Those of you that know me a bit better, will know that the hand of cards I have been dealt with in the last 12 years is, well, not (!) a good hand.
Twice now I had very close calls with death and been fighting the good battle non-stop the past 12 years. Lots of pain, kidney problems, liver problems and many other serious health issues with very dark clouds hanging over me.
But you know what, through it all, I’ve put my poker face on and played that hand of cards to the best of my ability! I have grown immensely as a person. Suffering and pain and dark clouds hanging over your future is the BEST opportunity to become the YOU, you never was. Does not matter what your prognosis…you will not exhale that last breath until God decide it is time. Make this an opportunity to look into that mirror and say “I like what I see, I like the heart of the person looking back at me!”. Apart from personal growth it also allowed me to grow in my walk of faith with God. Let this be your moment with God Almighty…believe me nothing brings more peace and hope.
No-one is going to live forever, tomorrow might be your last day, you might be run over, no one knows. So stand tall and stand proud, whatever dark cloud is hanging over you is irrelevant…play that hand of cards with your best poker face and win!
Walking by faith – Everyone knows by now there are a deeper side to me and a life altering back story.
But I have never really told my story about my walk in faith.
I am opening my heart here and I know there are risks…because the world is not always a good place to lay your heart bare. But this is the time to do it…my walk in faith has brought me to this point where I feel compelled to share.
So those that want to know about a story of pain, hope, miracles and LIFE, read on.
As many of you know, 11 years ago (at age 40) I was lying on my “deathbed” in hospital. At one point no blood pressure and heartbeat and ready to die. A brutal attack and mutilation left me with a broken soul and the will to live has left me, my heart was filled with darkness and pain which I could not carry anymore.
Me 2 months after hospital:
Then the unexpected happened. While I was lying in my hospital bed, weak and not expecting anything but death, I heard a voice, God’s voice. The voice was clear…”Gert, I am offering you life…I have a plan for you. You must choose…”
I cannot put in words that moment…I experienced an incredible beauty, softness, kindness, pureness, holiness, love and I saw LIFE…and in that moment my life changed. I was heartbroken, I was weak and I spend a lot of time in conversation with God over the next few days lying in my bed. I was soooo close to choosing death…but this unexpected experience showed me LIFE and I made my choice.
Sure, before this I knew about God and I knew the Bible. But this changed my world. Suddenly God was not just in a book anymore but He was more real to me than this world around me. And for just that brief moment I felt the touch of God…and I was utterly overwhelmed and unprepared.
Two weeks in hospital and I was strong enough to leave. Prognosis not good…some doctors gave me a couple of years. But it was not in their hands, I chose life and God was in control.
I was a changed man…but, the pain and darkness in my heart of what happened was not over. The weakness I have, is that I put a lid on things and push it deep down, trying to bury it…never really dealing with it.
My walk in faith deepened over the next years.
Now at 51 I am a living miracle of God. The body is still broken. Kidneys functioning at 50%, struggling with my liver, and that is just the tip of the iceberg with my serious health problems. But that is insignificant for God…look at me…with my severe health issues and being expected to be long dead by now, God has turned this around to the extend that I am looking the healthiest and fittest I ever did in my life. For Him, NOTHING is impossible. He is in control, not the doctors, not me, not medical science.
Me, today…4 months away from 52:
Now this all sound incredible and it is, but my world was about to be rocked again. God knew that the pain and darkness that I am trying to bury needs to be addressed. Every now and then an event triggers the lid from coming off slightly and the pain and darkness boils over. And recently the Holy Spirit kicked off that lid for good. All that pain and darkness surfaced and there was no way I could put back the lid on again. The Holy Spirit do not mess around…that lid was gone!
I struggled to breath, it felt like my heart was tearing in two…I pleaded with the Holy Spirit to please ask God to come and take my life…I could not bear the pain, it was overwhelming. My power to push it down was gone.
But let me give you a glimpse into how incredible God works.
The Holy Spirit literally forced me to walk into a church I do not know the next day, and walk up to the first friendly face I see and tell him I need someone to pray with me, now (!) and intercede on my behalf before God. Now anyone that knows me, will realize this is the worst thing anybody can ask me to do. I am a total introvert, sitting always quietly in the corner doing my own thing and NEVER EVER just walk up to people I don’t know, let alone in an environment total foreign to me. This was going against everything I am.
