It Fell Because I Pushed It

It Fell Because I Pushed It

by Dr. Roger Youmans

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Sometimes we think that little kids don’t really know what’s going on. But frequently, in fact, usually, they know more about what’s going on… I was going to say than we do, but at least more than we think they do. I think they know more about it than we do. When I was four years old… How many here are four years old? Raise your hands if you are four years old or younger. Anybody younger than four? There’s a few. All right. When I was four years old, my dad always encouraged me to make things. And I grew up in Kansas City, and we always had some lumber lying around and some boards and nails and saw. So when I was four years old, I made a ladder. I can imagine that, two boards laid out. I put three cross pieces on it, and I nailed them myself, and I bent them over myself. And I was so proud of this ladder. I carried this ladder around, and I would lean up against the telephone pole out in the alley. I’d climb up those three steps and put my arm around the telephone pole, and I’d look all around and see how far I could see. I was so big. I’d take that ladder over and lean against the garage. I’d climb up the three steps in the garage, and my nose right against the garage.

I’d look around and see how far I could see. I was really big. But I was the youngest of six. And my big brothers and big sisters, they thought I was pretty little. They made fun of my ladder, even. They told me that they could reach higher than my ladder was tall. They were right, they could. But I didn’t pay much attention to that. We also had a trash burner in our backyard because my dad was a printer. This was made out of cement blocks. And it was maybe, oh, five or six feet square or something like that. A little low in one spot so we could dig the ashes out. It stood about four and a half, five feet tall. I found that with my ladder, I could lean against the trash burner. And I could climb up the ladder and get on top of the trash burner. Now, it didn’t have a roof over it. It was just the cement blocks going around in a square shape. And I could walk around those cement blocks and back to my ladder and get down. I was really big stuff. I had a little neighbor boy named Louis. He was a year younger than me. He’d climb up the ladder, but he was too chicken to walk around the top.

And I was showing him how to do it. And you might not believe this, but eventually I fell in. Eventually, I fell in. Now, there wasn’t a big fire going inside. It was just sort of smoking. And when I fell in, I grabbed the sides of the trash burner like this. And I held on to it. And I called, “Louis, help! Help! Louis, help! Hand me the ladder!” And as the smoke and the dust began to clear, I looked up and looking over the top of the trash burner was Louis’ face. And he just grinned at me. I said, “Louis, help! Help! Hand me the ladder!” And Louis, he just grinned at me. I said, “Louis, help!” And he grinned at me. Well, pretty soon, the top layer of tile broke loose. And I fell in the trash burner. And I sat down really hard. And those big tiles came down right on my head and broke. That is the tiles. Well, my head broke, too. And I sort of stunned. And the soot and the smoke was everywhere. And the producing began to clear up. And I stood up. And I went over to the low place in the trash burner. And I climbed out. And Louis’ big sister, Vera, worked for my dad in the print shop.

She heard all this hollering and carrying on. And she was just coming out of the back door of the print shop when I climbed out of the trash burner. And she looked at me with eyes big as saucers. You know, I was all covered with dirt and soot. I had blood running down my head. Clear streaks down my cheeks where the tears were running. I was a mess. And I said, “Vera, would you do something for me?” And she said, “Oh, yes, Roger. What do you want?” I said, “Well, Vera, when I fell in the trash burner, I got a tin can stuck on the seat of my pants. And I couldn’t get it off. I couldn’t get it loose.” And I said, “Vera, would you get this tin can off the seat of my pants?”

And she pulled the tin can off the seat of my pants, took me inside, washed my face, put some ice cubes in a wash rag to put on top of my head, cleaned me up. And it makes me think of how we come to Jesus. We’re all dirty. Our heads are bloody. We’re filthy. We need all kinds of help. And we’re worried about a tin can stuck on the seat of our pants. Now, Jesus, in His grace and in His love, He’ll pull the tin can off the seat of your pants. He loves you. He’ll do that. But at this camp, I want us to raise our level of expectation. I want us to expect more than just a tin can pulled off the seat of our pants. This week, let’s ask Jesus to make us whole. Lord Jesus, we just exalt Your name. We praise You. We love You. We lay our lives before You. And we invite You right now to anoint us with Your Holy Spirit. That our hearts will be open. That we will hear You speak to us. That we will be eager to obey. Pour out Your Spirit on me, O Lord. On each person in this room.

We’re willing, Lord. We’re open. Amen. Amen. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ.” I want to share with you tonight a little bit about what I have seen, and heard, and touched, and felt about Jesus, that we might have fellowship together. And that our fellowship would be in Jesus.

Now, behind that same trash burner, I was telling you about a minute ago, at about the same age. I can remember the time very clearly. I was about four or five years old. It was in the springtime, and I was just standing out there on a spring morning, and the wind was kind of blowing, and it blew some dust that got in my eye. As I wiped the dust out of my eye, I was suddenly aware that God wanted me to be a medical missionary. Now, I didn’t hear an audible voice, but I knew that I was to be a medical missionary. Now, that’s a little bit unusual, because I’d never met a missionary in my life. I don’t think I even knew who one was. There were no doctors in our family. I’d never met a… Well, there was probably a doctor there when I was born, but I don’t remember him. I knew nothing about medicine, missionaries, or medical missionaries. But at that moment, at age four, I knew the Lord wanted me to be a medical missionary. So I went right in the house, and I went to my mother, and I pulled her on a skirt and said, “Mom, God just told me He wants me to be a medical missionary.”

