A Doctor’s Quest by by Robert S. Hoyt, M.D. Dr. Hoyt was born in Korea in 1925, the son of a missionary surgeon. He holds degrees from the University of California (A.B. and M.D.) and took post-doctoral studies in pathology at the University of Cambridge in addition to specialty training at the University of California in San Francisco. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Pathology. Late on a Sunday afternoon, in November of 1967, I found myself standing on the stage of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium at the end of an evangelistic meeting with Kathryn Kuhlman. This was a strange place for a medical doctor to be! Many years of my life had been spent in medical school and pre-medical education, followed by an internship and then five years of scientific training and studying the anatomical and physiological changes of the body that occur in disease states. A pathologist is trained to study the origin, nature and, with the aid of modem medical instrumentation, the progress of disease in the human body. Raised in a Christian missionary home, some of my earliest memories are of kneeling in our living room as we prayed for the needs of our family and the church. I claimed Jesus Christ as my Saviour during my teen years, and He carried me through many trials in military service during World War II in the Naval Air Force. After the war, I started pre-medical work and then entered medical school, but my witness was growing weaker and weaker. During my third year of post-doctoral training, a Christian doctor told me my Christian life was almost nonexistent. I am glad he did; it was a turning point in my life. In 1965, I volunteered to go to Ethiopia for a year to establish a department of pathology at Haile Selassie I University. I went to satisfy my desire to serve God in my chosen field of medicine — as a non-professional medical missionary. It was while I was in Africa that I came face to face with the reality of God’s power. I was particularly impressed with a Roman Catholic sister, a missionary, whose great love and compassion for the sick overwhelmed me. I saw Sister Gabriel throw her arms around lepers, tuberculosis patients, and persons with horrible skin diseases. I had never seen a love like this in action and I began to realize just how empty and powerless my own life was. I began to yearn for God’s love and power in my own life and committed myself to a deeper quest to find it than I ever had before. During my year in Africa, I learned of the miraculous moving of the Holy Spirit in the Wallamo Province in the southwest part of Ethiopia. The details of this story, which took place during the Second World War, are found in Fire on the Mountains by Raymond Davis. Three missionaries had gone into the Wallamo Province by mule-back (the only means of transportation at the time). It took them three years to learn the language and another year to win the hearts of thirty-five natives. Then the Italians invaded Ethiopia and the missionaries were driven out, leaving behind a pitifully small handful of native Christians. The only thing the missionaries left behind was a crude translation of the Gospel of John. Five years later, one of the missionaries was allowed to return to Ethiopia for a visit. He kept hearing stories about a huge Christian movement in the Wallamo Province. After three months, he finally wrangled a way to visit in the southwest section of the nation and there found a church with more than ten thousand members. He was aghast. Entire villages of born-again Christians were scattered throughout the province — and, most impressive, were the tremendous testimonies of healing. People who had been blind were now seeing — cripples were now walking. Apparently, when the missionaries translated the Gospel of John and then were forced to leave in such a hurry, they forgot to tell the natives that the day of miracles was past and that the miracles Jesus performed in the power of the Holy Spirit were impossible today! Those new Christians had read the Gospel, believed and prayed, and God had moved. I believed the missionary records and testimonies of these miracles in Ethiopia and I returned to the United States amazed at the power of the Holy Spirit in modem times in Africa. I wondered why God did not move in this way in America. During the next six months after my return home, I worked very hard in our hospital laboratory and continued some teaching. In my spare moments, I tried to secure new equipment and personnel for the laboratory we had started in Ethiopia. I felt a desperate need, seeking for more of God in my life. I knew there was a power that performed miracles, because I had heard of it first hand in Ethiopia; but where did one find such power in America? Thinking perhaps missionaries might have the answer, I began reading one missionary biography after another. In a Christian bookstore one day, still searching for more biographies, I stumbled across John Sherrill's book They Speak With Other Tongues. I did not know the first thing about the infilling of the Holy Spirit until I read this account by