Some of my strongest memories from my childhood are of hospitals, needles, pain and probably the worst of all for a young boy - the boredom of being confined to a bed. That season of my life for the most part ended when I was around 11 years old. At that age you mostly tune out what the doctors are saying with their big sounding medical words, and leave that side of it to your parents. From what has been explained to me as I got older, I do know that the start of all my problems was a diaphragmatic hernia from birth. The contents of my abdomen exited through a hole in my diaphragm and pushed up into my chest. My heart was moved over to the right-hand side, and my left lung was squished, never fully developing. Growing up, I always heard the story re-told that the doctors tried to manage expectations, estimating that I had about a 1 in 10 shot of surviving with surgery required at birth. Further complications arose. At that point in time my parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, who believe blood transfusions are sin. For me to make it into Paradise, their belief was that they had to stick to their guns. The surgery would be complex, and long. As a newborn, my available pool of life-giving blood would be small. With transfusions off the table, the odds dropped to 1 in 100. Whether this was the honest opinion of the doctors, or they were just trying pressure my parents to reconsider their firm stance, who knows? Does it really matter? What are odds to God? He is not bound by physical “facts”. The Truth was that He had plans for me that required me to live. My odds became 100 in 100.
I had surgeries at birth, 3 months old, and somewhere in the region of ages 8, 9, and 10. I’m not entirely sure of the orders and details, but I do know that everything that belonged to my abdomen was returned home, my heart was moved back over to the left-hand side, attempts were made to mitigate severe acid reflux issues, and I had a “stomach wrap” procedure, where my oesophagus was wrapped around my stomach and held in place with a latex patch. They were difficult, long surgeries (more than 10 hours each), I missed a lot of school, I had to repeat a year, I always struggled with any sort of aerobic activity, I had discomfort eating and digesting, severe acid reflux continued, and my sleep was interrupted almost hourly from a dry throat that required a drink of water for temporary relief. All in all, it was a lot, and yet not so much. Even though I was many years from being saved and at the time I was not conscious of the fact, God was with me. I believe the ones who suffered the most were actually my parents. I am only soon to be a father, and yet I am already convinced that it is much easier for a child to suffer through something, than for a parent to sit by as an observer and see their child suffer. My parents sacrificed much. We had no money, and yet we were taking flights back to the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town because that is where my surgeons were. Turns were taken with me while I lay in hospital, as my two slightly older brothers needed looking after as well. There were times that my mother had to sleep on the hospital floor, and she recalls on one occasion waking up with cockroaches on her. We had no money or medical aid so private healthcare where things are cleaner and run a little better were not an option. It was a nightmare time for them, with many testimonies sprinkled in-between, but God got us through it all, and we’ll jump ahead to God’s latest miracle! Fast forward to 19 April 2025. I had recently bought a food dehydrator, and I am happily munching away at some delicious tomahawk steak biltong, washing it down with sparkling water. Admittedly, maybe it is a bit too delicious, and I am swallowing handfuls at a time like a glutton. My stomach begins to twist into knots. After a couple of hours, the pain is getting so bad that I have to go lie down. As I get up to walk to the bed, I notice that my shirt is tight and sticking out at a weird angle. I rush to the bathroom and see in the mirror that my stomach is hard as a rock and inflated into a weird shape. Lying down doesn’t help.
Eventually it dawns on me that I need to get to the Olivedale emergency department asap. When I arrive, the pain is so bad, that they cannot get me to sit still for an x-ray nor a CT scan. As a grown adult, I just sit there writhing in pain, moaning: “ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow…” My family is now there with me. Dread has begun to set it. This nightmare feels familiar. My father hovers in the emergency room, but can’t say much. His face is ashen. I could tell that he was wrestling with some form of mild PTSD from my time in hospitals as a child, agonising over whether this current issue meant that the past was back. Within a few minutes, he has to leave because he can’t handle my cries of pain. Over the course of three hours and four different injections of pain medications, the last one being fentanyl (yes, the drug you hear America struggling with in the news!), they finally manage to get an x-ray done, confirm the problem, and stick pipes down my nasal canal to release the pressure. In the process of dehydration, the meat had shrunk to less than half its original size. I had thought, “Great, this means I can eat twice as much!”. I’ve since considered that biltong may be an idol. The shrunken, dehydrated meat had been rehydrated by my bodily fluids soon after consuming, and rapidly expanded back to its original size. It had become a sticky mass that caused a blockage in my abnormal digestive system which was severely constricted by masses of scar tissue due to my medical history. The gasses from the sparkling water hadn’t helped, adding to an already inflated stomach and causing intense pressure on all my organs. By this point I didn’t care, I could just cry for joy that we had an answer. The tubes into the stomach help relieve the pressure. Eventually the mass digests or becomes unstuck, and I feel my stomach completely deflate. The relief is immense. But it doesn’t last long. It feels like I am out of the woods, crises averted, problem solved. But the surgeon seems concerned for some reason and still wants me to go for a CT scan. So I resign myself to a night in hospital while we wait on the results. The next afternoon he arrives with the diagnoses. And it was like hearing - 25 years later - that the old, conquered Goliath had risen from the dead. The blockage was gone. But the pressure and stress inside my abdomen had re-opened a hernia. Because of the complexity and scar tissue, he would not be able to operate on it himself but would need to refer me to a specialist. My wife and I sat in stunned silence.