She says, “Oh, that’s fine.” Pat her in the head, went right on what she was doing, utterly unimpressed. And sometimes I think we do that with our children. God speaks to them. And when they tell us about it, we’re preoccupied with getting the roast in the oven, or planning the vacation, or doing something else like this, and we belittle the voice of God in their heart. Well, fortunately, God kept repeating Himself to me. Through my early years, when I went to high school, I was all involved in the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I grew up in the Methodist Church with the YMCA, and they had the Hi-Y program, and we had a gospel team. I went to Youth for Christ. I was involved in many Christian activities, heard many evangelical sermons, and each time that they’d give the invitation, I would respond in my heart. On several occasions, I responded outwardly. But each time, it was as a recommitment. And I always wished that I had a dramatic story about how I became a Christian, because it’d be so neat to tell folks about it. But I don’t. I just can’t remember the first time that I took Jesus as my Savior. I can tell you about a number of times where I took Him as my Savior and Lord in a recommitment.

But somewhere back in there, my first recollection is what I just shared with, by being a medical missionary. I’ve discovered there’s a lot of people like this that can’t recall a dramatic experience like Paul when he was on the road and was knocked off his horse and saw a light and heard the voice of God. That just never happened that dramatically. And you always… I always felt so like a second-class Christian, because I didn’t have this kind of experience.

But I don’t want you to have any doubt, any doubt at all in your minds of what you have taken Jesus as your Savior and your Lord. At least if you haven’t done it before, I want you to have the opportunity of doing it tonight, so you can never forget that at this camp, at this night, you know how you’re related to Jesus. I don’t want to get off on the track there too far. I was going to be a medical missionary, so I figured the best way to do that is to go to medical school. And that’s why I went to medical school. That’s why I went to college. So I go to medical school, so I become a medical missionary. And after I got out of medical school, and I was with the Methodist board and thinking about going overseas, and I knew that I’d have to do surgery, and they encouraged me to take some training in it. In surgery, they always say, you ought to see one, do one, then teach one. But that’s the way you’re supposed to learn. You need to see it first. So before I went over as a missionary with my degree from Kansas, I’d start into a five-year training program, postgraduate, in surgery.

That was a tough road to hoe. It was 100 to 120 hours a week, every week. I was married, had a couple kids. Week after week, month after month, year after year. I’d schedule time on Sundays where I could have lunch with my kids. Otherwise, you know, I’d be gone in the morning before they’d wake up. I’d come home at night, every other night. I was on call every other night, so when I’d come home, it would be late, and they’d already be in bed asleep. So once every week, I’d schedule to have lunch with them at the hospital so I could see them when they’re awake. It’s a terrible way to live.

Many, many, many of my good friends, families broke up, divorces, problems. It’s a… These are the healers that we’re training. Who will heal the healers? As they come out of medical school, out of residency programs, technically oriented and skillful, but broken, wounded people.

Well, after I’d been in my residency for a short time, about a year or so, Congo got its independence. You know where Congo is over in Africa? Right on the equator, on the west side that has a little bit that goes out through the ocean. Congo got its independence, and there was a lot of turmoil. You may remember Lumumba, and Tshombe and some of these, and there was a lot of turmoil. And most of the doctors left the country about that time. Many of the hospitals closed. And the Christian Medical Society sent out an urgent appeal for doctors to come on a short-term basis. And I knew in my heart that I was supposed to go. And I told my wife this. Now, we were poorer than church mice. We had spent everything we had. My wife worked while I got through medical school. We had borrowed a lot of money to get started in residency. We were in debt to everybody. There wasn’t any possibility of her and the family going along, so I was just going to go for six months. I didn’t think that my chief of surgery would even let me off. But I was going to ask him. Now, it may not seem like much to you, but to me, it was taking my heart and my hands to go up there to his office, professor of surgery, chairman of the department of the university, and ask him if I could have six months off to go be a missionary to Africa.

But I did it. And he says, “Yes, provided you leave your wife and kids here.” I said, “Well, you don’t plan on that. Why?” He says, “That way I’ll be sure you’ll come back.” Well, it turned out that just before we left, the week before we left, our church had a dinner for us, and they gave us a check for enough money to pay my wife and children’s transportation over there and back. And my wife, in her unenlightened faith, had just gone ahead and gotten a passport and visas and had the kids already inoculated with all the various… She just seemed to know that she was going to go along. So there wasn’t a last-minute hassle. We went over and that was my first experience with Africa. And it was beautiful. I was in a hospital where I didn’t know any tropical medicine. Couldn’t speak French and French is the official language. There was one male nurse that could speak English and he just plugged me in where I was supposed to go for six months. We ministered there and came back and finished my residency and took the boards and took missionary orientation at Stony Point for six months and a year in Belgium studying French and tropical medicine. Then back down to Congo again.