this careful reporter of Guideposts magazine. That night the Lord gave me faith to believe that He would move into my life in power as I prayed for the infilling or baptism of the Holy Spirit. I went to bed believing that I would be different the next day and when I awoke, it was a glorious morning. Heaven came down and glory filled my soul! Jesus was so near, it was as if He were physically present, walking around the house and through the rooms. I suddenly found a great continuity of my life with His and with eternity. I had been really grafted into the “vine” and His love and power began to pour through me. I have never been the same since and that sense of the reality of Christ has grown stronger. Soon thereafter, I heard of Kathryn Kuhlman and made plans to attend her service at the Memorial Temple on Nob Hill in San Francisco. There were many things that happened there that I simply could not explain from my medical knowledge of the ordinary disease processes. The only explanation is that there are laws of God higher than any of the known laws of science and medicine! At the close of the Memorial Temple service, as we stood for the benediction, our attention was drawn to a father and his fourteen-year-old son coming down a side aisle toward the stage. From the expression on the father’s face, it was hard to tell whether he was registering awe, fright, or unbelief. Then, quite unexpectedly, he began to weep unashamedly. As they came to the stage, the young lad handed Miss Kuhlman two hearing aids and said, “I can hear.” We stood motionless; not a sound disturbed the stillness. The father quickly told the story. He had been standing with his son in the top balcony when the boy turned to him and said, “Dad, I can hear.” The boy pulled both hearing aids from his ears and said he could hear perfectly. This was real — I knew it! For the next several months, I attended most of the miracle services on the West Coast. Finally, I called Kathryn Kuhlman in Pittsburgh and said, “I am on my way to Pittsburgh. I want to personally examine and interview some of the people who have been healed by the power of God in years past.” I had a feeling I was nearing the end of my quest. I checked. I examined. I interviewed. I came away absolutely convinced that God is still performing miracles. I have been taken to a new echelon of faith in the living Christ through the ministry of Kathryn Kuhlman. The greater miracle, however, is the changed life rather than the changed body. Surgeon’s hands can transplant a heart, but not a life! I shall never forget the sight of hundreds of young people coming forward to enter into life and to live it more abundantly—coming forward by the score and standing on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with 7,000 witnesses. Hands upraised, they were asking God to change and fill their lives. There is a young couple whom I shall always remember, who stood on stage together while they repeated their marriage vows for the second time. There had been a separation because the tentacles of alcoholism had completely gripped this man. But in one of Kathryn Kuhlman’s services, his life was transformed as he accepted Christ as his Saviour. His wife, cautious and understandably so, watched him for many months until finally, she also believed. Now they are a Christian family and he has taken his place as a respected and useful citizen in his community. Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner and first man to keep living tissue alive outside the human body, has summed up my own feelings in a beautiful paragraph from one of his books (Voyage to Lourdes, Harper: 1950): As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. It is the power in the world that seems to overcome the so-called “laws of nature.” The occasions on which prayer has dramatically done this have been termed “miracles.” But a constant, quieter miracle takes place hourly in the hearts of men and women who have discovered that prayer supplies them with a steady flow of sustaining power in their daily lives. On another occasion, Dr. Carrel was confronted by the supernatural healing of a patient afflicted with tubercular peritonitis. He wrote: The wildly improbable became a simple fact. The fact that I can find no explanation for the cure disturbs me deeply—and it horrifies me. Either I must cease to believe in the soundness of our methods and admit that I am no longer able to diagnose a patient, or I must accept this thing as an entirely new, outstanding phenomenon which must be studied from every conceivable angle. Such cures cannot be brought about by natural means. And even though Dr. Carrel did not complete his quest, he finished his writing with a simple prayer ... a prayer which all medical doctors (and all others for that matter) should use as they continue their own quest: Thou didst answer my prayers by a blazing miracle. I am still blind to it. I still doubt. But the greatest desire of my life, my highest aspiration, is to believe, to believe passionately, implicitly, and never more analyze and doubt. An Invalid the Rest of My Life: Chapter 11 |