April 24, 2025 • 23 mins
God stories are the best stories aren’t they? Josh Nadeau has one such story to tell. He stopped by to explain how burst pulmonary arteries opened his eyes to the gift of an ordinary life in Jesus.
Josh has a new book. You check it out, right here:
Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Every Day Saints.
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Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:00):
Kurt and Kate mornings. Not just on the radio.
S2 (00:03):
It's a podcast too.
S1 (00:06):
God's stories are the best stories, aren't they?
S3 (00:10):
Oh they are.
S2 (00:11):
He's so faithful.
S1 (00:12):
Josh Nadeau dropped by. He's a new friend from Canada,
and he's written some books. And he had, uh, he
put together an article that I ran across this, and
I read it and I'm like, oh, there's so much
good stuff here. I would love to have him join
the conversation. That's exactly what we wanted to do. And
(00:35):
so we asked him, hey, Josh, you want to hang
out with us and share your story? And he said,
two thumbs up.
S2 (00:41):
And it was really great. And I think in some way,
even though it was a unique situation, we can all
identify with it.
S1 (00:50):
The title of the article, A Good Pair of Lungs.
What you're sharing in this bit of writing is something
that happened to you? How long ago? How long has
this been?
S4 (01:03):
Uh, we're closing in on three years ago. So, um.
The initial incident was July 24th, 2022.
S1 (01:12):
Let's talk about what happened on that day.
S4 (01:14):
Yeah. So, um, on July 24th, 2022, it was a
beautiful day. And my wife and I were out for
church in the morning. Uh, she was pregnant with our
now first son or my oldest son. Um, we go
for lunch, we come home, we have a beautiful dinner together.
We're about to settle down to watch a movie, and
(01:37):
I clear my throat and I feel something on my tongue.
And so I put my hand in my mouth because
just to take whatever it is out and my fingers
are covered in blood. And so I sprint to the bathroom.
I start coughing up blood into the sink. My wife
is Panicked. I tell her to call 911. Um, all
(02:01):
the ambulances are taken up, and so I grab a
bucket and we sprint to our car. She drives me
to the hospital. She's running through lights. We're praying, um,
hoping we have no clue what's going on. And so
we get to the hospital. I've got a, like, a
trash can from our bathroom. There's probably, like, 300 mils.
(02:23):
400 mils of blood in there. And, um. Yeah, that's
what happened that day. It's a very long journey. I
don't mind sharing anything.
S1 (02:33):
So. Okay, well, let's just talk about it. And I
might just add here, maybe I'm just pointing out the obvious. Uh,
you and your wife are followers of Jesus. For how long?
Up until this point.
S4 (02:45):
Uh, both of us. Our whole lives. So I was
a Christian. I was born in a Christian home. I
got I became a Christian when I was like, six,
watched the Jesus movie, and, um, that was it. And
then everything was a journey from there. My wife has
a very similar story. So there was this panicked moment of, um,
you just had this crazy dichotomy of the day we
(03:06):
were living, knew life was coming. My wife was pregnant
with our first. And so we're like, this is life.
Couldn't get any better. And then at the end of
the day, they're drawing blood from me, getting everything tested.
And my wife's bawling her eyes out, her hand on
my shoulder, her pregnant belly rubbing up against my arm.
And we're thinking life couldn't get any worse than this moment.
S1 (03:29):
All right, so here you are. And you've got that
faith in in Jesus. And, boy, I tell you what,
that's when the rubber meets the road, for lack of
a better phrase, this is when. And I say this
with all sincerity. I don't want it to sound trite,
but it's it's when you actually find out if you
(03:50):
believe what you say, you believe. But it's difficult in
the midst of a whirlwind like that to reach out
and grab on to something that is firm, a firm foundation.
In that moment, in the midst of disbelief, um, were
you just shooting up? Were you talking to the Lord about. Oh, Lord,
you know, please be with us. What's going on? How
(04:12):
did how did that work for you?
S4 (04:15):
Yeah, it's really hard. Um, there's this amazing book I
read by. He's a Catholic philosopher called Peter Kreeft, and
the book is called Making Sense of Suffering. And he
talks about how the theologians and the philosophers, they can
give you kinds of answers to suffering. But the truest
answer we have is in the story and narrative of
(04:37):
Jesus himself, who suffers alongside us. And so I have
gone through, um, my first book, room for Good Things
to Run Wild, is like, uh, was the foundation for
how I was able to get through this suffering, like,
from three years ago. And it was still. It was brutal. Like, I,
I can't, uh, what's the right way of saying it? We,
(04:58):
my wife and I have made a decision to never
lie or be hypocritical. And so we did not hit
the ground running. Um, and what I mean by that
was like, it wasn't like July 24th. I was bleeding
all night, and we woke up July 25th singing praise songs,
and everything was okay. We were terrified. Yes. Um, I
was in the hospital that first time for three weeks.