Way out in the sticks, a place called Wembo-Nyama. That was kind of a wilderness experience. I thought I was going to go to a teaching hospital. I mean, here I was, a fully certified surgeon and stick me way out there where I didn’t have enough medicine to work with and so on, but that’s the way it was until the rebels overran that station. We had kind of a hard time before they overran it. Actually, every year there would be a rebellion up in Stanleyville. Maybe you don’t even remember that, but there used to be a rebellion every year where the soldiers from Katanga would get tired of being in the army without being paid and they would rebel and would go home. And unfortunately, the road that led from Stanleyville back down to Katanga went just a few miles from Wembo-Nyama. So every summer when there was trouble at Stanleyville, the Congo army would come by and take our vehicles, take our radios, and just leave us there stranded. And this happened to be the mission station where just before we came they killed a missionary. Burleigh Law, maybe some of you might have heard of him. They shot him. He died on the operating table there at Wembo-Nyama just before I got there.

So we were a little anxious every time they would cut off our communications because you’d never know when the next jeep that pulled down the road just might be the rebels. And you never knew what was coming. We had a system worked out with the Missionary Aviation Fellowship that if the upstairs window, shutters, when the upstairs window were closed, that meant the rebels that had already come don’t land. Whereas when we’d hear the missionary aviation plane coming, we would go upstairs and open the shutters and they would know everything was all right and they could land. It got to be kind of a joke because we’d forget to open them sometimes and we didn’t want to leave them open and we’d run clear across the compound sometimes when we hear the plane. It would circle maybe ten minutes while we got up there to open up the shutters so they’d know they could land. But in any case, they finally closed that station because of the activity and this was in 77. And they advised all missionaries and families that could to go home. We were under house arrest for a while down in Kinshasa at that time and so I really felt a tremendous sense of relief as I saw my family, by this time I had four kids, get on Pan Am and saw the plane take off.

I just felt like they were home already. What a relief. Then I went back up to Loggia where we had our annual conference and decided that at that time we would not reopen Wembo and Yama and they sent me down to a missionary nursing school where they didn’t have a hospital and the school wasn’t in session and I got sick and I kept thinking about my beautiful wife and the kids back in the states. Didn’t have any money at all and I thought that probably some neighbors or some friends would help her out and the more I got to thinking about my beautiful wife and neighbors helping her out the more uneasy I got. And the Lord really clarified for me where my primary responsibility and loyalty lay. There is no higher human commitment than to one’s family and one’s wife. Organizations are great. Other things are important but your commitment to your wife and your children is the highest human commitment you have. Make no mistake about it. No matter what the pressures, the conflicts, that’s where it is. So I talked to the other missionaries and the bishop after I’d been there for two months and hadn’t done any work and didn’t know where my family was and had malaria and all the rest of this and I told them I thought the Lord wanted me to go home.

I felt in a very real sense that I was a missionary failure. That I was a dropout. That hurt my pride, my ego terribly. There comes a time in a man’s life where he makes the decisions. You can’t have it all. Let me urge you to pray carefully about decisions and don’t ever sacrifice people and human relationships for organizations and institutions. Keep your priorities straight. Jesus died for people, not for organizations. In fact, people should be willing to lay down their lives, Jesus said, for each other, and Christian organizations should be willing to lay down their corporate lives for God’s people. Well, in any case, we were back in Kansas and the Lord provided me a job on the faculty at the University of Kansas School of Medicine teaching surgery and directing the emergency service. I was doing that for three years. Got a call back from Zaire. Now, they changed the name. It’s now called Zaire. And President Mobutu was organizing a new group called Fonds Medical de la Coordination. The abbreviated to be Fomeco. And it was to undertake the urgent medical needs there in Zaire because they were terrible. And they asked me to come to be the medical director of Fomeco and the chief of staff of this big Kinshasa General Hospital.

1,700 beds. It was a little bigger than this room. It was a big place. It was a big place. And I was also supposed to be chief of surgery. And they promised that they’d have 15 or 20 other doctors to work with me. Now, I’d been to Africa before and they didn’t fool me. There wasn’t going to be another 15 or 20 doctors there. They said they’re going to have a home for us with a swimming pool and all kinds of stuff. But I would anyway. I thought maybe there’ll be five doctors. And if I’ve got five doctors to work with, we’ll give it a whirl. I was one of these old Ironmen, you know, I can do anything still. So we went back over and the hospital was a disaster. Piles of garbage in the corridors. Flies every place. The water hydrants didn’t have handles on it. The nurses carried them in their pockets. And for a small fee, they could turn on some water for a patient. You had to bribe the guards to even get inside the hospital. The food service that was supposed to take food to the patients, the food was consumed before it got to the patient. The surgical ward that I took over as my own responsibility directly of 100 patients, there were 100 patients there with us running out of their surgical wounds.

They locked the emergency room door every night at sundown. The next morning, about 6, they would open the door to see if there were any emergencies. I thought, this is terrible. So the first night, it had to be my birthday, the first night, 1970, when we took over this hospital, I spent the whole night myself in the emergency room to make sure we kept the door open. That’s when I discovered that we didn’t have any stethoscopes in the emergency room, no thermometers, no blood pressure cuffs, no tetanus toxoid, no penicillin, no sterile syringes, no needle, no nothing.

