Welcome to Gaia! ::

I don't really share this story with everyone, but since this forum seems to be for posting stories where we can praise God, I figured I'd share some things God did in my life a few years ago.

When I was a kid in middle school my life seemed pretty great, but then I moved to a high school and things went downhill from there. Also I should probably mention that I was sort of agnostic/wiccan/atheist/something at this time in my life. I can't really slap a label on what I identified myself as, but the main point is that God was just not important to me at all during that time. But I had lots of Christian friends, and even though I didn't really like them a whole lot because most of them were weird and sheltered, I tolerated them and still listened to what they had to say.

One morning I was going to math class, and as I was about to sit down at my desk I felt my heart completely stop and suddenly I felt like I was going to pass out and took a huge gasp of air. So I dropped my bag and sat down quickly, but then my heart started beating again, but really really fast. So I went to the nurses office and they couldn't figure out what was wrong if anything at all, and it did eventually go away. But the same thing happened again and again for the next three years. I think I had maybe four episodes of this, I can't actually remember how many. Each one was terrifying, though, and most of them I ended up in the emergency room. The doctor suspected it was a condition called SVT, and I didn't really know what to make of that.

Anyways, eventually it was starting to take a toll on my health and my heart wasn't even beating normally anymore. It would just feel lumpy and skip beats all the time, and eventually it just got so bad over the course of a few months that I just barely had the energy to get out of bed anymore without feeling exhausted. After that, my parents and I decided that we should go see a reputable heart doctor in Albuquerque (we live in New Mexico, and it's very VERY rural here, so finding a good doctor that specializes in anything AND is competent is really difficult) to do tests and scans and whatnot to see if he could find out what was wrong.

So I was diagnosed with Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which is basically a condition I was born with where my heart had an extra electrical pathway (since the heart runs on electricity) that would randomly activate and send my heart into an insane (and terrifying) hissy-fit. The doctor gave me the option for surgery to fix it, which I accepted because the other choice of "keep doing nothing" really just wasn't an option anymore. Anyways, the first surgery failed and I was really depressed about that, but then about a day later the doctor asked if I wanted to give it another go and go back into surgery, to which I said yes without hesitation.

The second surgery was a success; the doctor told me (several times, apparently, because I was still coming out of anesthesia and I guess he came into the room several times to tell me, but I forgot each time as if it had never happened, haha.) that they succeeded in fixing my heart this time for good. And as I heard the news, I was so happy that I cried. My mom was there too, and she cried. I know she was thanking God too, for his mercy on me and my family, since my condition was making things really hard for everyone, not just myself.

I left out probably 90% of the details of this story, there's a lot more to it, but the point is that God had mercy on me when I was facing the very-real threat of death as my life was falling apart, and I didn't really have the fortune of really knowing God or Jesus and taking a legitimate interest in him until that very first day where I almost passed out.

I can't remember when I started praying to God while all this was going on, but it was definitely something that became more frequent as time went on. As a result, my relationship with God grew because of this terrifying experience, and he has shaped me into a different person because of it. He's always busy shaping me, and I feel like I'm on the right track now.

So yeah. God did all of this. Hands down, no doubt about it. So I just thought I'd post it so that we have something else to praise God for. I usually keep this story to myself, but if we're going to praise God for it, then it's better for more people to know it instead of me doing it alone. :]

Thank you for sharing. I thank God you were healed and came to know the Lord.