I've been playing with cards since I was actually a kid,
and learning this for a really long time.
You know, learning how to become a magician, I have
developed a skepticism.
And that's really where my story starts.
Having become a magician, you understand there's some kind
of scheme or something going on behind the scenes that's
ultimately fake or false.
The idea of a God seems really silly.
It seems really, really silly.
That's like the Wizard of Oz.
It's like the wizard behind the curtain
making things happen.
However, one day in college I got asked to go to a church,
check it out.
And so I did.
Something happened to me that morning that I couldn't quite
fit into my world view.
There was a way.
There was a version of the story that was shared.
I began to ask myself the God question.
Maybe there's something more to this.
If I was going to believe in this God, If I was going to
believe in the Bible, if I was going to acknowledge who,
ultimately, the Bible points to, which is Jesus, if I was
going to knowledge all those things, I asked God.
I said, God I need you to make this real to me.
I need you to make this so real to me.
I need you to take me back behind the curtain.
Sometimes when you pray prayers, you don't want them
to be answered.
Mine was getting ready to be answered.
Here I was.
I'm 29 years old, married for five years.
I've got a three year old girl and a two year old boy, and
this really intense pain started happening in my leg.
And I was popping 10 Advil at a time trying to make it go away.
We decided that it was probably best if
I went to the ER.
They begin to run a bunch of tests on me.
The doctor walked in.
Your white blood cell counts are a little bit high.
We're going to do some more tests.
We're going to check it out.
Another doctor walked in and on his name badge it said
Texas Oncology, a cancer doctor.
And he says, "Mr. Munroe, you have leukemia.
We've got to do something about this right now."
This doctor basically told me two months.
You're going to die if we don't do anything.
They get me down to MD Anderson Cancer Center, and
they begin to run this battery of tests on me, cat scans, a
catheter into my chest, sticking huge
needles in my spine.
It's a complete whirlwind.
The first doctor on call who's going to oversee all of my
treatment comes in.
He looks at me and he says, "Mr. Munroe, I've got some bad
news for you."
And at that point, I'm going,you mean like worse than
cancer bad news?
He says,"the kind of leukemia that you have is actually more
rare than we initially thought.
Even if we fight your cancer and get you into remission,
this thing's going to come back.
And we can get you into remission again, and it's
going to come back.
No matter how hard we hit it, it's going
to keep coming back.
But, there is something that we want to do.
There's something that we can assist in, and seeing you
completely made well, healed."
I said, "OK, let me hear it."
I want to do a procedure called a bone marrow
transplant.
What we want to do is, we want to get you into remission by
treating your with chemotherapy.
But then we want to find somebody, somewhere in the
world, whose DNA matches yours so succinctly that, literally,
we're going to take their immune system out of their
body and put it into yours.
We're going to hope that your body recognizes it enough as
its own, and essentially, it will begin to grow new white
blood cells from an entirely new person.
That's like real magic.
So, they went and they tested my biological sister.
And my own biological sister wasn't a close enough match,
which was a huge blow to the situation.
So, then they went into this database that the national
bone marrow donor program keeps.
They came back to me and they said, Mr. Munroe, out of the 7
million person database, you've
got 16 possible matches.
Out of those 16 possible matches, we
found one perfect match.
It's a 19 year old female.
We found one perfect match.
And we were elated and we were so excited that there's
somebody out there who was not only a match, but after being
contacted, was willing to give their blood, and to be brave
enough to give me what I needed to live.
So, they began the process, and they began the chemotherapy.
And those first 10 days, were just--
they literally destroyed me.
As we were going through this process, they would use
terminology like, it was a literal, you're
going to be born a new.
When we get you to transplant, when we put this new blood
inside of you, you're going to be given a new birthday.
You're going to be like a baby inside the
womb all over again.
And I'd heard that terminology before in Scripture.
So, I was thinking, man, this is kind of weird.
I'm literally dying a death.
And then they brought that bag of blood into the room.
The whole time, this whole process, was waiting to get
that new blood on the inside of me, just stick it in my IV,
and the new blood begins to run into my body.
The doctors and nurses, everybody involved, are hoping
that my body will accept this new blood.
And it did.
My body accepted this new blood.
And it slowly began to build a new immune system.
And I'm completely cancer free today, 100% cancer free.
It's no longer I who lives, but someone else who lives
inside of me.
When they look at my blood now, investigate it, they
don't see a 30 year old male, they see a 19 year old female.
I've literally got XX chromosomes living on the
inside of me, a substitution of blood on my behalf, so that
I could live again, and so that the deception of
my body would die.
That, to me, is very difficult to ignore.
Asking God to reveal Himself to me, that's very
difficult to ignore.
I believe that all of us have a spiritual cancer that's
eating us away on the inside, and if we really take a look
at it, and we are dying.
We are begging for somebody to intervene, to
step in on our behalf.
There's not a question in my mind that the only answer for
the human condition is that of Jesus.
My life with Jesus has completely changed as a result
of my darkest hour, and I'm actually thankful for the
process of having to go through.
As a skeptic and as a magician, I fully believe, I
fully believe in not only who God is, but
what He did for me.
There's no question in my mind.
My name is Jim Munroe and I am second.