Involuntary MISSION

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you shall find."—Matthew 7:7 Everyone's heard that, but whether they take it seriously depends on how quickly a prayer is answered and if God packaged it differently than they had expected. Another axiom, "Everyone has a mission." Often, Tim Ulmer admired the great people in history books more for their character than for their achievements, especially when they were epileptic. He has seizures, also, and envied people like Julius Caesar, Einstein, and Plato who significantly impacted mankind. If the Greeks' 'Genius Disease' didn't stop them from being famous, it shouldn't stop him either. He was going to pledge his life to fighting for the USA against communism and all other enemies. The complex-partial seizures he'd had since the age of 2 were mild and didn't keep him from being an achiever, so their wretched fangs weren't bared fully at him until his teens, when epilepsy kept him from driving. Soon, it ravaged him like a T-rex when it kept him out of the military. It left him in a heap, aching to find another big mission he could do for history. A political career came out of the mist. But he left God out of the equation. After college, Tim left the Illinois farmlands for a business in Chicago that he knew would pay for politics. He was aware that epilepsy was shadowing him, but he didn't care and drove a car since his seizures weren't as disabling as tonic-clonic (gran-mal). He'd keep functioning, but he just never remembered later on what he'd done. It took 4 car wrecks and a final wreck with a semi to make him jobless, penniless, and with nothing to do except move in with his parents in a village. Suicidal thoughts even followed. Tim humored a friend who insisted that since no one was ever hurt in those accidents, including him, he wasn't meant to die yet. She swore that God had a big mission for Tim; which was why none of his plans had worked. However, it was a "break" for him, not a blessing, when the State paid for him to return to college and get a degree in TV. Producers at the show, The Young and the Restless, wanted to hire him after an internship, but the T-rex devoured that when Tim had a seizure at its studio. It kept him from other jobs. A minister in LA told him what the Bible said about epilepsy. Best of all, he said that experts think that the "thorn in the flesh" that St. Paul asked God to remove was epilepsy! Paul's seizures made God be seen stronger! He returned to Illinois to help care for his mother, but that was a facade. He worked at a local TV station, but epilepsy cost him a full-time job. A reporter he'd teamed with left to teach English in China and urged him to follow her. Doing anything for that nation made him nauseous. They had a spy in our nuclear weapons lab, paid for a president's re-election, crash-landed a US Navy airplane. And its human rights were atrocious! It seemed treasonous to him to teach a skill to anyone Chinese! Eventually, medical side-effects that made him feel like he was drowning into oblivion motivated him to accept a job at a Chinese university. Once, as he recovered from a seizure during class, students wanted to know why his "sickness" didn't scare him. He shrugged that God had saved his life at least 5 times, and he could get killed just as easily at home, so why not travel? Upon mentioning God, people began asking him to tell them about Christianity in private. The school told him to leave because it considered him to be "contagious". In two years, he taught in 5 cities, and was asked about Jesus everywhere. That's when he knew his prayer to serve the US hadn't been ignored. He'd needed to find God first and his epilepsy was the means by which God steered him. Serving God, too, impacted more people than if he had gotten into the military. Tim is proud to be epileptic. He has created a TV show called "Epilepsy Gangster" so others with epilepsy can discover their missions in life.