Now, how can you practice medicine and surgery in a situation like this? In the biggest hospital for a couple thousand miles in all directions. The main hospital in a city of 2 million people, the capital of Zaire. How can you practice medicine like this? So the next morning, I went around and I was getting equipment supplies for that emergency room and some of the wiser, older heads there said, “Dr. Youmans, if you put those things in the emergency room, they’re going to get stolen.” I said, “I don’t care. We’ve got to have them.” So we put them there. They got stolen. So we bought some more, put them there, and they got stolen. Then I found out that these nurses hadn’t been paid a regular salary, some of them, for over a year. And they had kids to take care of. To close, to send to school. And how’d they do it? Oh, they’d have a little clinic out in the city. And how would they outfit that little clinic? They would borrow things from the hospital in lieu of not having had a salary for so long. They weren’t stealing them. They weren’t getting any money. They had to make a living, so they’d borrow these things to use in a little clinic. And as soon as we began to pay regular salaries to the nurses, then the stealing dropped way down to about like it is in hospitals in this country.

And that’s still a problem. People are people. So we started paying regular salaries. We started taking care of the patients. The doctors used to come, the full-time staff doctors, come about 11:30 in the morning and stay till about 12:30 or 1 o’clock. Then they’d leave. So the nurses would come about 11 o’clock in the morning and stay till about 1:30 or 2. So the nurses’ aides would come about 10:30 in the morning and stay till about 2. And the rest of the day, there were the fetus owls and the voetus owls. These are the cleaning people with one nurse’s assistant to look after this whole 1,700-bed hospital. As soon as we started getting the doctors there on time and had them spend a full day there, then the nurses would stay. And so the whole thing began to improve. And patient care improved. And as patient care improved, more patients came to us.

Like he said and introduced him, pretty soon we had 250 patients every night in that emergency room. That is a load. Now we recruited more doctors. We had 20 doctors and 30 doctors. Eventually we had 100 doctors. Mobutu was good to his word. He provided us with lavish funds in terms of an African-developing country. Not very good in terms of what we think of for a hospital that size. And he gave us authority that we could… We couldn’t exactly fire people that we thought were incompetent, but we could transfer them to other hospitals. And since we were the only hospital that was paying salaries regularly, everybody wanted to work for us. So we were able to establish some discipline. The patient care got better. More patients came. The harder we worked, the behinder we got. The outpatient department, we had to develop that. The Lord gave me a little scheme for that. 16 questions. Such as, do you have a headache? And then with that, have you had it more than 48 hours? Yes or no? Have you been vomiting? Diarrhea? Stomach pain? So 16 questions and yes or no answers. And we taught the nurses’ aides to ask in the native language of the people that came to the outpatient clinic these 16 questions and mark them.

Then we had a color code of the five most common syndromes in Kinshasa. Malaria, intestinal worms and so on. And the nurse would answer these questions, compare it with the color code and if it matched any one of the syndromes, they had prepackaged medicine there, they’d hand the patient the medicine and tell them how to take it. 55% of our patients were taken care of satisfactorily on this basis. If it didn’t match a code or if they came back to the next thing and weren’t better, they immediately moved to the second layer of triage and they got to see a nurse. And that took care of another 30%. Maybe even 35%. And if that didn’t resolve it, then they got to see the doctor. That way, the doctor only saw maybe 10 or 15% of the patients. Now, 10 or 15% of 3,500 is still a back-breaking load. But we could handle that or we did handle it at least with only having two and sometimes three doctors in the outpatient area because we were stretched off a fin. That 130 to 140 babies born every day, that’s no exaggeration. That’s no joke. Just the logistics of keeping the babies marked and identified with their mother is a major problem. That’s a bunch of babies every day.

You should have seen it in the morning. We had a big room, about half this size, where women that came in after dark would stay until the next morning. Then we got some patients out of the obstetrical ward the next morning, then they could move into the beds that the others had just left. So every morning there’d be about 60 or 70 women carrying their newborn babies in one arm, carrying all of their belongings, which would be usually a big dishpan filled with things on their head, and their chart in their arm, and they would march with a national flag carried in front of them by one of the uniformed guards of the hospital, marching through the corridors to where they were going to stay for the next three or four days until the umbilicus would dry on the baby and they’d go home. Those folks are something else. They’re tough. Found out we didn’t even have an autoclave to sterilize instruments in the operating room. That’s why we had all those infections. They were using dry heat. I don’t have any hospital that does that. Hasn’t done it for 30, 40 years, I don’t think. So we got some autoclaves and our infection rate began to drop and so on, and we got more doctors and they had special equipment they wanted and so on and so forth.

I’ll tell you all of this that just sort of gives you a flavor that I was working. I was supposed to be the go-between for all these doctors and what they would need. It would take us weeks, months, to get supplies from overseas through customs and up to our depot. They’ll do a depot for it. And we always run out of penicillin or run out of this or we got a blood gas analyzer then we had to have certain parts that were broken on roots then we had to have a technician that could repair it and by the time we got it all together the doctor that wanted the blood gas analyzer had gotten discouraged and quit and gone home and the next guy didn’t think that was worthwhile anyway. I had frustration piled on frustration. Everybody was mad at me all the time. So I got sick. That’s what you do when you get sick. Well, it gets bad enough you get sick. Praise the Lord for sickness. It’s one of the ways that He allows us to escape the pressures and get a brief respite. I got sick. I got lobar pneumonia. I got amoebiasis, amoebas in the intestine, and malaria, all three at the same time and I was really sick. And about this time I was aware of something new had happened to my wife.

