that I had not seen previously, and I understood where I was. So, I started looking into it. This is when I started to comprehend why this was a really good fit for me. I started to think that, Yes, I could do this. Over the months, I started to get real confidence in what I was doing and I loved it.
I started listening to the web and I also started talking into my computer. Yes, this was reading and writing for me. I wrote several sermons and I worked on one that I heard from Timothy Keller. This was wonderful. I started to focus as I worked. I was not mad anymore. I could see what God wanted me to see.
At this point, I was ready to start. I knew who I was and what I was, and I knew that I was going to get better, someday. So, I started to ask the Lord where he wanted me to go, and what He wanted me to do. This process took me a few months, and it was so good to understand all of what I was doing. My calling was a vision in my mind. It was different from anything else that I had ever seen.
When I got my call, I was stunned! I saw it, in my head, a vision, I was sitting in the mall (the Jefferson Valley Mall, near where I live), and working with someone, whose face I could not see. I was sitting at a table and was talking to them, answering their questions or talking about the passage. I had my Bible open and it was sitting in front of me. Unfortunately, that table doesn’t exist anymore, but there I was. And we were talking, just the two of us.
This was a real calling, but when I had it, I didn’t even know what it all meant and I was unsure what I would do with it. And I was confused, thankful to the Lord always, as anyone could be, but confused. Nonetheless, I prayed “Thank you so much!” I wasn’t sure what I saw, and I analyzed it, as I used to analyze my stroke, and surprise, now the analysis was back. When I finally sat down, 5- or 6-minutes later, I started looking at what this was and I found out God wanted me to be an Evangelist. A what? Yes, an Evangelist! But nobody does Evangelism work, do they? I didn’t even know what evangelism work was. I had to look it up on Google to make sure that I understood it.
I prayed “Thank you, but please help me understand this.” I worked on this for hours. When Linda came home, I was still busy. We talked for a while and I started back on it again. That night for dinner, I told her all about it, what I saw and what I thought it meant to me. She agreed that I should go with it and that I should start looking into what this work would introduce me to. So, I did.
People around me still want to understand why I want to be an Evangelist. For years I was quiet, so quiet, and now I can’t stop talking. Today, I am eight years from my stroke, and I can now look back on it and wonder how I could have gotten through all of it.
But, isn’t that what God is for? Doesn’t God help you with the impossible things?
When I got my calling, and sat down with my wife, I had a dozen things in front of me. The first two were hard. I wanted to be someone that people could believe. I also needed a way to reach out to people. I thought that the “reach-out” was simpler, God had given me a perspective and I needed to achieve this. I knew I could start in the mall, but there were half a dozen things I needed to make the “reach-out” happen. But, how could I be someone that people could believe? This took me a while to understand. When I finally understood that I should be a CLM (Certified Lay Minister), I got it. I understood what being a CLM was but, I was unclear if I could obtain a CLM. My answer was “Yes, and here I am”.
I had to understand what being a CLM meant and also, what it meant to non-Christians. Remember, that an Evangelist is evangelizing others to come and to be Christians. People who are in the mall may not be happy with me and the evangelist work I am doing. This took me some time, and I think God is still helping me with it. This year was really difficult and frustratingly wonderful. I finished my CLM, and now I am in the mall. This is a lot of fun. I do love what I am doing and the issues that I see.
Our Lord has given me all this because I said, Yes. Now saying Yes is not an easy thing to do and you must be ready for the circumstance that comes with saying, Yes. But, when you say Yes, lots of things happen to you. I got my CLM, not by pushing for it, but by understanding that the Lord needed time to work with people and the Lord helped me to gain what I needed. I also asked for people to help me, and they did. I needed help because we were not living in a simple place. We are living in this world and it is not always fun. It’s hard! But God is here to help us, always! He gives us grace and helps us with the really hard things. And He understands who we are and understands what lies ahead for us. If we can be still and watch, we can see Him in motion. He also corrects us in the things we do, and that is good for me.
As I thought through all the extraordinary issues that I found and fought with to gain some semblance of my old life back, I can see how I, with God’s grace, struggled back from my stroke. It was through many frustrating moments that I fought, many tears, and many angry fits. I struggled and prayed through, why I could not fathom an answer to why I didn’t understand the world around me. And God showed me. He showed me that I needed to wait for my mind to come back. He showed me that I needed to understand why people, like me, needed more time to understand their world. He showed me that I needed to hear and understand what was happening to the people around me and even to me.
