I was brought up in a Christian home, the youngest of four children until I was 14 when my parents had another child. She was born with multiple medical issues and spent the first 17 months of her life in hospital. Physically weak, unable to speak or walk, she had a delightful personality. She died at 4 when my parents took their first weekend away after she came home. God spared them being present for that trauma.

I came to faith early in my pre-teens. My church was small but loving and committed to its youth. Our leaders, especially pastors, were biblically educated and committed to teaching the Scriptures, rather than their own opinions. Several of them were important mentors to me in my teens, twenties, and thirties. My parents’ generation made room for us in the church. The put up with our noise, our music, our overconfidence because they cared about our spiritual growth.

Even with these advantages my faith was challenged by the Creation and Evolution debate, to the point that I refused to read the Old Testament for much of my teen years. Fortunately, I had a strong experience of Christ’s love and forgiveness, as well as a dynamic peer group in the Church.

Only when I began to teach and found myself teaching Evolution in an Ancient History course, was I forced to confront the issue. Research lead to the development of a teaching unit on ‘Comparative Origins’ that I taught in a public school for the next 20 years. That also sparked my interest in apologetics. I remained active in leadership in the church, married a Christian girl between degrees at university, enjoy largely Christian friends and neighbours, traveled, built a house and began a family. Plus, I loved my career - teaching high school history students in a small school in rural Nova Scotia, Canada.

After a 33-year career in education, I was able to focus more time on the historical evidence for Christianity and have written several books on the subject; ‘Examining Jesus: Lessons on the Historical Evidence for Jesus’, ‘Faith Building Evidence’ and ‘Frustrated with Faith’. Recently I have been writing short eBooks and creating related digital products, like tools for Christian parents to enhance family devotions and how to apply apologetics to teens tough faith question.

Also, after my career in teaching and school administration ended, Kathleen and I began an apartment rental business at a local university. We thought it would allow us to travel - which it did, and help out our adult children - which we did, but I think God knew we would need extra financial resources when our oldest son had a traumatic vehicle accident in Thailand, where he had just gone to teach.

That accident and the resulting multiple physical injuries and his traumatic brain injury (TBI) has defined much of our lives for the last 13 years. My writing was partly a bit of a release from the difficulty of dealing with his situation and partly a way I could minister to others and still be home. The first 5 years were hard for all of us, but God has allowed him to heal more than we ever anticipated. He still needs a lot of support, but he is back substitute teaching and that is a small miracle.

Links

website: www.faithbuildingevidence.com

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglas-schofield-63748b291/

Personal FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009471635555

FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/FBEMinistries/

Welcome to 12-Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, His creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

What is God for you, Douglas?

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

I'm in Nova Scotia.

It's on the Atlantic coast of Canada.

It's just a little bit above Boston and New York.

From what I read, your son had an accident here while he was...

Where was he when he had the accident, Douglas?

He was in Phuket in Thailand.

We have four children, three boys and a girl.

And Mark is our oldest son who had the accident.

He had just started teaching at an international school.

He was only there three weeks and he was on a motorbike and he wasn't used to riding motorbikes and caught in the heavy rainstorm and lost control, went right into a telephone pole and almost killed himself.

How has that affected you?

It was a long road of recovery.

We actually saw a tremendous amount of answered prayer in the first month that we were in Thailand.

One thing after another, he recovered much quicker than anybody anticipated.

He was supposed to have his skull partially removed so the brain would be able to continue to swell.

But when they took him into the operation and did the preparation, they did one final examination of the skull and the swelling had stopped.

So they weighed it.

So he never did have that operation, which allowed him to come home much earlier than expected.

Because if you have that operation, of course, you can't fly because of the pressure changes in the flight.

You were in Thailand at the time?

We went over, it took us three or four days to make the arrangements.

And so we were there with him because in Thailand they have excellent medical care, but the family is responsible for the non-medical care, like cleaning and feeding and that type of thing.

And so we did that for a month.

And we were, if you're there for 30 days, then you have to leave, go out of the country and come back in because we didn't have a visa or anything.

But we were able actually, before the 30 days were up, actually on the 30th day to fly him home.

But he had to have a doctor fly with him and a nurse fly with him as well.

The cost of the flight was, I think it was $56,000.

That was unexpected, but our children and the other children back home had created a GoFundMe page that raised all of that to bring him home.

Between the time of actually getting to Thailand, the three days, what was life like at that point?

It was difficult.

His wife was with us.

She was a Korean girl and they'd only been married six weeks.

And so we had to get her ready and prepared to go over.

We didn't have any documentation.

His wallet had been stolen a couple of days before and he lost all of his cash and all of his ID.

So I had to try to get some documentation from the government.

And I was fortunate, or the Lord oversaw, contacted a woman in the medical department who I explained the situation and she gave me his MSI card, which allowed us to have medical care.