But instead of doing this, I wanted to die, because this darkness and pain was so intense and overwhelming that again I was at this crossroad point in my life where I had to choose between life and death. I had a young son who I adore and a beautiful loving wife and if it was not for them chances was I was going to choose the easy road out. I was breaking down in tears continuously…and I am NOT an emotional person!
So I DID IT! I just did it in total obedience. I went to the church the Holy Spirit indicated to me, my wife and son by my side. I walked up to the first friendly face I saw and I told him what the Holy Spirit instructed me to do. He smiled and said I must go and sit, someone will come to me. A few moments later a guy, my age, walked up to me and touch my shoulder and smile. We went to a quiet corner outside and I told him my story, laying my heart bare, told him of my pain and the way the Holy Spirit is working with me now. We bend down and started praying, he laid me before God…during this moment the Holy Spirit told me that because of my obedience, He will now plea my case before God and lay my pain of the darkest corners of my heart before God. I could hear it, I could literally hear the murmurings, not words, but I could hear everything. I felt the touch of God as I did in my hospital bed and broke down in tears by grace I do not deserve. God once again began the 2nd miracle in my life, healing my pain in my heart.
The following week was extremely emotional for me as the Holy Spirit carried me through this process of cutting the pain in my heart out, piece by piece.
I thought my walk was close with God previously, but had no idea how intense it was about to become.
This God I bow down too, has become more real than anything else in this world. I am totally unprepared for how amazing and incredible His love, His holiness, His power and His kindness is.
So many people I talk to over the internet ask me “Why do God, if He is a good God, allow this pain and suffering in this world to continue?”
The world is a broken place. We have made our choices to abandon God and with it comes pain and suffering. God is the ultimate gentleman…He NEVER force His will on anyone. Bad things happen to even good people everyday…and you know what, it strengthens you to become a stronger person reaching greater heights. Look what happened to me…through it God strengthened me to reach heights I thought never possible in my life and I am touching many lives out there and helping people. I am a hard nut to crack and God knows it. He had plans for me…but left to my own devices that plan would never come into play. He allowed things to happened to me and come over my path. Bad things…like Job, but like God is, He turned everything around into blessings beyond believe. I still had to make the choices myself…but God gentlemanly lead me in the direction…
God wants so much the best for us, but when we abandon Him we are left alone in this broken world. The heart of God is such that He allowed that, which was most precious to Him, to be put through pain and mutilation and to die on a cross for us, just so that me and you would have direct access to God and the Holy Spirit.
My sins in this broken world prevents me from having a direct link with God, because before God nothing that has any sin or darkness can stand and live, nothing. God is pure and holy. Only through the sacrifice of Jesus, who was blameless, could He die in my place and through that allow me to talk to God and be saved. It had to be someone blameless, he had to had no sin because that is the only way He could die for ours.
God could have sent armies of angels to rescue Jesus, but this shows God’s heart…unmeasurable kindness and compassion. He did not have to do this for us…He is the Almighty God, rescuing us just by grace…which we do not deserve.
Now, many devoted believers don’t like it when they hear of someone like me who had such incredible experiences with God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ (I had Christ holding His hand on my shoulder at one of my toughest moments in prayer and more…)
Why me, what makes me special?
Remember Maria?…remember that between all the disciples of Jesus, SHE was the one that quietly bent down with her tears falling on Jesus feet and rubbed very expensive oil/perfume over His feet, no words, just an act of utter compassion. His disciples were not impressed about the logic that such expensive perfume was wasted. But she had a relationship with God on another level, why?…because of the AMOUNT of grace she required to be saved. Be happy and joyful if you required little grace to follow God, then you are blessed indeed. People like me (and Maria) carried so much pain and darkness in our hearts that the grace we require, is massive. This amount of grace changes you on every level and your relationship with God, is extremely intense.
Last week on one of the biggest radio stations in Cape Town, they aired this young woman who had a vision where Jesus Christ appeared to her and told her: “Go and tell the world, I have finished preparing all your places in heaven. I am coming to fetch you. The time is up.”
The Holy Spirit confirmed this in my heart…
Now, I know God said, no one knows the date and time, but I am making sure me and my family is ready…I cannot wait to join my Lord and Saviour!