(05:21):
That first day, I'd coughed up 800ml. A few days
later it was 600. A few days after that, it
was another 800. I had countless surgeries, and then I
was in and out of the hospital for a year. Wow.
S1 (05:35):
What did they diagnosis at this? What was the diagnosis? Okay. Well,
what caused this? What triggered it? What was it?
S4 (05:41):
Yeah, they don't know. So, um, they ran every test
in the book, and they all came up negative, which
is good, right? It's nice to know I don't have
lung cancer. It's nice to know I don't have cystic
fibrosis or tuberculosis or anything else. So what was happening
was the arteries in my left lung were swelling up
and bursting. And there's normally like a subset of diseases
(06:05):
that would cause that. And I don't have any of them.
S1 (06:07):
Wow.
S4 (06:08):
And so there was this deeply spiritual aspect to it where, um, uh,
the ancients of our faith, they believe that all of
these things were, were spiritual, all evil in some sense
is demonic in origin. So you can picture Adam and
Eve in the garden. You have the forces of evil
enticing them, telling them lies. And then Adam and Eve
(06:31):
use their free will to reject God and go their
own way. And, uh, the Church fathers, they believed the
same thing. They think that you have these moments where
everything is spiritual warfare. Everything is our Eden moment. And
so there's this deeply spiritual aspect to this time of
suffering for us, we're like, I am. I almost died
(06:53):
three times, and we had these moments in the hospital
where we're making sure my wife had access to all
of my business accounts. All everything. We're just dotting every I,
crossing every T, and there are these moments where I
was thinking, I'm not going to see my firstborn son.
Is my wife going to move back to where my
parents are so they can help raise him? Um, and
(07:16):
because we were because we made the decision not to
be hypocrites with our faith, we went through the deep
waters like the valley of the shadow of death. Yeah.
And Jesus was just always there. I get emotional, I'm
getting emotional now, even thinking about it. Um, there. There's
no sentence. I can tell you. There's no construction of
(07:37):
words that I can say that does justice to the
feeling of presence and union that I had with Jesus
literally standing on the edge of life and death and
just knowing in time that everything would be okay. And
when I say that, it wasn't like, um, it was
(08:01):
like every step I took, I was terrified every day
that I went through. There's just so many unknowns. And
God met me step by step by step. And now.
So I haven't bled in almost two years. Praise God.
S1 (08:16):
Well that's great.
S4 (08:17):
I can tell more of this. I'll tell the the
whole story. But now, on this side, I realized that
most of the battle was against fear. I'm going to
die one day. And I took part of my life.
I took a lot of my life for granted. Before
that moment where I was a young man who's always
Proverbs say the glory of young men is their strength. Um,
(08:40):
I took a lot of my life for granted. And
now on this side, I don't take it for granted
as much. I'm still not perfect, but I realized that
fear is the true killer. You can be alive and
be afraid, and then you're not living at all.
S1 (08:57):
Oh, wait a minute. That could be the quote of
the hour. You can be alive and be afraid, you know.
I mean, this is just. This is so good. Um.
And not living at all. Oh. Fear is, uh, it's
a robber. Fear steals. Um. Fear is the enemy. So
you have a choice. Fear or faith? And sometimes they
(09:19):
can overlap just a little bit because, you know, there
are gray areas in our walk of faith. Because, Josh,
you know this is true. We're not perfect yet, right?
We're in process.
S4 (09:32):
Totally. And I think you're right, Kurt. Like they do,
the places where faith grows the most is where fear abounds.
That's your opportunity to To show faith and learn faith
in the middle of fear. Right. We think that we
can learn it. Um, I wrote about this in the
first book. We think that we can learn the Christian
(09:53):
virtues in our minds or by reading books, but really,
you learn them by living your life and through your body.
And so I that year, it wasn't quite a year.
I tell, I, I tell myself all the time that
God gave me. God gave me the grace of. I
started bleeding on July 24th, 2022 and my last bleed
(10:14):
was July 15th, 2023, so I didn't even suffer for
a year. It was deep, but I don't even have
the luxury of saying it was a year. But in
that almost year of suffering, that's where my faith was strengthened.
It was the days, um, it was the nights, every
single night. And the people who are on the call
(10:36):
who have suffered or who will hear this, they'll know
these feelings of you lay down to go to bed.
I would be in our spare room because I just
needed to sleep. I was very, very sick. And so, um,
I would just be petrified of falling asleep because once
every two weeks I'd cough up blood in the middle
of the night and have to take an ambulance to
go to the hospital and leave my crying wife and
(10:58):
crying son at home. And so you just never knew.
