My Story God's Glory: A Testimony for Anyone Who Feels Out of Chances

In 2007, I crashed on the operating table during a liver transplant. I was clinically gone for three and a half minutes before I came back. Most people would call that the worst day of their life. I call it the day I learned that God is real, Heaven is real, and prayer works, because I lived every word of that firsthand, not as a phrase I picked up somewhere.

Fourteen years later, in 2021, I faced it again. This time it was a multivisceral transplant, replacing my liver, kidney, pancreas, upper and lower intestine, and stomach in a single operation, one of the rarest surgeries performed anywhere in the country. I share both of these not as medical history, but as testimony, because I believe the details matter to anyone walking through their own impossible season right now.

What I learned the first time

Coming back after being clinically gone does something to your understanding of what is actually solid in life. I did not walk away from 2007 with a better appreciation for small things, though I have that too. I walked away with a settled certainty that God had not finished with me, because there was no medical explanation good enough to account for what happened on that table. Faith stopped being something I practiced and became something I had simply lived.

What I learned the second time

By 2021, I already knew what it meant to depend completely on God and on people I could not control or predict. What that second surgery added was a deeper patience. Recovery from a transplant that extensive does not happen on your schedule. It happens in God's timing, in small, sometimes invisible steps, and I had to learn to trust that timing even on the days nothing seemed to be moving forward at all.

Why I tell this story publicly

CBN's The 700 Club featured this journey, and since then I have shared it in churches, at men's ministry events, and at healing services, always with the same purpose. I am not interested in being admired for surviving something rare. I am interested in someone in that room recognizing their own situation in mine, whatever it is, a diagnosis, a loss, a season that feels like it has no way through, and walking away believing that God is still writing their story too.

My book, My Story God's Glory: The Story of a Walking Miracle, goes deeper into both surgeries and everything between them. Many congregations have used it alongside a message for small group discussion afterward, since it gives people something to sit with beyond the hour we spend together.

If your church, ministry, or faith based conference is looking for a testimony that is corroborated by doctors and national media, not just a story with no outside witness, I would be honored to bring this one to your congregation.