I pray this article means something to you…it comes from deep within my soul.
In a lot of my videos you will notice I am talking about not just changing the outside of the body but also the inside.
The outside (muscles, looks), that make but a small part out of what you really are. By far the biggest part is that what you are inside. How your heart is, because no transformation is worthwhile if you do not also transform the heart.
So this article is where we get a little deep. Here I am going to talk about something you can add to your life that will not just make you feel incredibly good about yourself but can have life changing impact to those crossing your path….and can literally make the difference between life and death for some…
Now understand me, I am not putting myself on a pedestal here…believe me (!) I am still working very hard to change from the inside for the better. It is a process that probably be never complete. For one man it was and is and that is Jesus Christ and that is my role model I aspire too.
Ok, let’s get deep for a moment…
If you’ve been spared suffering, real suffering, the kind of suffering where you sit in a corner and cry hopelessly, you are blessed. A suffering where you want to die, but you do not have the guts to do it yourself. A suffering where all hope is lost and the pain and despair goes deeper than your bones. A suffering where it feels as if your heart is tearing in two and you struggle to breath…
MANY, MANY people are at that point, whatever the reason. The reason is not important, the world is a broken place and there are a multitude of reasons. The fact is those people have reached the bottom of a pit where all hope is lost. Their will to live, their humanity stripped from them. I was there myself, and know what it feels like.
The broken people are people you see around you. People you work with, sometimes people very close to you. They hide their pain to protect themselves because through their experience, showing pain and hurt would bring further pain by rejection because people do not want to be bothered by those in despair. Entertainment, laughing and be happy is all we are interested in…
But you know what, those people do not want your Bible verse, they do not even want your money and most of the time they do not want your solutions…because they believe there are none. All that people want and really NEED is a loving gesture of caring. A soft hand touching their shoulder lovingly, a hug with no words that just say “I am here for you”, just sitting quietly by them…just be there. They need hope because they have lost all hope. Caring gives them that hope and caring restores their humanity.
That gesture can be as little as a friendly and loving smile.
But when it comes to do something physical help, then you can CHANGE lives – when you are ready to get out of your comfort zone and physically help your fellow human being who have lost all, including hope, that is when amazing things happen.
Sadly the world is what it is because of us, no one else. But we have it in us to make it so much better. We are created in the image of God, but we fail soooo many times to live this because we don’t want to change our hearts.
If you want to really change from the inside who you are…this is one of the most powerful places to start. To become part of these people’s lives and see what great impact you can have gives an immense positive feeling, which you will never ever reach by even the most amazing body transformation. This is powerful stuff!
Make it your daily mission to show just one different person, every day, you care.
This is true transformation – body and soul! The most beautiful people who have ever crossed my path was the ones who had immense inner beauty with their amazing kind and compassionate heart. That overshadowed any aspect of their outer beauty for me and later on that inner beauty was all I could see. Now imagine you transforming your body and become this incredible “wow” physique, and at the same time the inner beauty becomes so immense that it start to overshadow even this incredible body transformation…now THAT is true beauty…super hero beauty!
Those with cancer: http://gertlouw.com/2013/10/28/fighting-cancer-to-survive/
Those with Fibromylgia: http://gertlouw.com/?s=Fibromyalgia
You might have health problems, lost your job, a loved one might have died or you might just struggle to keep head above water. I can never have all the answers for you but what I do know is that your faith and hope will lead you through this. It will most probably get even worse and more painful, but the ONE thing you must not let go is your faith and hope.
Now I am not naïve in thinking all with always be sunshine in the end of the day. Life sometimes just do not work like that. But through faith, there is hope and many, many times that hope turns into sunshine.
I have experienced this myself when 11 years ago I had my darkest hour in my life. Through faith I kept going and started to live a healthy and fit lifestyle. Yes there was days that I thought it cannot get worse and then usually did get worse…but faith gave me hope and hope kept me going.
Today for me the sun is shining, it is 11 years later for me, I am healthy, looking the best I ever did and all because of the faith that gave me hope. Yes, you have to bring your part and you have to do what you can humanly possible do to change your situation, but keep the faith, keep the hope and hand it over to God in on your knees in prayer!
Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
Romans 12:12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.