So I'd have those moments of great fear every night,
and I just have to pray myself to sleep. It
was literally the only way through. And eventually those like,
embodied liturgical, rhythmic moments of offering my fear through prayer
(11:20):
to Jesus over and over and over and over and
over again. I was teaching my body that there is
peace that passes understanding. Um, but you just you don't
learn it in a day. I still pray about it
every day.
S5 (11:36):
Thank you for taking some time to listen to this
episode of the Kurt and Kate Mornings podcast. We always
welcome a review with your thoughts and comments, and please
feel free to subscribe and follow us as well.
S1 (11:48):
You know, one thing I was thinking about too, Josh,
is you're unpacking all of this, um, is I believe
it's Psalm 84. No good thing will he withhold from
those who walk uprightly. Um, there's that verse, and then, uh,
you go a couple of psalms beyond that, and, uh,
(12:10):
I don't have chapter and verse, but in essence, the
phrase the psalmist uses is the nearness of God is
my good. What is God's definition of good? Because he
has all knowledge. He loves me. He cares for me.
He has a plan. So if my greatest good is
(12:31):
his presence, then he will allow things in in my
life that put me in a situation where I can
experience that. And it is his goodness, even though the
very thing itself we would not label as being good.
S4 (12:47):
Yeah, 100%. So there's this time I had to be
on a fast. So the first time I was in
the hospital, you go on these deep fasts because if
you have a surgery, you can't have anything in you.
And so I hadn't eaten or drank anything for three days. And, um,
I was very emaciated, very weak, and just praying through, like,
(13:08):
how what is like my body's wasting away. And you
can think about the Paul saying our bodies are wasting away,
but inwardly we're being renewed. But there's another quote that
popped into my head, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when he was in
the Gulag. He thought that his faith meant like ideas
of contentment meant success or flourishing or whatever. And he
(13:32):
learned that even in those Russian prison cells, sleeping on
moldy hay, that contentment could be, like you said, presence
and growth and maturity and quote unquote, becoming a saint.
And the idea was, okay, you you then become invincible, right?
Like if if success is becoming a saint and nearness
(13:55):
to God, then it doesn't matter if you're in a
hospital bed not eating or drinking for three days. It
doesn't matter if you're in a gulag. It doesn't matter
if right now you guys are in balmy, beautiful Florida
and I'm in a nice spring West coast morning, you
can be anywhere and accept the invitation to be near
(14:16):
to God and become a saint.
S1 (14:19):
This is powerful stuff. And this is not just conversation
where we're like, okay, let's just talk about stuff and
have concepts and and warm and fuzzies and all that. Josh,
you know what the cool thing is? Our Christian faith
is meant to be lived out in real life, and
the Bible is real, right? Everything that we read in
God's Word, it's very clear. You see the people, warts
(14:42):
and all. You see them struggle. Just like. Just like
we struggle. And yet, um, the Lord helps us. And
the Holy Spirit also helps us when we can't take
another step. You know, God picks us up and carries
us because he is. He is for us. You know,
I wanted to ask you to that that day that
you stopped bleeding. Um, was there any reason why or
(15:05):
did it just stop out of nowhere?
S4 (15:07):
Yeah. So, uh, I have goosebumps a little bit because.
So I was in and out of the hospital a ton,
and it almost became routine. Right? So about 6 to
9 months in, I'd start bleeding. I'd tell my wife,
I'd call an ambulance. They drive me in and I'd
get the whole rigmarole. They do a surgery, they'd give
me some medicine to help clot the blood. Um, but
(15:30):
eventually I just hit this breaking point where I was like,
I got it. This can't. I was like, Lord, this
can't keep happening, right? Even if you want me to
go to the hospital to be a force for good,
let the hospital find a chaplain. Like, I don't want
to be the one walking in the hallways praying for people.
I want to hang out with my wife and my
kids and do my life. Yeah, and I had this
(15:50):
moment at that breaking point. I was in the hospital.
They put these gas masks on me, and they gave
me like a, like an aerosol version of a of a,
a pill that helps clot the blood. And someone had
messaged me on Instagram, and which is a silly thing
to say, but it is how the modern world works.
(16:11):
And they said that they were suffering with something similar.
And in that moment I started weeping and I started
thinking to myself, the the world is suffering. I was
just blind to it because I didn't experience it in
a deep way. And there are ways that now I
see the suffering of others. And so I just had
(16:33):
this moment where I said, you know what? We need
to I just whatever I can do through the platform
or influence that God has given me with the books
and the writing and the art, I want to use
that for good. And so we did a day of
fasting and prayer, and right around this time, they found
something they thought could have been the cause of my bleeding.