It didn’t take God long to fill the silence. We had recently been through the FWCOM healings and miracles course. God started reminding us of everything that we had learned about. We realised that through His grace, without our effort, God had gifted us with the faith to say that we didn’t agree with the “facts” on the surgeon’s report. We were determined that the only written words that we would agree with was the Truth in Isaiah 53:5 and 1 Peter 2:24. My favourite of the two is 1 Peter because by then it had come to pass and was now written in past tense. By whose stripes you were healed.
And still, fear started creeping in. What if God didn’t heal me, and I put my parents through all of this again, so many years later? The Word crept in. God hasn’t given me a spirit of fear. Fear crept out, and shut the door behind itself. The appointment with the specialist took over a month. In that time, my wife and I constantly encouraged each other with what God had taught us. God is not a God of sickness. He wants us well. In the FWCOM course we did an exercise called “Never have I ever…” where we arm ourselves against common lies that the enemy tries to sneak into our head. When I started to think, “Maybe God is trying to teach me something through this si…” NO. It’s the enemy that came to kill, steal and destroy. Jesus came to give life and life more abundantly. Not one person who came to Jesus while he was on earth was turned away without their healing. Who left Jesus sick because the Father wanted to teach them a ’lesson’? Then: “Well maybe God won’t heal me because I have offended Him and haven’t been a good enough believer recen…” NO. The word says that: “Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” The blood of the last Adam that brought righteousness through grace is so much more powerful than the blood of the first Adam that brought sin, sickness and death. My healing wasn’t about what I had done or not done recently. It was about what He did for me on the cross.
We were confident. I knew that God can do miracles with just a single prayer, and yet over the years God has also taken great care to reveal to me that nearly all of the most powerful, impactful prayers that have changed my life, have been offered up by others on my behalf. If I look back, the pathway on my journey with God so far is blessedly lit up with regular bright spots of intercession. So, we called out to an army. Family, friends, elders in the church, the NCCB Prayer Requests group, anyone who was willing to stand with us we asked for prayer. By the time I walked into that appointment over a month later, I was covered in prayer and ready to insist that nothing will be done without further tests. I was not about to get another surgical scar for my collection, only for the specialist to realise once inside that there was no hernia.
The surgeon that I had seen in the emergency ward had not made the appointment, but instead had given me the contact details to book. The specialist hernia surgeon had no background as to why I was there. He asked what I had been referred to him for. When I explained what had happened the month prior (and threw in that I believed I had since been healed - which he just flat out ignored), he began a very thorough medical history examination. I told him everything I knew. As I went along, and mentioned the procedures I knew of and roughly the years in which they had taken place, I could see him start to inwardly cringe. When it was his turn to talk, he took great care to set my expectations. He informed me that all the related ops but particularly the stomach wrap procedures in those days were very rudimentary and medical science had come a long way since then. The patches that they had used to hold stomach and oesophagus together were made of a material that actually fused into the flesh and organs over time, and made it very difficult to go in and repair years later. If he opened me up now, many hours of surgery would be used just to navigate past the mass of scar tissue that was there from my past procedures. He told me that this would be messy and difficult, and he was very reluctant to go in. He would only make the call for an op depending on how severe the hernia was, and if it was manageable, would advise me to rather try accepting life on medication and lifestyle changes to mitigate the symptoms instead.
He asked me where I had been admitted with the blockage and subsequently had the CT scans done. I said “Here, at Olivedale Clinic.”. He said, “Great, then I should have access to it. What’s your surname again…” After a few seconds, he had pulled up my CT scan. To my surprise, it was not a still image like an x-ray, but more like a short video. He played the video a couple of times. Then after about a 10 second pause, he leant back and said, “There’s no hernia showing on the scan for me to close”. Thank you Jesus! He had come through! I said “Oh? That’s interesting…”. Then the surgeon added a little something extra which took me by surprise – he said, “In fact, what’s strange is, I don’t see evidence of a stomach wrap on the scan either?”.
I asked him, “Oh really? So what does that mean?”. He replied, “It means you must go home. Only come back if you feel any symptoms again. There’s nothing for me to do.” I had been prepared to go through more CT scans and maybe even a scope to prove that there was nothing to be done. God, in His grace and mercy, decided that me and my family had been through enough. He also was not satisfied to just make the problem go away, but rather to do a full healing, reaching into my past and making all things new. All the glory, the honour and the praise belong to God and God only. He didn’t just give me the healing, but he even gifted me the faith to believe for it too, evidenced by everything that He had already done for me, and like stones in a sling to still a long dead giant, many memories of every time that He had already fought for me.
Romans 5:8 says that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”. For those of us who are saved, our identity is no longer sinners. The blood of the lamb has washed us clean. God has separated our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. So, if Christ was willing to go as far as to die for us - while we were still sinners… now that we are redeemed, how much more can we trust in Him for?