Our God is Good, All the Time! (An Update on Health)

If you read our previous newsletter then you know that I had a tumor in my spine at the T11 vertebra. Well, I went into the hospital and had it removed. There were a few complications that ended up happening during the surgery. First, the tumor was not the type that they thought it was. To begin with, when the neurosurgeon looked at the MRI he believed that it was a meningioma (a tumor of the sheath surrounding the brain and spinal cord). However when he actually opened the spine he found that it was rather a neurofibroma (a tumor of the sheath surrounding an individual nerve). The second complication was that the tumor was larger than initially thought. Not only was the tumor about a centimeter larger (it turned out to be about the size of a golf ball), but it also had two tails coming off of it that didn't show up in the MRI. The third complication was that the tumor was not on the side of the spine that they thought it would be. For the surgery, I was on my stomach and they opened from the back. When the surgeon opened me up, he was surprised to not see any tumor where it looked like it should have been on the MRI. What was discovered was that the tumor rather than being on top of my spine was underneath, so in order to remove it they had to push my spine to one side. Despite all of these things, the surgeon did an exceptional job as the hand of the Great Physician guided his. I was awake that afternoon; fully responsive and able to move my extremities. A fun fact is that Emmy and I celebrated our 3 month anniversary in the ICU! On the 13th I checked out of the hospital under my own power. Nineteen days after my operation, school started again. When I was signing up for classes in April I only had peace about signing up for seven credit hours for the upcoming semester, so the course load was not beyond my abilities to handle. (God's hand was even in that!) I was unable to drive at the time, so I was very blessed to have an awesome wife and mom who were willing and able to bring me to class the first couple of weeks of class. Several weeks after I checked out from the hospital I went in to see the surgeon so he could look at my incision and to see how it was healing. He cleared me to drive and even said that because I was healing so well I could just continue with my day to day tasks as physical therapy! Which is a huge blessing because we don’t have to deal with the costs of doing a course of physical therapy. My days consist of working in my capacity coordinating fellowship among the students, staff, and community, studying in the evenings, attending classes on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and spending time with my gorgeous wife and cute little dog Chloe. There are many exciting things occurring at the coffee shop! We are getting ready to expand the kitchen and the shop’s square footage, this will allow us to better serve the community that we are forming! One of our alumni has a ministry to Muslims and one of the manners in which he evangelizes them is by sitting down with them and discussing the Bible with them. He was arranging with one of the people who he does this and the person asked specifically to meet in the Koinonia because he felt that it was a safe, and welcoming place for them to discuss the Bible. This week we are serving the refreshments for a Bible conference that we are hosting here at the school also! I feel incredibly blessed to be involved in such a wonderful ministry! Please pray that God will continue to use Koinonia Koffe as a place to meet around God's Word.

God Bless!!

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