(16:57):
Long story short, none of the doctors think that was
the cause. So what we did was we had this
day of fasting and prayer, um, where a few thousand
people from my Instagram signed up. We prayed the hours,
so we prayed on the hour every hour from morning
till evening. I got people to pray for me and
then we prayed for tons of other people. Um, and
(17:22):
that was it. Like I am. So, you know, the
when Jesus is doing the healing and he spits in
the mud, and he puts it on the eyes of
the one person, and they can see. And they see
something like trees. Yes. And then he does it again.
I so the the year that I was in the hospital,
every surgery they would do would be a little miracle.
(17:45):
So what they do is they go in through your
femoral artery near your groin. They shoot a catheter up
all the way up from your groin, up into your lungs,
and all of the parts where your arteries have burst.
They like laser beam them shut or dam them shut
like you would a river. And every time they do that,
(18:05):
it's your lungs are supposed to get worse, right? Like,
if you if you put a dam in a river,
the pressure builds up. And generally the water streams somewhere else.
S1 (18:16):
Yes.
S4 (18:17):
And so they would do this and all of these
dead or decaying or swollen branches of my lungs everywhere else,
6 or 7 of them would also heal. So I
had all these incremental healings along the way, which didn't
make sense. And I think I was that person in process, right?
(18:38):
Where the disciple, the person I see, someone like trees, I,
I both people in the story. And then the day
of fasting and prayer was that final moment where now
I can look back and say, I'm very confident, I
know that I've been healed. But I didn't know that
July 15th was going to be the last day I bled.
(19:00):
I was still scared. I we flew to go visit
my folks in that fall, that autumn in October, and
it's a four hour flight from British Columbia to Ontario. And, uh,
I prayed the entire time because I just, I if
I started bleeding on that plane, I had no clue
what was going to happen. Um, and so, yeah, the
(19:23):
thing that changed was just the day of fasting and prayer.
Literally both of my doctors. So I have a family
doctor and I have a pulmonologist. And, um, when I
went in for the checkup around that year, Mark, they
got a CT scan. Uh, guys, there's so much to
this story, and I know we don't have infinite time,
(19:44):
but one day, if I ever see you, I'll tell
you the whole story. Um, my family doctor, I was
in the in the the meeting room with him, and
he said to me, he's like, Josh, here's these pills
that you took. How did you feel after doing this
round of pills? And I said, I, I said I
felt great before I was even taking them. Once I
started taking them, I felt great. Um, and I asked him,
(20:07):
would these pills heal what I had? And he's like, no, no, no.
He studied in the UK. Um, they thought that I
had this thing called just like an Aspergillus infection. So
a kind of mold and fungus overgrowth from some exposure somewhere.
So they put me on a bunch of antifungals and
(20:28):
he's like, no, no. I studied in the UK. Tons
of people in the UK have it, and they will
be on this pill for three years for the rest
of their lives, and they don't notice anything good. Um,
you this would not have done that. So the fact
that you stopped bleeding was a miracle. My pulmonologist said
the same thing, and then I got the same response,
(20:50):
just like a three, four months ago from both of them,
again saying, um.
S1 (20:58):
We don't know how to explain this. This this really
is a miracle.
S4 (21:02):
I have all these irreversible ailments. Um, one of them
called bronchiectasis. It does not get better. It only gets worse.
And mine has continually gotten better over the past two years.
S1 (21:14):
Well. All right. Well, Josh? Yeah? I'm telling you what
this is. That's why I told you guys. This story
is so, so powerful. This God God's story. Before we
let you go, my friend, I want you to speak
from your heart to those who are struggling with their
own battles, whether they be health challenges that they're facing,
(21:35):
maybe very serious like yours. Or maybe they're just walking
through a valley of some type, having walked through this valley,
having found the Lord faithful. What would you like to
say to them this morning?
S4 (21:53):
Um, first off, I would just want to say, like,
I see you, I know how hard it is. Any
kind of suffering, physical suffering, spiritual suffering, there's a lot
of times we think we suffer alone. Um. God healed
the blindness in me over that time. All the ways
I didn't think he was working. He opened my eyes
(22:16):
and the eyes of my heart to see all the
ways that he was working. And I would just tell you,
I know the journey is hard, but it is very good.
And if you let go of your expectations, of the
things you think you deserve in life, and you embrace
the path that he's given you the opportunity to become
(22:38):
a saint, he will transform you. And, um, there's just
no other way to say it. I think that this
is an open hand, and you can find your savior
even in the deepest, darkest pits. And these are our
moments to be loyal. When things are hard, things get
easier on the other side. So I've heard. And so
(22:59):
this is a moment to to show our faithfulness and
and respond in kind.
