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No, I'm not going to smack you in the head with one of those giant family Bibles. I'm just going to tell you a short story about myself.
I've had to do a lot of things over the years to make a living, besides playing music. There are plenty of reasons for this (like other musicians, for the main thing), but anyway... Some years ago I worked as a teacher/counselor at a wilderness school, an outdoor treatment center for disturbed teenagers. To make a very long story short, I got physically run down, had some sort of terrible flu, and on top of it all was bitten by an extremely filthy individual (who actually turned out fine; my group had a 90 per cent success rate, a lot better than jail). I contracted a rather serious illness now known as Hepatitis C.
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I took a lot of flak from people about this ("Yeah, with a name like 'Hi' you probably did something bad years ago to get this"), but the worst part was my family (wife and three kids) had to put up with me literally deathly ill for years. I spent four and a half months in bed at one point, expected to die at any time. Then several years slowly getting a little better, a little worse, a little better...
You get the picture. I'm not going to go into any detail of what medical therapies I did not take or what I did do, nor tell you any horror stories from "medical hell", just believe me, if you haven't been there you don't know and you're lucky you don't! Be that as it may, I did get better. One research specialist in hep c even told me I was the only person she knew of to get as sick as I did and not die. I asked her, "Ever read the Bible?"
Now I know it's not always "cool" to be a believer, and all that. I know all the arguments people use trying to put their questionable grasp of archeology and history to use denying the Bible, etc. I'm not going to get into all that here. All I'm going to say here is that God healed me, after nine years of "medical hell". For six years, not well a single day, then feeling OK for very short periods of time followed by weeks of lying in bed, my body swelling, gaining and losing weight erratically, unable to exercise (what happened to my 40-inch chest and 29-inch waist?), my heart swelling, kidneystones and gallstones, a whole array of hepatitis related things: ultra-low white blood cell count, low platelets, blood chemistry completely screwed up, sick all the time except for very brief periods. Nothing worked for the pain but morphine, and I didn't take that. I already had enough problems, and I wasn't ready to give up and just sit around the house. After nine years, healed by prayer and the laying on of hands, just like the Bible says. So you can believe whatever you want, that's your right. I'm just telling you what happened to me.