She was happy. Now, in the midst of all of this, for her to be happy, to get up in the morning to fix breakfast for me, which she didn’t do very often before that, to not complain about cleaning the house, something was new about her. And one day as I was feeling a little better, she said, “Roger, you ought to come out to this church and hear this American preacher. He’s preaching in English.” Now, everything was being done in French. That was the hardest part of all for me. I never studied French in high school or college. What French I learned, I learned in Belgium and people used to ridicule me about my French. I tell you, it was a struggle going to all these meetings in French and meeting with the government officials and the university people and so on. We were trying to make a teaching hospital out of this Kinshasa General Hospital to go along with University of Zaire Medical School. But they made fun of my French and I was… Well, anyway, I wanted to hear somebody preach in English. So I went with her. She told me that she had seen poor, unschooled, sick, black Africans come before the Lord and receive wholeness and joy and health. And I thought about the $30 million a year we were spending, the 100 doctors we had recruited, and all the foreign nurses, and all the hard work, and if we could just double the number of foreign personnel and have about three times as much money to work with and give us a generation, we could probably get this hospital up to the level of Harbor General or Bellevue or Cook County or Charity of New Orleans.

I mean, think about it, that’s not too much to ask. They got big problems in those hospitals. I thought, God, there must be a better way. There must be a better way for men to be made whole than what I had been a part of and what I had seen going on. So I went to this church. It was just like a big barn. About 800 people packed in it. They treated us like VIP and brought us right up the front and set us down in front of everybody else and some other missionaries there and these noisy people gonging and ringing bells and all kinds of stuff. And the preacher preached a very simple, straightforward sermon. He said, “You have to admit you’ve got a problem. No sense talking about a Savior if you can handle it by yourself. You don’t need a Savior. You’ve got to admit that you can’t handle it by yourself.” Now, I didn’t have any trouble with that, man. I knew I was over my head.

And you folks know you are too. You know what your problems are. Admit you’ve got a problem. But then you’ve got to believe. Believe. Believe that Jesus can meet that problem. He can solve it. I believe. I believe that Jesus can solve any problem. But that’s not enough. Because even the devils believe and they tremble. You’ve got to make a commitment. A wholehearted, 100% commitment to Jesus. Throw your whole weight on Him. You’ve got to make a confession of where you stand. You’ve got to make it outward. Lord, I’ve done that before too. Then he said, “Is there anybody here who doesn’t know how they stand with Jesus? Anybody here who knows they’ve got a problem and believes Jesus can meet it but has never made that commitment? Just come on forward.” And about 50, 60 people came forward and they prayed together. They didn’t quit. He then started talking about the early disciples and how Peter preached and 3,000 people were converted. How they saw the lame man and they just spoke the word. “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give unto thee. In the name of Jesus Christ rise up and walk.” And he got up and walked. And he said, “Is there anybody here who needs that kind of power?”

Like the apostles had? Like the early church had? Anybody need that power? And there in front of God and 800 black Africans, I raised my hand. “It’s me, Lord.” And there was about another hundred or so people that did it too. And this American preacher whose name I don’t recall and doesn’t really make any difference came over to me and he laid his hands on me and he prayed for me that I would receive the power and the fullness of the Holy Spirit. And I swear to God a miracle happened right then.

I experienced a peace. Deep down peace. That I hadn’t known. And joy? It just bubbled out. I couldn’t keep it in. I was laughing and singing and praising and, of course, everybody else was too, I guess. But I just never felt this before. Fantastic! But, you know, I’d had religious experiences before. I had emotional highs and I was sure this would wear off.

But this was an emotional experience that flowed out of a spiritual reality. It wasn’t an emotional experience trying to create a spiritual reality. God had touched me with His Holy Spirit and the emotional high got better and better week after week. For two months I wouldn’t tell any of my colleagues at the hospital what had happened to me. They’d see me walking around with a silly grin on my face. And they’d say, “Dr. Youmans, what’s happened to you? Something’s different.” I’d say, “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

Finally, I did confess that I said, well, yeah, I guess something really did about two months ago, you know. I’ve been this way ever since when God reached out His hand and touched me with His Holy Spirit that day. But I noticed something else really even more important than this. More important than the peace and the joy. I discovered I could pronounce the name of Jesus with conviction and with power. Up to this time, I could count on the fingers of my hands the number of people who had taken Jesus as their Savior in my presence in my whole missionary career.

But after this, to my astonishment, I found that when I talked about Jesus, people would accept Him as their Savior by tens and twenties. Fantastic! I used to be able to talk about God, the Creator, the Father of all. Talk about the Father. But somehow, Jesus just seemed too provincial, too narrow. And I had a hard time talking about Jesus. Well, I could talk about the Savior a little bit and Christ, but Jesus was just too… I was suddenly free. I could pronounce the name of Jesus morning, noon, and night.

Well, I think those are a couple of the marks of the reality, the authentic experience of the Holy Spirit moving in the believer’s life. But now I just have to tell you a few more things. Because this was just the beginning. A short time after this happened, I got a phone call one night from Randy. And Randy said, “Dr. Youmans, I got these terrible headaches. They come all of a sudden and they just last a little while and then they go away. And they’re just on one side.” And I asked him what he was doing to make them better or worse. He said, “Well, I find that if I chew onions on one side of my mouth it makes these headaches come.” And it sounded to me like he was talking about tic dolorosa, or trigeminal neuralgia. Now, that’s not in the field of a general surgeon, but I’ve seen a few of these in the past, and about half of them that I had seen was due to a brain tumor. And the other half they never did find out what it was due to. But the pain was so severe, so excruciating, that people’s lives would just begin to revolve around the fear of this pain coming. If you can imagine, you don’t know when it’s going to come, and it’s going to come like this, just shooting down your face, just horrible.