S2 (23:03):
Thanks for listening to Kurt and Kate Mornings podcast. Please
take a minute to follow, subscribe and review us. And
no matter where in the world you are, you can
listen to us live from 6 to 9 a.m. weekdays
on the Moody Radio app.
Kurt and Kate mornings. Not just on the radio.
S2 (00:03):
It's a podcast too.
S1 (00:06):
God's stories are the best stories, aren't they?
S3 (00:10):
Oh they are.
S2 (00:11):
He's so faithful.
S1 (00:12):
Josh Nadeau dropped by. He's a new friend from Canada,
and he's written some books. And he had, uh, he
put together an article that I ran across this, and
I read it and I'm like, oh, there's so much
good stuff here. I would love to have him join
the conversation. That's exactly what we wanted to do. And
(00:35):
so we asked him, hey, Josh, you want to hang
out with us and share your story? And he said,
two thumbs up.
S2 (00:41):
And it was really great. And I think in some way,
even though it was a unique situation, we can all
identify with it.
S1 (00:50):
The title of the article, A Good Pair of Lungs.
What you're sharing in this bit of writing is something
that happened to you? How long ago? How long has
this been?
S4 (01:03):
Uh, we're closing in on three years ago. So, um.
The initial incident was July 24th, 2022.
S1 (01:12):
Let's talk about what happened on that day.
S4 (01:14):
Yeah. So, um, on July 24th, 2022, it was a
beautiful day. And my wife and I were out for
church in the morning. Uh, she was pregnant with our
now first son or my oldest son. Um, we go
for lunch, we come home, we have a beautiful dinner together.
We're about to settle down to watch a movie, and
(01:37):
I clear my throat and I feel something on my tongue.
And so I put my hand in my mouth because
just to take whatever it is out and my fingers
are covered in blood. And so I sprint to the bathroom.
I start coughing up blood into the sink. My wife
is Panicked. I tell her to call 911. Um, all
(02:01):
the ambulances are taken up, and so I grab a
bucket and we sprint to our car. She drives me
to the hospital. She's running through lights. We're praying, um,
hoping we have no clue what's going on. And so
we get to the hospital. I've got a, like, a
trash can from our bathroom. There's probably, like, 300 mils.
(02:23):
400 mils of blood in there. And, um. Yeah, that's
what happened that day. It's a very long journey. I
don't mind sharing anything.
S1 (02:33):
So. Okay, well, let's just talk about it. And I
might just add here, maybe I'm just pointing out the obvious. Uh,
you and your wife are followers of Jesus. For how long?
Up until this point.
S4 (02:45):
Uh, both of us. Our whole lives. So I was
a Christian. I was born in a Christian home. I
got I became a Christian when I was like, six,
watched the Jesus movie, and, um, that was it. And
then everything was a journey from there. My wife has
a very similar story. So there was this panicked moment of, um,
you just had this crazy dichotomy of the day we
(03:06):
were living, knew life was coming. My wife was pregnant
with our first. And so we're like, this is life.
Couldn't get any better. And then at the end of
the day, they're drawing blood from me, getting everything tested.
And my wife's bawling her eyes out, her hand on
my shoulder, her pregnant belly rubbing up against my arm.
And we're thinking life couldn't get any worse than this moment.
S1 (03:29):
All right, so here you are. And you've got that
faith in in Jesus. And, boy, I tell you what,
that's when the rubber meets the road, for lack of
a better phrase, this is when. And I say this
with all sincerity. I don't want it to sound trite,
but it's it's when you actually find out if you
(03:50):
believe what you say, you believe. But it's difficult in
the midst of a whirlwind like that to reach out
and grab on to something that is firm, a firm foundation.
In that moment, in the midst of disbelief, um, were
you just shooting up? Were you talking to the Lord about. Oh, Lord,
you know, please be with us. What's going on? How
(04:12):
did how did that work for you?
S4 (04:15):
Yeah, it's really hard. Um, there's this amazing book I
read by. He's a Catholic philosopher called Peter Kreeft, and
the book is called Making Sense of Suffering. And he
talks about how the theologians and the philosophers, they can
give you kinds of answers to suffering. But the truest
answer we have is in the story and narrative of
(04:37):
Jesus himself, who suffers alongside us. And so I have
gone through, um, my first book, room for Good Things
to Run Wild, is like, uh, was the foundation for
how I was able to get through this suffering, like,
from three years ago. And it was still. It was brutal. Like, I,
I can't, uh, what's the right way of saying it? We,
(04:58):
my wife and I have made a decision to never
lie or be hypocritical. And so we did not hit
the ground running. Um, and what I mean by that
was like, it wasn't like July 24th. I was bleeding
all night, and we woke up July 25th singing praise songs,
and everything was okay. We were terrified. Yes. Um, I
was in the hospital that first time for three weeks.
