I would like to relate an experience I had recently that is about the
most profound thing I have ever experienced.

I have been a Christian since the age of 6 when a teenage baby sitter
shared the Gospel with my brother and me.  What joyful news it was.  To
live forever in a beautiful Heaven ruled by a wonderful loving God.

Over the years there were different times when I would try to witness to
those around me about the Lord, and necessity of salvation through His
atoning Death.  I may have often planted  "seeds"  in my interaction
with others, but, if I was brutally honest, there was probably only one
person I totally successfully led to the Lord.  And that was 35 years
ago when as a pulmonary resident at the Cleveland Clinic, I succeeded in
leading a down-and-out psychiatric drug abusing wreck of a neighboring
minister's  nephew to the Lord.

Subsequently, I made heavy use of Richard Eby's Heaven and Hell
experiences relaying them to patients and relatives alike., which made
witnessing relatively easy until Eby passed away.

But more recently I have been surrounded by professional nonbeliever
physicians.  They are openly hostile, or, more usually, just plain don't
care.  Believers there are aplenty, but they are Hindus or Muslims.
Reaching these people is well nigh impossible, with my intellectual and
persuading tools.

A vascular surgeon I am good friends with used to be an atheist before
reading  Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith ("Why, of course there is a
God,"  he concluded on reading this book).  And Lee Strobel's The Case
For Christ (this book "scared me to death," he related).  Having been

there, he was superb at making others at least think about the claims of
Christ, and he did it through repeatedly asking rhetorical questions and
eliciting their opinions, giving them rope with which to box them in
with their inconsistencies.  To do this patience of Job, which he has.

His ability to do this, however was like a mirror showing to me my
defects of persuasion, because of my impatience with the incredible
stupidity of secularists.  I was known as the one who wore Christianity
on his sleeve, there was no doubt as to my opinions.

In part this was because of another friend, an agnostic psychologist,
who would often pin me to the wall, forcing me to blurt truths of the
Gospel in front of everybody all attentive.  "And Carl, tell me, do you
believe one goes to Hell if he does not believe in Jesus Christ?"
"What
about these Hindus here?"  "Why do you think that is so, Carl?"
etc.  In
doing this he inadvertedly helped me to witness in spite of myself.

I had become bothered by my lack of success or persistence in reaching
out, coupled with the posts we all see on the Internet by legalists on
how we should all be (just like them).

It was in this discouraged mode that I went to bed one night and prayed
to the Lord to help me, being very down.

Two days later a new patient came to the office and brought his wife
along, whom it turns out in the past had sustained a cardiac arrest in
an ambulance on the way to a hospital while on vacation.  She looked
down and could see through the roof of the ambulance as well as hear
what was going on and the commotion.  Then ups she goes to Heaven where
she is in the Presence of the Lord  She has been given the blessing of
being allowed to return there five times in the Spirit, and is writing a
book about her experiences.

But on one such visit before she and her husband ever made an
appointment to come to me, she told me she was transported to Heaven
where the Lord said to her the following:

"You are to go meet and tell a Dr. Carl Lindquist that the first Words
he will hear from Me when he sees Me in Heaven will be, "Well done, good
and faithful servant." .............

What an extraordinarly kind, gracious thing for the Lord to do and
say!!  And the way He went about it.  Straight from Headquarters.

I was staggered and stunned by the immense comforting and timing of the
Lord and His Care for a nothing.  And have found that this narration
really hits believers hard when they hear it, as most are in the same
boat as me.  The usual response is a grabbing of the chest and a moan.

I know in my spirit, that this experience is met to be a comfort for all
struggling and discouraged Christians who hear it, and He wants me to
tell it.