Then it goes away. And then you wonder, when’s it going to come again? Maybe it’ll come in five minutes, maybe 30 minutes. And I’ve seen people’s personalities just disintegrate in the presence of this fear of this terrible pain. Well, in any cases, he was telling me this. I thought, that’s a bad sign. So I suggested to Randy that he go see our neurosurgeon. By this time, we had a neurosurgeon on our staff. We got things cleaned up. We had things running pretty well. We were a university-related teaching hospital by this time with medical students and residents and so on.

And so the next day, Randy went to see the neurosurgeon. That night, he called me again. He said, “Dr. Youmans, don’t know what to do. I saw the neurosurgeon. He said this was ticked over the roof, probably due to a brain tumor. I need to go back to Switzerland.” He was from Switzerland. “And have an operation for it. And I told him that I was going on vacation in just a couple weeks, just a couple days for a couple weeks. And asked him if I could do that with my family since I didn’t know what would happen afterwards. And he said it wouldn’t make any difference. So I’m going to go on vacation. He gave me some medication. I’ve been taking the medication, Dr. Youmans. The headaches are getting worse. I feel sick to my stomach. I’m weaker. I don’t know what to do. What should I do?”

Now I thought about my professional relationship. You know, he wasn’t my patient. And Dr. Grunbeck, who was a neurosurgeon, was my colleague that I had brought down here to take care of these kinds of problems. Now, how do… what do I say or do when this Christian brother is reaching out asking me what to do?

When all else fails, or sooner, pray. Pray. But I was kind of new in this, and I didn’t want him to know what I was doing, so I prayed silently. Maybe some of you do that occasionally. I said, “Lord, what shall I tell him?” And the Lord said to me, “Send him back to see Dr. Grunbeck.” Wow! I thought the Lord was going to ask me to do something fanatical.

I just sent him back to Dr. Grunbeck. So I told Randy this, and so he went back the next morning, came by my office at noon, and said, “Dr. Youmans, would it be better for me to come by your place tonight or do you want to come by my place?” I thought, wait a minute. Sometimes I forget what patients say to me or what I say to them at night on the telephone. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Pride’s big. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. So I said, “Well, Randy, which do you think would be better?” Hoping he would give me a clue, and he did. It turns out that his wife had been talking to the wife of a German who my wife and I had gone with and gone to and prayed with for a real bad case of malaria just a week or so before, and this German went and got well real quick. And Randy’s wife thought that if I would go pray with him, he’d get well. Well, if somebody asked you to pray, what can you say? Well, sure, I’ll go. I knew I had a board of directors meeting with Fomeco that night. I knew I promised to take the kids out to dinner that night, but I thought, well, if we go at 6 o’clock, he lived about 15 miles from us.

If I go over to his house about 6 o’clock, I can pray with him. I can then leave early, quickly, take the kids to dinner, get them back home and get the board of directors meeting. So we left it that way, and after Randy left, I got scared. What would I pray? Would I pray that Randy’s wife would be brave as a widow? That she wouldn’t resent God taking her husband? Would I pray for the little orphan kids, that they wouldn’t grow up with bitterness filling their hearts against Jesus? Would I pray that Randy would be made well? And then what would I say to the widow when he died?

I was really in a dilemma. And the Lord showed me that when you have a problem like this, all else fails, or sooner, read the scripture. Sure enough, in James chapter 5, we heard the verse last night, “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick and the Lord shall raise him up. And if he has committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.” I said, “Okay, Lord, I don’t understand a lot of this, but I do believe the Bible. And I know You’re able. If the Bible says to do this and Randy asked me to do it, I’ll do it.” Went home and told my wife about it and she had a verse from John 16, 24. Here’s before you’ve asked nothing in My name, ask and ye shall receive. And that’s powerful. Now we had another lady living in the house with us, Suzanne. Now Suzanne’s an interesting person. She, black woman, grew up in Jersey City. Her father was a communist boss and when Khrushchev was here some 15, 20 years ago, he was so impressed with her father and the work he was doing that he gave Suzanne a scholarship to go to Moscow to study nursing.

So when she was 14 years old, she went to Moscow, studied nursing, met a Zairean law student, they got married, went back to Kinshasa in Africa, had some children. He started running around with other women. We tried to bring some women home to live in the house with him. His wife objected, Suzanne objected, so he kicked her out of the house. And women don’t have many rights in Zaire, and foreign women especially, so she had no place to go, nowhere to turn. She came to the church. The pastor wasn’t there that night. My wife was. She talked with her. She recommitted her life to Jesus and moved in the house with us, filled with the Holy Spirit and just praised the Lord and she wanted to go with us.

Now, Suzanne needs a whole book. But the verse that the Lord gave her to share with Randy was from the 11th chapter of John, verse 4, where Jesus was told that Lazarus was sick and He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but that the Son of God may be glorified.”

Wow. Well, that night we all got in our little Mazda, all seven of us, my four kids, my wife and I and Suzanne, and we drove the 15 miles over to Randy’s house and as I got out of the car and started up the steps, my daughter shouted out encouragement to me. “Don’t stay too long, Daddy!”