(05:21):
That first day, I'd coughed up 800ml. A few days
later it was 600. A few days after that, it
was another 800. I had countless surgeries, and then I
was in and out of the hospital for a year. Wow.
S1 (05:35):
What did they diagnosis at this? What was the diagnosis? Okay. Well,
what caused this? What triggered it? What was it?
S4 (05:41):
Yeah, they don't know. So, um, they ran every test
in the book, and they all came up negative, which
is good, right? It's nice to know I don't have
lung cancer. It's nice to know I don't have cystic
fibrosis or tuberculosis or anything else. So what was happening
was the arteries in my left lung were swelling up
and bursting. And there's normally like a subset of diseases
(06:05):
that would cause that. And I don't have any of them.
S1 (06:07):
Wow.
S4 (06:08):
And so there was this deeply spiritual aspect to it where, um, uh,
the ancients of our faith, they believe that all of
these things were, were spiritual, all evil in some sense
is demonic in origin. So you can picture Adam and
Eve in the garden. You have the forces of evil
enticing them, telling them lies. And then Adam and Eve
(06:31):
use their free will to reject God and go their
own way. And, uh, the Church fathers, they believed the
same thing. They think that you have these moments where
everything is spiritual warfare. Everything is our Eden moment. And
so there's this deeply spiritual aspect to this time of
suffering for us, we're like, I am. I almost died
(06:53):
three times, and we had these moments in the hospital
where we're making sure my wife had access to all
of my business accounts. All everything. We're just dotting every I,
crossing every T, and there are these moments where I
was thinking, I'm not going to see my firstborn son.
Is my wife going to move back to where my
parents are so they can help raise him? Um, and
(07:16):
because we were because we made the decision not to
be hypocrites with our faith, we went through the deep
waters like the valley of the shadow of death. Yeah.
And Jesus was just always there. I get emotional, I'm
getting emotional now, even thinking about it. Um, there. There's
no sentence. I can tell you. There's no construction of
(07:37):
words that I can say that does justice to the
feeling of presence and union that I had with Jesus
literally standing on the edge of life and death and
just knowing in time that everything would be okay. And
when I say that, it wasn't like, um, it was
(08:01):
like every step I took, I was terrified every day
that I went through. There's just so many unknowns. And
God met me step by step by step. And now.
So I haven't bled in almost two years. Praise God.
S1 (08:16):
Well that's great.
S4 (08:17):
I can tell more of this. I'll tell the the
whole story. But now, on this side, I realized that
most of the battle was against fear. I'm going to
die one day. And I took part of my life.
I took a lot of my life for granted. Before
that moment where I was a young man who's always
Proverbs say the glory of young men is their strength. Um,
(08:40):
I took a lot of my life for granted. And
now on this side, I don't take it for granted
as much. I'm still not perfect, but I realized that
fear is the true killer. You can be alive and
be afraid, and then you're not living at all.
S1 (08:57):
Oh, wait a minute. That could be the quote of
the hour. You can be alive and be afraid, you know.
I mean, this is just. This is so good. Um.
And not living at all. Oh. Fear is, uh, it's
a robber. Fear steals. Um. Fear is the enemy. So
you have a choice. Fear or faith? And sometimes they
(09:19):
can overlap just a little bit because, you know, there
are gray areas in our walk of faith. Because, Josh,
you know this is true. We're not perfect yet, right?
We're in process.
S4 (09:32):
Totally. And I think you're right, Kurt. Like they do,
the places where faith grows the most is where fear abounds.
That's your opportunity to To show faith and learn faith
in the middle of fear. Right. We think that we
can learn it. Um, I wrote about this in the
first book. We think that we can learn the Christian
(09:53):
virtues in our minds or by reading books, but really,
you learn them by living your life and through your body.
And so I that year, it wasn't quite a year.
I tell, I, I tell myself all the time that
God gave me. God gave me the grace of. I
started bleeding on July 24th, 2022 and my last bleed
(10:14):
was July 15th, 2023, so I didn't even suffer for
a year. It was deep, but I don't even have
the luxury of saying it was a year. But in
that almost year of suffering, that's where my faith was strengthened.
It was the days, um, it was the nights, every
single night. And the people who are on the call
(10:36):
who have suffered or who will hear this, they'll know
these feelings of you lay down to go to bed.
I would be in our spare room because I just
needed to sleep. I was very, very sick. And so, um,
I would just be petrified of falling asleep because once
every two weeks I'd cough up blood in the middle
of the night and have to take an ambulance to
go to the hospital and leave my crying wife and
(10:58):
crying son at home. And so you just never knew.
