Jesus

Jesus – Who He Is

Here is my favorite clip from The Chosen – a show that does a great job of depicting a biblically accurate Jesus and gives you a good idea of who He is.

This clip is the Sermon on the Mount (which starts at 10:00 in the clip if you just want to listen to His sermon).

The sermon is taken from the book of Matthew in the Bible – chapters 5-7. This is a great place for a beginner to start if you are curious about who He is. If you like that, try reading the rest of the book of Matthew – it is my favorite book in the Bible.

When thinking about why I believe in God – I just do. I believe that Jesus is God because His word is love and kindness for everyone. Another reason why I believe in Jesus is that with so much pain and suffering in the world, it is reassuring to know that one day He will come back, create all things new and set everything right.

The Healing God and The Power of Prayer – A Personal Testimony

I used to lift weights. Growing up I watched the “World’s Strongest Man” contests on ESPN and my heroes were the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronnie Coleman as well as others. Later my favorite body builder was Kai Green, my favorite strongman was Eddie Hall and my favorite CrossFit athletes were Rich Froning and Annie Thorisdottir. It is truly impressive what these athletes can do.

As an adult in the gym, even though I had an interest in body building I mainly gravitated towards powerlifting exercises. To be truthful it was just a hobby. I never competed, but the idea of lifting something very heavy was appealing to me for some reason. My favorite exercise was the deadlift. For those who aren’t into this stuff you load the barbell up with a lot of plates and pick it up off the floor. While this is a great exercise for building strength, but it puts enormous strain on your lower back.

By 2017, after about 10 years of doing this, I had severely injured my back. I had injured my back before but this time it was much worse and there was fiery pain going down one of my legs. After having an MRI, the doctor told me that I had a herniated disc in my lower back and that I would need to have surgery. Having a herniated disc means that one of the soft hockey puck shaped items in between the bones in your spine exploded and is now pressing on your nerves. During the surgery, the doctor went in and removed part of one of my discs which took the pressure off of the nerves. If all goes well this is supposed to alleviate the pain. This surgery is risky and there are several things that can go wrong. While the surgery does help people, many continue to still have pain afterwards and I was one of them. While I had pain it was not as bad as before. I was happy that I was able to walk. My wife and I were planning on starting a family so with all this taken into account I decided to give up weight lifting.

In 2020 I reinjured the disc and this time I was laid up in bed. The doctors did not want to do another surgery and I was afraid of making it worse. While waiting for it to heal on its own I was googling all kinds of things that I shouldn’t have been and I was actively thinking of worst case scenarios. As a 35 year old man with a 1 year old son and another on the way I was worried about how active and involved I was going to be in the life of my children. As anyone with infants knows it is a very intense and involved process. My wife was pregnant at the time with our second child and due to a complication in the pregnancy she couldn’t lift anything (including our son). While I was able to get out of bed I had to call my parents to come down because the amount of lifting around the house was too much for me. Lifting my son (then around 20 lbs.) was always a scare to the point that I eventually decided to lose weight. The thought I had was that as the kids got heavier I would try to drop some pounds to take the pressure off my back. I HAD to be there for them.

By mid 2021 I was fully out of bed but I was still in considerable pain. I was so terrified of making it worse that I wouldn’t bend over to pick things up, I would kneel down. A couple years later in 2023 I was still having pain but not as bad. Losing the weight seemed to be helping. Before kids I weighed around 225 lbs. and by this point I had dropped down to 180lbs. I also had a bunch of ways to lift things to try and get the pressure off my back which also helped. The kids were now bigger (3 and 4 years old), so they didn’t require to be lifted as much. The pain was more bearable and I was getting by but barely.

In the summer of 2023 we were back in church and I began learning about God again. This is something I had not done since I was in my youth. One of the things that I learned was that all things are possible through prayer and faith in Jesus. There are incredible stories in the bible of Him healing people. I used to pray as a child and I began to pray again for other people. I now keep a prayer list on my phone and pray daily. In early 2024 I decided to give it a shot for myself. I prayed that He would help me and heal my back. I did not ask to be 20 again but I asked for at least enough that I could work and be there for my kids. At least enough so that I did not walk around my house with reacher tools to pick small items up off the floor (I had 3 of these stashed around the house – it was that bad).

Within a month after that a true miracle happened and I wanted to share it here for all to see. The pain went away! I no longer had numbness in my feet, pain in my legs and fire in my back. While I am not as nimble as I was when I was 20 years old, here is a list of things that I now can do easily that I could not do before:

Bend over to pick up a napkin off the floor unassisted (without the reacher tool)
Pick up my kids (now 40-60lbs)
Go for a jog
Volunteer at Habitat for Humanity (Construction)
Lift heavy items at work (up to 75 lbs) – I now work in the restaurant industry
Curl my back up into a ball without fear of paralysis (e.g. touching your toes)

As part of saying thanks to Him for this miraculous blessing I decided to create this website to help others and I want to give all the Glory to God. As one of the most prodigal of sons it is truly a story of His love, faithfulness, and ability to forgive. As a note – while I have seen a few miracles I do not consider myself to be a profit.