Dr. Vic's Testimony

From the very early years, I had my life planned out. Each detail maticulously outlined as if part of some vast roadmap leading to the journey of a lifetime.

Though my heritage was a background of middle-class factory workers, none of whom had attended college (and in fact, few had even graduated high school), I set my goal on a much higher calling. I wanted to be a doctor -- to work at helping others, while at the same time establishing a comfortable lifestyle for myself.

My plans for life also included a family. Eventually I wanted to marry and have two children. So when I met and began dating a beautiful girl in college, marriage seemed the inevitable next step.

My wife and I settled into marriage, but I must admit that my heart wasn't in it. My time was occupied with finishing medical school and starting my residency and internship. By the time our oldest son, James Victor, was born, I was seldom at home, content to work double shifts at the hospital and leaving my wife and child alone for too long.

As time passed, I began to expect more and more from my wife, while continuing to give little in return. As a physician specializing in neuromuscular diseases and injuries, I opened my own practice, while remaining on staff at the hospital. I couldn't understand why my wife did not share my enthusiasm over my career, why she never wanted to serve on the committees and charities that other doctors wives enjoyed, why she seemed to pull farther and farther away from me.

When our second son, Michael Vincent, was born ten years later, my wife and I were more like strangers than we had ever been. Nothing mattered to me but my work. Jamie and Mike kept her busy, but she began to feel unfulfilled as a person. But I was too wrapped up in my own life to pay attention to her needs, or to even care.

Within two years after Mike's birth, my wife and I had both changed so much that we no longer had a marriage in the truest sense of the word. One evening, a rare time when I was home, my wife said she was going to do some marketing. She left the house, got in her station wagon and pulled out. Hours passed, and she had not returned. I had phoned the supermarket where we traded and had her paged -- no response. By 2:00 a.m., I telephoned the police, who told me that nothing could be done until she had been missing for over 24-hours.

But the next day, I knew that nothing had happened to her, and that she had simply had enough and had chosen to abandon her family. Things were missing from the house -- her things. Suitcases, clothing, her jewelry chest and a few personal items that I knew she would never leave behind.

For a time the police and even a private investigator tried to locate her, all to no avail. After awhile, with no leads to go on, the search ended and I picked up the pieces of my life and went on. I hired someone to move into our home and help with my sons. Mike was too young to know what had happened, but for Jamie (now twelve years old), it was a very difficult time. He loved his mother deeply, and needing me more than ever, he was left to the care of a stranger new to our home while his father returned to the work schedule that had driven his mother away in the first place.

Through all of this, my sister Joan had played a valuable supporting role for my children and myself. After their mother left, Joan would often take the boys out for a day, she called them often, they talked to her about things they felt I was too busy to hear. She is, in so many ways, the only "mother" Jamie and Mike ever knew.

Our lives, now so changed, continued over the next few years. Then something occured which changed all of our lives forever. In 1984, Jamie (then sixteen years old) came to me with something he needed to share. He wanted to quit high school and move to Los Angeles. I didn't even give it a second thought. No son of mine was going to drop out of school and go off at such a young age to be on his own. It was unthinkable. But he had another bomb to drop on me -- and I was not prepared to hear what my child was about to say. Jamie proceeded to tell me that he was a homosexual. Not that he felt he had homosexual tendencies, but that he had been a practicing homosexual with an older eighteen year old boy for the last year.

The arguement that ensued could never be fully told. I felt totally sick by what I had heard, and at that moment, I could have cared less where Jamie went or what happened to him. In a moment of not thinking rationally, I signed his paper allowing him to leave school, I threw his belongings into boxes and told him to leave my home and get out of my life forever, and to never attempt to make contact with me again. To this day, I can remember the last words we exchanged. I yelled from the front door of our home, "Get away from me. You're never to walk inside this house again, do you hear me? You are DEAD to me!" And Jamie's response was, "Don't you know, Dad? I'm DEAD ALREADY!"

That was the last time I saw my firstborn for the next seventeen years. He never tried to make contact with me, he never asked for anything, he never wrote a letter. It was as if he had ceased to exist, which was fine by me. Mike and I continued to live there alone until I remarried in 1996.