So I'd have those moments of great fear every night,
and I just have to pray myself to sleep. It
was literally the only way through. And eventually those like,
embodied liturgical, rhythmic moments of offering my fear through prayer
(11:20):
to Jesus over and over and over and over and
over again. I was teaching my body that there is
peace that passes understanding. Um, but you just you don't
learn it in a day. I still pray about it
every day.
S5 (11:36):
Thank you for taking some time to listen to this
episode of the Kurt and Kate Mornings podcast. We always
welcome a review with your thoughts and comments, and please
feel free to subscribe and follow us as well.
S1 (11:48):
You know, one thing I was thinking about too, Josh,
is you're unpacking all of this, um, is I believe
it's Psalm 84. No good thing will he withhold from
those who walk uprightly. Um, there's that verse, and then, uh,
you go a couple of psalms beyond that, and, uh,
(12:10):
I don't have chapter and verse, but in essence, the
phrase the psalmist uses is the nearness of God is
my good. What is God's definition of good? Because he
has all knowledge. He loves me. He cares for me.
He has a plan. So if my greatest good is
(12:31):
his presence, then he will allow things in in my
life that put me in a situation where I can
experience that. And it is his goodness, even though the
very thing itself we would not label as being good.
S4 (12:47):
Yeah, 100%. So there's this time I had to be
on a fast. So the first time I was in
the hospital, you go on these deep fasts because if
you have a surgery, you can't have anything in you.
And so I hadn't eaten or drank anything for three days. And, um,
I was very emaciated, very weak, and just praying through, like,
(13:08):
how what is like my body's wasting away. And you
can think about the Paul saying our bodies are wasting away,
but inwardly we're being renewed. But there's another quote that
popped into my head, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when he was in
the Gulag. He thought that his faith meant like ideas
of contentment meant success or flourishing or whatever. And he
(13:32):
learned that even in those Russian prison cells, sleeping on
moldy hay, that contentment could be, like you said, presence
and growth and maturity and quote unquote, becoming a saint.
And the idea was, okay, you you then become invincible, right?
Like if if success is becoming a saint and nearness
(13:55):
to God, then it doesn't matter if you're in a
hospital bed not eating or drinking for three days. It
doesn't matter if you're in a gulag. It doesn't matter
if right now you guys are in balmy, beautiful Florida
and I'm in a nice spring West coast morning, you
can be anywhere and accept the invitation to be near
(14:16):
to God and become a saint.
S1 (14:19):
This is powerful stuff. And this is not just conversation
where we're like, okay, let's just talk about stuff and
have concepts and and warm and fuzzies and all that. Josh,
you know what the cool thing is? Our Christian faith
is meant to be lived out in real life, and
the Bible is real, right? Everything that we read in
God's Word, it's very clear. You see the people, warts
(14:42):
and all. You see them struggle. Just like. Just like
we struggle. And yet, um, the Lord helps us. And
the Holy Spirit also helps us when we can't take
another step. You know, God picks us up and carries
us because he is. He is for us. You know,
I wanted to ask you to that that day that
you stopped bleeding. Um, was there any reason why or
(15:05):
did it just stop out of nowhere?
S4 (15:07):
Yeah. So, uh, I have goosebumps a little bit because.
So I was in and out of the hospital a ton,
and it almost became routine. Right? So about 6 to
9 months in, I'd start bleeding. I'd tell my wife,
I'd call an ambulance. They drive me in and I'd
get the whole rigmarole. They do a surgery, they'd give
me some medicine to help clot the blood. Um, but
(15:30):
eventually I just hit this breaking point where I was like,
I got it. This can't. I was like, Lord, this
can't keep happening, right? Even if you want me to
go to the hospital to be a force for good,
let the hospital find a chaplain. Like, I don't want
to be the one walking in the hallways praying for people.
I want to hang out with my wife and my
kids and do my life. Yeah, and I had this
(15:50):
moment at that breaking point. I was in the hospital.
They put these gas masks on me, and they gave
me like a, like an aerosol version of a of a,
a pill that helps clot the blood. And someone had
messaged me on Instagram, and which is a silly thing
to say, but it is how the modern world works.
(16:11):
And they said that they were suffering with something similar.
And in that moment I started weeping and I started
thinking to myself, the the world is suffering. I was
just blind to it because I didn't experience it in
a deep way. And there are ways that now I
see the suffering of others. And so I just had
(16:33):
this moment where I said, you know what? We need
to I just whatever I can do through the platform
or influence that God has given me with the books
and the writing and the art, I want to use
that for good. And so we did a day of
fasting and prayer, and right around this time, they found
something they thought could have been the cause of my bleeding.
