That’s what the man at my door said two years ago. I'm your donor, God told me to give you a kidney. I had only seen this man a few times before he showed up at my door late one night.

Nine months before this night, I lost both kidneys due to vasculitis, an auto immune disease. I had been working for Union County School System and school had just started back. I was feeling sick and thought I had picked up a bug until I started passing blood in my urine. I went to the doctor and by the time we found out what was going on, it was too late. I had lost both kidneys.

Within a few days, I was sent to surgery to have a port inserted in my neck that ran directly into the main artery that goes to my heart. This was to be my dialysis access as I soon started dialysis treatments. (Later, I would have an operation on my arm to allow them to use large needles the size of Q-tip shafts for dialysis.) In addition to starting dialysis, I was given large doses of steroids, a thousand milligrams a day, for three days and chemotherapy drugs to fight the vasculitis and to try to save my kidneys. I become so weak that my wife had to hold me up in front of the counter to brush my teeth. The chemo made me sick. I could hardly eat. I had sores in my mouth and my hair fell out. My condition worsened and I could no longer walk or stand and could barely move my legs.

I soon found out I was having a rare side effect from the heavy doses of steroids. The steroids had caused fat deposits to form on my spine which compressed my spinal cord. I could not feel anything from my chest down. I was becoming paralyzed. On a Saturday evening around 5:00 pm, the doctors performed emergency surgery and cut me 14 inches down my back to remove the fat deposits that were compressing my spinal cord. I spent a week in the hospital and the following three weeks in Patricia Neal learning to walk again and several months after that in outpatient therapy.

I suffered pneumonia, migraine headaches, deadly hypertension, pericardial effusion, pleural effusion and was on dialysis 4 hours a day, three days a week. In total, I was admitted the hospital eight times and had countless doctor visits. It was a miserable existence.

During my first hospital stay, I called for the elders of the church to pray and anoint me with oil according to the book of James 5th chapter. Months passed with continued prayers until a man I had only seen a few times came to my door late one night with his family. He said, “Well I guess you are wondering what we are doing at your house this time of night. Well, I'm your donor, God told me to give you a kidney.” I proceeded to say, “How can I began to thank you?” I could not find words sufficient to express how thankful I was. “Thank you is just simply not enough,” I said. Then he made it abundantly clear and said, “I'm not doing this for you. I am doing this out of obedience to God.” He proceeded to tell us how God had been dealing with him. He told us he had asked his wife how one would go about donating a kidney just a few days before I had handed her a card with donor information on it. I jokingly told her if she knew anyone with an extra kidney to have them call the donor nurse at the hospital.

A little over two weeks after my donor and his family showed up at my door, I had a kidney transplant. Todd, my donor, and I, and our families, have all become good friends. Praise the Lord, today my health has stabilized. Thank you to all the people that prayed for me and most importantly, I want to thank the Lord Jesus Christ for His blessings. Words are not sufficient to describe how thankful I am that the Lord intervened on my behalf for I was a very sick man. To God be the glory!

By Aaron Russell