I want to be an Evangelist!
This is why I want to be an Evangelist. It’s all about the Good News! The Good News is not about gaining God’s grace, you already have it, you only need to make it work. And honestly, that is so simple.
What is an Evangelist? Somebody who talks to others about the Good News. This is not that hard. In God’s world, it is not hard to understand what we are to do; the hard part is doing it. Standing in a mall for two years is not so easy. Listening to people is easy, but when you have to understand why the Bible says it one way and people are thinking that the Bible should say it another way, it can be hard to explain why the Bible says it this way. It’s not what we do, it’s how we do it.
How many of you reading this would like to be an Evangelist? … not that many. Why? Is it hard to be an Evangelist? No. Then why? Being an Evangelist means that you have to be in God’s light, in a pure, unblemished light, with all of God’s people around you, all the time. So, what is God calling you to do? Let’s look at the gospel of John: Chapter 15 (John 15: 1-15):
1 “I am the true vine, (this is Jesus talking to his disciples) and my Father is the vine-grower. 2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. 9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
What is his commandment? 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
And He says 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Now I see this as Christ calling me to participate in the conversion of people. Who? By standing in a mall. Simple… right?
No, you don’t need to stand in a mall for years, but you should bring others to church. You should encourage others to be a Christian. I am an Evangelist, but maybe you don’t need to be one, you can help us to gain Christians and to help our Lord.
This is why I became an Evangelist. It’s not just standing in a mall, it’s conversing with people that matter. For me, it is finding new people to bring into our church and finding new people to get excited to be a Christian. This is what being an Evangelist means.
To be an Evangelist you only need three things: 1) full trust in God, in all of God and who He is and why He is, 2) an understanding of what He has done in your life and how faith plays a role in your life, 3) and a willingness to openly share it with others who don’t believe.
I didn’t put prayer on this list, but I think that prayer is part of your faith. Prayer is enacting your faith and putting it into the way you serve. You need to think through this list for yourself.
Do you have a realization of God? Is God in your life now, right now, and if not where is He? What does faith mean to you and why? When you enact your faith what does it mean? Faith is not something simple, it is very complex and infiltrates everything we do. Let’s look at what God has done in the Bible, for Elisha and a pore wife of a member of the company of prophets:
1 Now the wife of a member of the company of prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the LORD, but a creditor has come to take my two children as slaves.” 2 Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?” She answered, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” 3 He said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels-and not just a few. 4 Then go in, shut the door behind you and your children, and start pouring into all these vessels; when each is full, set it aside.” 5 So she left him and shut the door behind her and her children; they kept bringing vessels to her, and she kept pouring. 6 When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” But he said to her, “There are no more.” Then the oil stopped flowing. 7 She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your children can live on the rest.”
(2 Kings 4:1-7)
If you look back at my past, you can see that my stroke was put there intentionally, just like Elisha help the wife, this was God helping me through the prayers I was praying over the years of my life. I had the stroke to start me on a new path. As I was on this path, I failed to find my way. And I have to tell you that it was ugly. But the Lord let me look at the world around me and I found nothing, so when He gave me a crazy idea of being an Evangelist, I didn’t say No. Then, He formed me into what He needed.
So, yes, my stroke was intended for me and I hope I don’t have another. But, let’s look at what I got from this stroke. I love my family; they are everything to me. I have a full direction and an understanding of what God wants from me and I know how to fulfill it. No, it was not easy. It was through many frustrating moments that I fought, many tears, and many angry fits I struggled and prayed through, but He did help me and He didn’t stop me. Even though I was going in the wrong direction, he still helped me so that I could understand that this was the wrong way and then He helped me find the right way.
Several years later, from the start to where I am now, He has helped me fully. Truly, He cares, because I was “slow”, lost, confused, and simple-minded, and yet here I am, ready and able to help anyone who needs my help. Yes, the Lord cares for anyone, and especially for those who care for Him.
To finish, let me ask you this: What is Jesus’ commandment to us? And if we understand what that means, then why are we living without being Evangelicals?