Rang the doorbell and the dog started barking. They lived on the second floor in a flat. Almost took my leg off as we went in. They lived in just one big room that was sort of semi-divided with a kitchen in one corner and Randy’s wife was there frying some stuff for supper. The other corner had the kitchen table and the other half of the room had some overstuffed chairs. In the middle of the room, our youngest baby was lying about a year old and his diapers were full and the characteristic odor filled the whole room. And about that time, his other son, who was about three, had just been disciplined and came walking through the room screaming bloody murder. And then Randy walked in and in this spiritually charged atmosphere, we began to minister. No candles, no dim lights. I guess I was kind of embarrassed, so I just jumped in with both feet and I said, “Randy, you invite us to come here and pray with you.” So I read in the scripture about what it says about anointing with oil and praying and then invited my wife to share her verse and Suzanne shared hers and then I said, “Randy, you got some oil?” He looked at me, walked over to the kitchen where his wife was working and poured a little less than oil in the cup and brought it over to me.

I said, “Sit down now in this chair and we’ll pray for you.” And he did. I knelt down around by the chair and Suzanne, my wife knelt down and for the first time in my life, I took the oil in simple obedience to the scripture and I anointed him and claimed his healing in the name of Jesus. My wife prayed and claimed his healing in Jesus’ name. Suzanne prayed and claimed his healing in Jesus’ name.

Then, I don’t understand this, but the Lord just spoke to me and I said, “Randy, would you thank Jesus?” And he did. Now, Randy, although he was a Christian, he was pretty taciturn. He wasn’t given to much conversation about religion. And when he thanked Jesus for healing, that surprised me. That surprised me that I asked him. But then we stood up. No lightning, no thunder. Stood up. And Randy looked at me and said, “Dr. Youmans, how can you be a doctor and believe all this stuff?”

I imagine I blushed. And I said, “Well, Randy, I don’t have it all together in my head. I don’t understand it all. I do know one thing, and that is obedience. And you ask us to come pray. And the scripture says to pray this way. And so I’m just obeying.” And then he talked about how in Switzerland, people that had any education never went to church. The church was for the ignorant, the illiterate. And we shared a little bit about that. And then I saw my daughter at the window waving at me to hurry up. So we excused ourselves. And the next morning, early, Randy and his family went on vacation. I was really feeling scared. I was really under attack about what to do next. And I was part of a men’s prayer fellowship. So I went to this prayer fellowship on Wednesday night, and I just poured it all out on these men. There was a colonel from the Air Force that was there, and a major, and there was a sergeant, and I think there was a private. There were a couple other missionaries. There were a couple of businessmen. And a number of these men had just come to know Jesus just recently. It was an exciting prayer fellowship. You know, this is an essential part of the Christian walk.

You’ve got to be a part of an intimate fellowship of other believers to keep you straight, to support you, to help you. If you’re not a part of one, you must become a part. It’s a balance. It’s a strength. So I shared this all with them, and bless their hearts. They said I’ve done the right thing, and they encouraged me, and we prayed for Randy. By the next week, I was feeling discouraged again, so I told them so, and they prayed again. And I was thinking that, you know, what was President Mobutu think or say if he found out that his chief of staff and medical director there at this hospital was anointing patients with oil?

Don’t be afraid of what men can say and do. Keep your eyes upon the people you’re ministering wholeness to, and not upon what people will say in criticism against you. Too long, I’ve been more concerned about my reputation and my relationship with my peers, and not adequately concerned with my patient.

So a few days later, Randy came back from vacation. He called me on the phone. He said, “Dr. Youmans…” He was obviously upset. He said, “Dr. Youmans, after I went on vacation, I wasn’t having much trouble, so I cut my medicine back to about half and still wasn’t having trouble. So I cut it back to a fourth. I still wasn’t having trouble, so I quit taking it all together. And Dr. Youmans, I haven’t had a headache since that night you prayed for me, and I’m scared they’re going to come back. What shall I do?”

I was stunned, and I was ecstatic. What an incredible coincidence. That at… At the precise moment when we prayed and anointed him with oil, he had a spontaneous remission. There wasn’t any coincidence. It was the hand of God. So I said, “Well, Randy, go back and see Dr. Grunbeck and get those tests run.” So he did. And Dr. Grunbeck did all the tests and x-rays. He said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong here. We must have missed the diagnosis. You can’t quit with us, doctors.”

If it’s not a spontaneous remission, we’ll call it a misdiagnosis. But God looks at it, and He calls it a miracle. He calls it love in action. He wants us to be whole. He wants us to have the courage to ask. And let me ask right now, what time am I supposed to be through? Can I go a little further? Okay. Because there’s a couple other important points. I’ve covered a lot of things that are extremely important to me, and I don’t want to give you indigestion. I don’t care whether you intellectually understand this or not, or whether you get the main points of what I’m trying to say. But I want you to know that there is nothing illogical or unscientific about the way God runs His universe. The problem is in our heads. There’s nothing unscientific or illogical about the way God heals people on a biblical basis. It’s our problem. And I want you to know that and believe that if you forget everything else.

