God, Let This Be A Testimony For You

When his doctor told him those words, Larry Bjorklund was floored. Larry had struggled sleeping for a few weeks—his lungs burning so intensely that he would wake up often throughout the night. His symptoms finally worsened to such a degree that he had to see a doctor.

Upon receiving the news that he had had a heart attack, Larry and his wife, Judy, drove to the emergency room. After nine hours of tests, Larry was admitted to the hospital. The test results showed his heart was enlarged with one valve continuously open.

“At this point, we were asking all kinds of questions,” Larry said. “We wanted to know how this happened and what caused it.” There was no heart disease on either side of his family. Because Larry was otherwise in excellent physical condition, he never would have suspected heart disease. “We were already praying and believing for my complete healing,” he said.

Larry was in the hospital for four days. After all the tests, he was told that he had lost 80 percent of his heart muscle function. The doctor also found a goiter on Larry’s thyroid. A virus might have attacked his heart, Larry was told, or the thyroid could have short-circuited his heart and caused it to become enlarged. To get his physical condition under control, Larry was given a nuclear iodine pill that killed his thyroid.

Larry went from taking no medications to taking 20 pills a day consisting of 13 different medications. He went home, rested, and continued to take the medicine, but he grew steadily worse. “I got to the point where I could not eat or sleep, and I was literally wasting away. But during this whole time my wife and I were crying out, ‘God, let this be a testimony for You!’ ”

The following month, Larry was readmitted to the hospital. More tests showed that he had now lost 88 percent of his heart muscle. The doctor told Larry that he was losing his kidney and liver function and that he would probably need a heart transplant.

Larry told the doctor, “Get me to where I can eat and sleep. Then I’ll go home, turn my face to the wall just like Hezekiah, and I will get my healing” (see Isa. 38:1–8).

One month later, Larry found himself in the hospital again. Doctors inserted a Swan-Ganz catheter into his heart to monitor its function and blood flow. They placed a defibrillator next to his heart, because they were concerned his heart would go into arrhythmia. They also inserted a Hickman catheter and connected it to an IV pump to inject medication 24 hours a day.

After being in the hospital for nine days, Larry was told again he needed a heart transplant. After another series of tests, Larry was told doctors wanted to put him on a transplant list immediately.

“I had been confessing all along that the Lord is the strength of my heart, it shall not fail,” Larry said. “I did not have peace about being on a transplant list, so I asked if I could wait until I saw the doctor face-to-face.”

With only 17 days until his next appointment, Larry prayed, “Okay, God, we have 17 days. We need to be able to show them improvement.”

Larry felt led to have a specific person pray for him. At the same time, he received a prayer cloth from Kenneth Hagin Ministries. “From the moment I received the cloth, I kept it with me all the time,” he said. “I wore shirts that had a pocket over my heart, and I would wear it over my heart and at night put it under my pillow. This cloth was a point of focus to help me continue to stay in faith. I hung on to that prayer cloth and kept the switch of faith turned on.”

At Larry’s next appointment, his wife told the doctor she had seen a noticeable change in her husband and asked that his heart be retested. The doctor said, “I would test him if he was doing more exercise or cutting the lawn, but he isn’t. So we’re not going to test his heart right now.” The doctor told Larry to go home and get ready for the heart transplant.

Determined he wasn’t going to need a heart transplant, Larry went home and immediately cut his lawn. “It was a chore just to get the riding lawn mower out and cut a little bit of the back yard,” he said. “Then I got out the push mower just to prove I could do it. I took the push mower to the front and mowed for a short amount of time, and I was totally spent. At least it was a start. I did something. From that day on, I started to walk some every day.”

Larry had put action to his faith. Two months later, the doctors retested his heart. Previously his heart had been working at only 12 percent of what it should have been. The test showed it was working at 25 percent, to the amazement of his doctor. “This just doesn’t happen,” the doctor said. “It was too late. You needed to have a heart transplant. This is not normal.”

Larry also scheduled an appointment to see another doctor about his thyroid. Again, his doctor was amazed. “We killed your thyroid and now it is working perfectly,” she said. “I am taking you off the thyroid medication. We will check again in three months and adjust the meds accordingly.” They checked his thyroid three months later and it continued to work perfectly.

Four months later, Larry went skiing in Colorado with his wife and son. One year after feeling the first symptoms, he was told by an internist, “I cannot wait until they do an echocardiogram on you. You have the heart of an athlete.”