I was fifty-two when I married the thirty year old Diana, and she made such a difference in my life. For the first time, I felt loved by someone who was actually interested in me as a person AND in my work. My house felt like a home for the first time. Diana is a beautiful person, physically and inwardly, and I was never so happy.

Of course, at the time of our marriage, Mike was seventeen and he had problems in seeing someone else move in. Although he couldn't remember his mother, I think he lived with the hope that one day she would return as mysteriously as she had disappeared. But after so many years, it was unlikely we would hear from her or ever know where she was. Diana tried her best wtih Mike, but he wasn't going for any type of relationship with her. When he graduated high school the following year and went to college, he moved into a dorm that Fall.

Then the year 2001 arrived. A new millinium, and suddenly a new life for Diana and me. Last December, my sister Joannie's family became Christians. One by one, I witnessed the miraculous changes in the lives of Joan and her sons. Drug addicts healed! Even Joan's marriage was restored after twenty-two years of divorce.

In spending valuable time with Joan and Jerry's newly revived family, I began to see the need for the Lord Jesus in my life. I had never known any form of religion in my life. But as I talked more and more to my nephew David, I could see so clearly that this was so much more than a "religion". This was a personal one-on-one relationship with Christ Himself -- and oh, how I longed for that! So what ultimate joy it was when I gave myself and my all to the Lord. Shortly afterward, Diana joined the Kingdom of God, as well. Now all three of us were Christians, Mike included.

But I was new to this, and even though my thoughts often turned to Jamie, I could never have made that all-important first contact with him. I was still deadset against his lifestyle and what he was. Once again, my sister played a pivital role.

Joan had never lost contact with Jamie. He had been living in Tahoe for the past ten yers, and she would often either visit him or invite him to come to San Diego to visit in her home. Since becoming a Christian himself, Joan's son David had carried a burden for his cousin, as he had for several of his relatives. He talked to his mother about it, and Joan and her husband Jerry made a trip to Tahoe to talk with Jamie about his soul. Jamie promised to come to San Diego the next week, and wanted to know if he could see me. When Joan called me with this, I reluctantly agreed to at least see him. It would be the first time in seventeen years that I had seen my son, and I was a little nervous about this reunion. Jamie would be arriving on Friday, have dinner with Joan's family on Friday night, and then I would come over on Saturday to see him.

But the Lord had something else in mind. And as always, His ways are always best!

On Friday night at around 11:30, I received a phone call from one of my nephews. Jamie needed me to go to my sister's home immediately. The entire family had shared their testimonies with him, and Jamie was under such conviction that he was ready to surrender all to the Lord -- but he wanted his father there with him. Diana and I left immediately.

Seeing him for the first time in so long, I didn't see a homosexual whose lifestyle I despised, I didn't see the rebellious son who had argued so violently with me before walking out of our home and my life, I didn't see any of that. What I saw was my child -- now so broken -- reaching out to me for love, acceptance and forgiveness. Holding him in my arms as we hugged, all of those old feelings melted away almost immediately. He asked me to pray with him. All of us knealt right in the living room floor and began praying. Diana, Mike and me, Joan, Jerry and all their sons. The prayer which had began around 12:30 midnight would still be continuing at 8:00 the next morning, for Jamie had much to confess, much to release and much to deal with. But praise God! It was all settled during that long night of prayer and weeping.

Jamie never returned to Tahoe, not even to collect his belongings. He has left the homosexual life he once lived, and is growing daily towards being the MAN God intended him to be.

I have thought so much of how my life could have been spared so much heartache and pain had somewhere in my youth, I had met Jesus Christ. Had God been more important to me than my work. Had I put my family second to Him, and allowed my career to follow after that. How much richer and fuller would my life have been. How much better life would have been for my sons. How much better care my patients would have received if I had helped to heal their souls as well as their bodies. But we can't go back and change what is in the past -- we can only learn from it and move forward.

Today I am proud to say that I have my priorities in order. Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes before the Lord. My family is restored, and we live together now, with both boys living at home again and enjoying the family life we share.

I still have my practice, and my greatest joy is in sharing with my patients what Jesus has done in my life -- and what He can do for them, if they will only let Him in.

As a successful doctor, the world would have said that I had it all, when in reality (being lost), I had nothing. But one day, the doctor met the Great Physician, and the healing that He brought to my life at long last GAVE me LIFE. I will never be the same again.