(16:57):
Long story short, none of the doctors think that was
the cause. So what we did was we had this
day of fasting and prayer, um, where a few thousand
people from my Instagram signed up. We prayed the hours,
so we prayed on the hour every hour from morning
till evening. I got people to pray for me and
then we prayed for tons of other people. Um, and
(17:22):
that was it. Like I am. So, you know, the
when Jesus is doing the healing and he spits in
the mud, and he puts it on the eyes of
the one person, and they can see. And they see
something like trees. Yes. And then he does it again.
I so the the year that I was in the hospital,
every surgery they would do would be a little miracle.
(17:45):
So what they do is they go in through your
femoral artery near your groin. They shoot a catheter up
all the way up from your groin, up into your lungs,
and all of the parts where your arteries have burst.
They like laser beam them shut or dam them shut
like you would a river. And every time they do that,
(18:05):
it's your lungs are supposed to get worse, right? Like,
if you if you put a dam in a river,
the pressure builds up. And generally the water streams somewhere else.
S1 (18:16):
Yes.
S4 (18:17):
And so they would do this and all of these
dead or decaying or swollen branches of my lungs everywhere else,
6 or 7 of them would also heal. So I
had all these incremental healings along the way, which didn't
make sense. And I think I was that person in process, right?
(18:38):
Where the disciple, the person I see, someone like trees, I,
I both people in the story. And then the day
of fasting and prayer was that final moment where now
I can look back and say, I'm very confident, I
know that I've been healed. But I didn't know that
July 15th was going to be the last day I bled.
(19:00):
I was still scared. I we flew to go visit
my folks in that fall, that autumn in October, and
it's a four hour flight from British Columbia to Ontario. And, uh,
I prayed the entire time because I just, I if
I started bleeding on that plane, I had no clue
what was going to happen. Um, and so, yeah, the
(19:23):
thing that changed was just the day of fasting and prayer.
Literally both of my doctors. So I have a family
doctor and I have a pulmonologist. And, um, when I
went in for the checkup around that year, Mark, they
got a CT scan. Uh, guys, there's so much to
this story, and I know we don't have infinite time,
(19:44):
but one day, if I ever see you, I'll tell
you the whole story. Um, my family doctor, I was
in the in the the meeting room with him, and
he said to me, he's like, Josh, here's these pills
that you took. How did you feel after doing this
round of pills? And I said, I, I said I
felt great before I was even taking them. Once I
started taking them, I felt great. Um, and I asked him,
(20:07):
would these pills heal what I had? And he's like, no, no, no.
He studied in the UK. Um, they thought that I
had this thing called just like an Aspergillus infection. So
a kind of mold and fungus overgrowth from some exposure somewhere.
So they put me on a bunch of antifungals and
(20:28):
he's like, no, no. I studied in the UK. Tons
of people in the UK have it, and they will
be on this pill for three years for the rest
of their lives, and they don't notice anything good. Um,
you this would not have done that. So the fact
that you stopped bleeding was a miracle. My pulmonologist said
the same thing, and then I got the same response,
(20:50):
just like a three, four months ago from both of them,
again saying, um.
S1 (20:58):
We don't know how to explain this. This this really
is a miracle.
S4 (21:02):
I have all these irreversible ailments. Um, one of them
called bronchiectasis. It does not get better. It only gets worse.
And mine has continually gotten better over the past two years.
S1 (21:14):
Well. All right. Well, Josh? Yeah? I'm telling you what
this is. That's why I told you guys. This story
is so, so powerful. This God God's story. Before we
let you go, my friend, I want you to speak
from your heart to those who are struggling with their
own battles, whether they be health challenges that they're facing,
(21:35):
maybe very serious like yours. Or maybe they're just walking
through a valley of some type, having walked through this valley,
having found the Lord faithful. What would you like to
say to them this morning?
S4 (21:53):
Um, first off, I would just want to say, like,
I see you, I know how hard it is. Any
kind of suffering, physical suffering, spiritual suffering, there's a lot
of times we think we suffer alone. Um. God healed
the blindness in me over that time. All the ways
I didn't think he was working. He opened my eyes
(22:16):
and the eyes of my heart to see all the
ways that he was working. And I would just tell you,
I know the journey is hard, but it is very good.
And if you let go of your expectations, of the
things you think you deserve in life, and you embrace
the path that he's given you the opportunity to become
(22:38):
a saint, he will transform you. And, um, there's just
no other way to say it. I think that this
is an open hand, and you can find your savior
even in the deepest, darkest pits. And these are our
moments to be loyal. When things are hard, things get
easier on the other side. So I've heard. And so
(22:59):
this is a moment to to show our faithfulness and
and respond in kind.
S2 (23:03):
Thanks for listening to Kurt and Kate Mornings podcast. Please
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no matter where in the world you are, you can
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