Nate, that sounds promising. And I certainly believe in spiritual battles. Hang tough!
If these people are encouraging you to write, don't be afraid to get ballsy and ask them for contacts or recommendations or anything that'll get your foot in the door.
These people opened huge ministry doors for me once. And things looked wide open. Then I got knocked down by a string of calamities. Three times through really freak attacks I wound up hospitalized and nearly died. This last time I felt a lump that came out of nowhere. I have some medical training, and my first thought was that I might have Lymphoma. But I was going to put off calling my doctor until the next day. .......My wife is a doctor and I didn't want to bother her after a hard day. Then I figured she'd kill me if I didn't tell her, so I showed it to her.
.......They rushed me into the hospital, and the differential diagnosis was gangrene or MERSA - that skin eating bacteria. Well, it had the markings of gangrene on the CT scan. And none of the doctors consulted felt it was anything else. .......I had emergency surgery and the wound went in 7 inches deep, cleaning out the infection, but they couldn't find any gangrene. .........The sheer timing of this I knew it was another spiritual attack, and so I was never worried. ...But had I waited another day like I had planned, they told me I would likely have gone into septic shock. .......It all worked out.
That was the latest in this constant barrage of physical calamities that has hit me these past seven years.
.........At that time, seven years ago, I was reaching tens of thousands with spiritual messages weekly. People who had worldwide ministries had asked me to join them in going to Africa, and India, where we would build schools, hospitals, orphanages.
When these doors were opening, I had a day job to support my ministry habit. Then a freak mechanical accident happened in a brand new bldg. An elevator door malfunctioned and pinned me - The sensor didn't work, and then the break release didn't work. .............The stress of dealing with liars and people who threw me under the bus caused so much stress that I went into uncontrollable arrhythmias. Finally I wound up in the hospital - and they were going to give me a medicine to speed up my heart rate - which would have killed me.
........I stopped the doctor, and showed him that if I sit up my heart rate will jump to 250 BPM. And if I tried to stand up, it jumped to 300 BPM. At which time they took away my bathroom privileges ...The cardiologist said something I have heard many times - I've never saw that before. They could neither give me drugs to slow down my rhythm or speed up my rhythm. I was so medically unstable that to do either could kill me. And so I was forced to sit still. My blood pressure kept dropping so low that they couldn't allow me to sleep, and kept shaking me awake because I would bottom out. I think my lower number was going down into the forties.
Again, I knew I wouldn't die and I had no fear of death. I knew I had a spiritual destiny from a young age. But even so, when you get hit over and over again, the emotional toll grows. And so I lost my appetite and my will to live.
Then they stabilized me. I was released from the hospital and they gave me an anti-arrhythmic drug - and I had a rare side effect from that. It caused Myesthenia Gravis symptoms - It's something like Lou Gehrig's Disease. I lost the ability to swallow and was loosing the ability to breathe. ....And when we tried to explain that maybe it was this new drug (and by now I was on home oxygen) - The cardiologist told me to double the dose. My wife said, "I'm taking you back to the hospital..." They admitted me at once after doing an O2 walk test.
But again, it wasn't the medical stuff that was killing me. It was the cruel people I was forced to deal with, because Workman's Comp didn't want to pay my medical bills, including the surgery I needed for my arm from the crush injury.
Multiple times I was getting huge medical bills, where my insurance refused to pay it because it was comp related. And comp was refusing to pay it saying I had pre-existing conditions. We were now near financial ruin and losing everything.
I could no longer work, though I had tried for six months to work with one functional arm - still waiting for comp to approve paying for my arm surgery.
Work was not making the medical accomodations - because weeks before I was forced into threatening to become a whistle blower - and threatened to expose something worse in my opinion than the IRS scandal. They had threatened to fire me, and then backed off when I threatened to go to the New York Times.
So now I'm forced to try to work in a hostile environment. I'm now on Oxygen PRN, getting arrhythmias all the time, in severe chronic pain, and I'm forced to deal with people who hate me (just a few who were covering up the injustice- but who had the power to make my life a living hell.)
They knew the elevator malfunctioned. There were witnesses. There were witnesses that the elevator inspector had found such serious problems with the elevators that they never should have opened the building. But then there were cover-ups. Records were falsified. I even showed my supervisor that the elevators still weren't working - and I proved the break and sensors didn't work. A week later they had fixed the problem, and then my supervisor had refused to help - and they sort of stone-walled.
And this was just the beginning of a period of darkness that left me completely suicidal - everything was falling apart, and things I can't even talk about here. ...My father died horrifically, and I was fighting to reconcile my two brothers to him in his last moments.
Then my beautiful young Labrador got a freak case of pancreatitis and started bleeding from the mouth, and then died within days.
Then I got these pains that were so severe that it felt like someone had put a spear through my spine, and I couldn't even describe it in words. ...But now comp wouldn't pay to get it checked out. And I didn't want to get more of these multi-thousand dollar hospital bills. It turned out that I had tumors in my spine, and I had to go through radiation until it burned my esophagus. ....For people who've had herniated discs, I've gone through that, where you double up on the floor and can't stand. ...Well, this was far worse.
I stopped every ministry I was doing. Men's ministry to men who were former victims of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Ministry to people with end stage illnesses, and crazy diseases, where in cases, I was the only person who continued to befriend these people to their dying day, because their diseases were so cruel that even their friends and families abandoned them. I even tried to do extreme home makeovers before that show started, because some of these people I was ministering to - completely crippled, were living in houses that were falling down around them. Then I was doing the ministry to the thousands, where even Jewish Rabbis in Israel were hearing my teachings, and some were keeping notes. (That's because I mostly used the Old Testament in my messages- because so many people who were hearing the messages were from other countries, and I figured that if I could use the Old Testament that Jews and Muslims could listen in without getting offended.)
Well, realizing I no longer wanted to live. And I had lost my fear of hell. I partnered with a minister whose specialty is ministerial counseling - to keep me alive until I could regain my sense of balance, because I hit that place where I didn't know if I wouldn't do something impulsively. The temptations were overwhelming during that period.
And some might remember back a few years when I butted heads with some people here on the Sci-Fi threads - and then I went into self-exile. That was during the thick of this mess.
I could go on and on - I'm convinced that Satan hit me with everything, to the point where I felt like Job. It seemed like everyone in the world had become offended with me. I often make this point, Satan killed Jobs children, destroyed his job, his home, and even made his wife give up and tell Job to go curse God and die. .........All these attacks from Satan didn't cause Job to curse God. ....Do you know what finally did him in? His spiritual friends. ...They began badgering him that he was suffering for sins, and this was his fault. ......That's when Job declared that he wished his mother had straddled the grave at his birth. And that's when Job began accusing God...
Satan's greatest tool to destroy a spiritual life is people. And when you're broken and find no comforters, but people are attacking you right and left. I understood Job.
People prayed me through. I'm no longer on the edge of death's door. I no longer have suicidal thoughts - or that loss of perspective where I didn't even care if I went to hell. I met someone who committed suicide - died - was in hell - Jesus came in and brought her out- and she was physically revived. After that I spent a year studying every NDE/Vision of people who saw hell. And I guess you could say that it scared me straight.
New ministry doors are opening up, and I've hit a new wave of spiritual warfare. But I'm more resilient. The people that believed in me still believe in me. The last thing I'm worried about is finding a publisher. Finishing the books is the battle. Keeping my eye on the prize and not giving up.
The