I had to revise a lot of my understanding of health and wholeness. You know, the Anglo-Saxon word hal, H-A-L, is the root word for three words in our English language today. It’s the root word for whole, it’s the root word for health, and it’s the root word for holy. Put those three together. Whole, health, and holy. I think our ancestors knew something about health that we have forgotten as we separate holiness off for the church, and health off for the doctor, and wholeness is where they’re going to try to talk to each other. Now, they belong together. And I had to have a new definition of what health really was. What is health? You think about it just a minute. Is that the average? Well, if it’s the average, then it’s healthy in Zaire to have malaria, because nearly everybody does. Is health just an average? In this country, it’s healthier than to be fat, because almost everybody is. You know, 40% of the dogs in this country are overweight.

Yeah. And a higher percentage than that are the dogs’ masters and mistresses that are overweight, too. Now, an average isn’t the definition of health. Is it the absence of pain? Well, if you’ve got leprosy, you can’t feel pain in your fingers, or your toes, and that’s why you lose them. Because you burn, you stub them, you break them open, and you lose them, because you can’t feel the pain in them. You can have syringomyelia and not feel pain. And you’re sick. Now, absence of pain is not a sign of health and wholeness, because if you touch a hot stove, you need to have pain in order to get your hand off of it. Let me give you a definition of health that will apply across the board from the microbiologist to the saints of Christianity. Health is that relationship between an organism and its environment that enables that organism to fulfill its purpose. That’s all. It’s the relationship between an organism and its environment that enables that organism to fulfill its purpose, and to fulfill it effectively.

Now, let me just mention it’s a relationship. It is not a static thing that you achieve. It’s a relationship. Let’s take, for example, the little bacteria, the tuberculosis bacillus, Koch bacillus. When this little bacteria is on a culture plate that is warm and moist with nutrients that it needs, or if it’s in your lung, where it’s warm and moist and has the nutrients it needs, the healthy condition for this organism is to be dividing rapidly, metabolizing rapidly, reproducing, and growing. Now, when this little organism comes out with some spit or blood and gets on a cement sidewalk where it’s hot and dry and there’s no nutrition, if this organism continues to divide and metabolize rapidly, it will die very quickly. But the Koch bacillus doesn’t do that. It forms a little cyst around itself and becomes almost as though it were dead. It does not metabolize hardly at all. And it sits there, that little cyst around it, protecting it from the heat and the dryness for days and for weeks. And if it happens then to get in a warm, moist environment again, then it’ll start multiplying. It’s a relationship what is healthy for that bacillus. In one circumstance, it’s healthy for it to be metabolizing, and in another, it’s to be defensive. Health is a relationship.

And it’s a relationship between an organism and its environment. And if your environment is spiritual, as we know it is, health has to involve your spiritual relationships. And God, being a spirit, is the most important aspect in our environment with which to be related. You can’t talk about people being healthy apart from their relationship with God.

Now, I said it achieves its purpose. And biologically, we think that the purpose of an organism is to metabolize and to reproduce. We don’t think that’s the purpose of a human being. Your purpose isn’t just to eat as much as you can, metabolize as fast as you can, or reproduce as fast as you can. No. No. What is your purpose? Think about that a little bit. What on earth are you doing for heaven’s sake?

The Bible is very clear about the purpose of man. It’s to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. And you can put that in lots of different phrases or different ways of looking. It’s to praise Him, but it’s to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Even for Methodists, we’ll buy that.

So, for you or me to be healthy, we need to be in a state of relationship with our environment, the most important part of which is spiritual and God, in such a way that we glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Now, whatever contributes to that is health. Whatever detracts from it is sick. Now, I won’t press that too far right now, but I’ll come back to that definition a number of times in the future, and you think about it and apply it, that this is where real health and wholeness lies. Now, let me just review a minute. I want you to raise your level of expectations. If you wanted to pull the tin can off the seat of your pants, that’s okay. You’ll do that. But ask for something more.

Be willing to admit that you have needs that you cannot handle by yourself, and believe that Jesus can meet that need. Then make a commitment to Him. If you’ve never done it before, do it tonight. Commit everything you have, you never hoped to be, to Jesus.

Ask for the Holy Spirit to give you life and joy and power in your life. Be a part of a fellowship of those who believe in Jesus and are committed to Him as it’s recorded in the Bible to keep us balanced.

And all of this requires the action of your will. This is probably the greatest lesson I learned from my African brothers. That if I take a pin, and I set it here on the table, and I push it, and it falls, I say, “Why did that pin fall?” My Western mind would say, “The center of gravity got beyond the fulcrum of support, and so it fell.” That possibility would not occur to the African mind. They would say it fell because I pushed it.

They would say it fell because I wanted it to fall. They see reality in terms of the will. There is an enormous truth in this that I want you to receive from the Lord. It’s the will. Will you be whole?

Will you be well? Will you make a commitment to Jesus tonight? Let’s pray. Let’s stand and pray. Let’s all stand. And let’s pray together. Now this is so important. Some of you, most of you, have made a commitment to Jesus without reservation before. Some of you have not.

If you have never made a commitment to Jesus, but you will be made whole, make that commitment right now in praying with me. Let’s pray. And you repeat after me. Almighty God, Almighty God, I confess that I am a sinner.

I am lost. And I need a Savior. I believe that You, Jesus, can save me from all my sins and problems. And I commit myself to You without reservation now. Thank You, Jesus. Hallelujah. Thank You, Lord. Thank You, Jesus.