Testimony 6: 1988: God Gives Good Gifts
Our fourth child, Patrick, was born in March. He had all the normal tests and appeared fine. In July of that year, on the eve of our huge holiday trip, we heard from the New Jersey Health Department that his test for galactosemia showed that Patrick was at high risk of brain degeneration leading to mental retardation; he should be checked immediately and we should be ready to take him to hospital at a moment's notice. Our station wagon was all packed. We were planning to leave at 2:30 the next morning and drive to Rhode Island to house-sit for a lady who was flying to Europe. This had all been planned for months. What should we do?
We called our local doctor who was away. We called the local hospital who immediately went into great lengths about stuff we should do over the next few days, at huge expense. Clearly they were telling us to do every possible thing, so that if a problem arose and we sued them they would be covered. We had no idea where to go for practical advice as we were many thousands of kilometres from our own Australian network of friends who included doctors, midwives and nurses. Meanwhile, we were aware that our Lord had been teaching us to trust Him in all circumstances.
So we prayed. Lord? Is Patrick at risk? What shall we do? We felt a great peace. Patrick was a wonderful baby boy, a gift from our loving Father. This was the Lord's reality. We were to press on and go on our month-long house-sitting and camping holiday.
We didn't forget about this threat and wondered if we had heard aright from God. Soon we learned that the neighbour of our house-sit was a doctor. After my prayer time next morning I walked over to the doctor's house to speak to him. Praise Jesus, he answered the door with his Bible in his hand; he was Christian! The doctor was part of a "walk-in centre", a new concept in 1988; they have much diagnostic equipment and offer a wide variety of medical services besides simple diagnosis and prescription.
Our doctor arranged some tests and then saw Patrick immediately the results were in. He was God's man for Patrick, he had the courage to say the truth rather than fudge his answer to be safe from a lawsuit. Beaming, he told us that Patrick was perfectly well and we could ignore the results of the original test. To this day Patrick has been a perfectly normal kid; he's now a young Christian man, at university, studying to be a primary school teacher, he has the most wonderful affinity with little kids and will be a blessing to many.
Amen.
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Be blessed in Jesus.
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