So, you know, there were things like that.

I had to get a driver's license so I would have a photo ID of him.

We were able to do that in three days.

In the meantime, my wife was getting everything else ready and getting the preparation for the airline tickets and so on and so forth.

We had been scheduled the week following to go to Ireland on a vacation with friends of ours.

So we canceled that and actually gave the tickets to another friend and, you know, lost money, but that was immaterial at that point in time.

Yeah, I would imagine.

So it was, it was, there was a lot of prayer.

I actually was preaching the next Sunday.

We found out on a Saturday at 3.30 in the morning and I was due to preach in church the following Sunday because we were in between pastors at the time.

And I had some responsibilities at the church.

I had two different people call me and say, if you want me to preach, I'll do it for you.

But it was a unique kind of situation.

So I said, no, I think I need to do it.

But it was difficult.

What did you preach on?

It was a sermon on financial responsibility and giving.

And so I didn't want to really put that over to somebody else because that's, I had it all prepared and I'm not a pastor, I'm a teacher.

But I just felt that it was better for me to do it so that the pastors didn't have to accept that kind of blowback that they sometimes get.

People don't like to hear about money.

Yeah, I get you.

But I had two different people.

One of them, a professor from the local seminary at Acadia Divinity College, bless his heart.

So, you know, that was encouraging.

And we had a lot of people around us, our Bible study group, a lot of people at church who were praying.

And I got to tell you that during the time that we were in Thailand, my wife kept in contact with a variety of different people around the world.

I had been involved in convention, our Canadian Baptist of Atlantic Canada.

And so there were churches that were praying for him, like multiple churches, not just individuals, but churches as well.

And so I think he was covered with prayer.

And that really, I think that allowed him to get to the point where he has come.

What do you make of it all, if you could take a guess with your human mind here?

You know, it comes to why does God allow suffering?

Question.

And I've come to the conclusion that it's the wrong question.

We live in a broken world and suffering is a result of our own sin in some situations.

And I mean, in a general sense, that the world is broken and bad things happen, even to people who consider themselves good, although none of us are good theologically.

But you learn a lot.

I think you learn more by suffering than you do any other way.

I mean, my biggest issue, and I had to grow because we had that experience of rapid answer to prayer for the first, well, certainly the first month in Thailand, but for the next seven months while he was in hospital.

And then when he came home, it's like everything went into slow motion.

We continue to pray.

We continue to have a lot of prayer.

But his progress was very slow in the next three or the first three or four years and painfully slow.

My wife spent her entire time taking care of him.

We had apartment buildings, which, you know, we had started that business after I retired from teaching.

I know why now, because we would never have been able to financially take care of him the way we were able to if we didn't have those apartment buildings, but they had to be taken care of.

And so I was working there and she was taking care of him all day.

And then when I would come home at night, she would go into the bedroom and do research because he was sent home with, I want to get this right, but I think it was seven different medications, seven or 13.

Some of them were extremely powerful medications.

And he had three major drugs.

And you can't tell me anybody knows how seven different medications interact inside a human body.

So, you know, there was just a lot to take care of.

And we tried everything.

We tried traditional approaches and we tried non-traditional approaches.

And actually, some of the non-traditional approaches to medicine helped out as much as anything else.

But I think the good Lord brought us through it in many ways and introducing us to different people that we would not have, you know, we would never have thought of the kind of help that they were able to give.

Like, for example, Jensen Jitsu.

It's a Japanese.

I don't even know how to describe it.

It's sort of like a nerve energy kind of treatment, but it helped him.

But for me, during that period of time, I became increasingly angry at God.

Like, you know, where are you?

Why aren't you healing him?

You know, at least give him some light at the end of the tunnel.

Help him and help us see where this is going.

But God chose not to work on my schedule.

Surprise, surprise.

And so it taught me patience.

I eventually had to get to the point where I say, OK, Lord, I know that you love him.

You probably love him more than I love him.

And I love him as much as possible.

So I just had to give it over to him.

Doug, I was so excited to share about your work, the books that you've gotten, the opportunity to write.

Twelve minutes just isn't enough, but I appreciate it more than zero.

I would love for you to leave a message for future you.

Yeah.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's a message you'd leave for future you?

I just think, you know, five years from today, I'm 81.

And I would say be thankful for the grace of God.

Because we really don't know the future.

And it's probably wise that we don't know the future.

We take one day at a time because we are dependent.

Whether we recognize that we're dependent or not, we are.

And so we need to be grateful for the blessings that we have and for the people that we have around us.

I could easily have lost my son.

Doug, this has been a great pleasure.

Amazing audience.

Links are in the show notes.

There's so much more to who Doug is.

Definitely dive in.

My friend, thank you for being on What Is Inspired by Twelve Minute Converse.