Sid Roth

SID:  Hello, Sid Roth, your investigative reporter here with Tom and Ginny Hauser. Tom, give me a break, you’re making a quarter of a million dollars a year, you’re a nuclear engineer, you have it made, Ginny I guess you’re kind of happy with his career… 

GINNY:  Oh yes. 

SID:  And then one day he gets this thing in his head Ginny that he wants to leave his job and go into ministry. How did you get that in your head? 

TOM:  Well it was a journey; it really has been a journey. We got saved back in about 1974, my wife got saved first, and the Lord brought me into the kingdom, I call it be the two by four method. Our daughter had been sick, I thought I was saved, I had been raised in a Methodist denomination, when our daughter got sick, all of my scientist background, I had really made science an idol, rationalization… 

SID:  Now I find engineers are very difficult to believe in the invisible world as a people group. When someone is next to me on an airplane and they say they’re n engineer I say, oh brother! 

TOM:  That’s what happened to me, my wife came home and she said I got saved, and I argued with her and I said you’ve been a good Catholic girl, you’ve been saved, you know what are you talking about. Well, our daughter got sick, and at nine months they put her in the hospital. And we had a Jewish doctor, Doctor Nichman, and they had tried everything to find out what was wrong with her intestinal disorder, and they essentially gave up, they had tried all the testing, they had her on intravenous feeding. My wife got home and said we’re going to a healing service and we are going to trust that Jesus will heal her. 

SID:  Did you believe it’s possible? 

TOM:  No. 

SID:  I know you didn’t Tom. Give me a break, a nuclear engineer. 

TOM:  And I walked into the hospital room after Doctor Nichman had told us basically they had given up, my wife walked in with me and my daughter was essentially tied down because they had been I-V feeding her and she wanted to pull it out of her head, and I had the closest thing to a nervous breakdown. I said I’ve got to leave, I drove home in tears, we lived in the woods in upstate New York, I was working on a nuclear site for the fast attack submarine service at that point. And I said to God in anguish of my soul, I said, I’ve heard all my life from my mother that you are a God who does all these good things, if you even exist, heal my daughter. And if you will, then I’ll talk to you.   Well… 

SID:  Big of you to be so gracious with the creator of the universe. 

TOM:  Yeah, it was pretty arrogant, now I, oh my Lord.  Well about a week later my wife came home and said we’re going to a healing service. There was a Baptist pastor named Reverend Floyd Baker. He had been Hells Angel, got converted, he looked like a Hells Angel in a suit, right.   We go to this open-air park at upstate New York in Schenectady, and he’s giving words of knowledge. And I’m thinking man, this is a scam, this just can’t be true you know, I don’t even know what these are, and all of a sudden he points, he stops in the middle of his sermon and he points to the bleachers where I’m sitting in the back with my wife and said there’s a couple praying for a young child, and that child is being healed of an intestinal disorder right now. And I said, man, I think I said to my wife, did you tell him. 

GINNY:  He did, he did. But I didn’t. 

TOM:  And she gets on her knees worshipping Christ, and I’m like, my left-brain is going tilt.   

SID:  I understand. 

TOM:  And so at that point we went to Doctor Nichman, I think he thought we were very stressed. My wife explained to the Jewish doctor that Jesus had just healed our baby.   And so we took the baby, my wife a great woman of faith, the doctor had given me all these prescription things, you know that I was supposed to buy, and I bought a hundred dollars worth of banana flakes, Pedialyte®, mineral substitutes, be careful he’s warning. She gets home and says, don’t worry about that stuff, Jesus has healed the baby, puts the baby in a high chair, puts the finger food, and little Sarah ate I don’t know how many meals in that one sitting. About a week later, she’s still well, and she is gaining weight. And at that point I took a walk in the woods after the doctor said, well whatever is going on here, I don’t know how to explain it, keep doing what you’re doing. And I took a walk… 

SID:  But wait a second. How in the world did you know to believe like that? You’re a baby believer in God yourself. 

GINNY:  I had, I had no other choice.   I just was a desperate mom and I wanted for my child, and I said, you know I had just gotten save, started to believe that the Lord was real, he wasn’t just someone you prayed to and you are doing a good deed or something, so I said we are going to believe this and see if that is really real.    

SID:  I know, but you have a Tom, a doubting Tom over here. 

GINNY:  Well we believe in complete opposites you see. And I said lets just trust God for it. 

SID:  Okay. 

GINNY:  And we did. 

SID:  So Tom, you go out in the woods… 

TOM:  I go out in the woods and say, okay, so you are real, I don’t like your methods, I don’t like it at all. So that’s what I tell people now. I’m one of those guys, a two by four. There is a pastor I tell this joke once in a while. There is a pastor, an old pastor who had a horse and he loved this horse, and he’s given this horse away to another one, and he says I just have one criteria; you need to love this horse and treat him well. So the young man says I can do that, so he gets up on the horse and says giddy-up and the horse doesn’t go anywhere. So the old pastor picks up a two-by-four, whacks the horse on the side of the head and says now go.  And the young man says I thought you said be nice to him, and he says, I am, I’m just getting his attention. 

SID:  Okay. 

TOM:  So God got my attention.

SID:  And? 

TOM:  At that point I really surrendered. I said all right I give up, I don’t understand it, I’m willing to check my rationalism, all my science stuff, I’ve made an idol out of science, you’ve obviously done something here I don’t understand. I want more. And at that point, a week later, I think my wife invited a young man, one of the men from our church who had been in this guitar mass who had led my wife to the Lord, he came over and says, why don’t you just give up and why don’t you surrender, you’ll go free. How do I do that? There’s got to be a plan, there’s got to be a model, I’m a man of models and all that. He led me to Christ and within one minute I got the gift of tongues. And I didn’t really understand al of what that was, there’s been a lot of controversy with it… 

SID:  Well you know what happened you had what was known as a, you’ve heard of heart bypass, he had a mind bypass. He started speaking a language that he had never been trained. This can’t happen to an engineer, but it did. Don’t go away, we’ll be right back.