The Spokesman Review, Sunday, March 3, 1918
The Church at Spokane
How I Came to Devote My Life to the Ministry of Healing
By REV. JOHN G. LAKE
No one could understand the tremendous hold that the revelation of Jesus as a present day healer took on my life, and what it meant to me, unless they understood my environment.
I was on of sixteen children. Our parents were strong, vigorous, healthy people. My mother died at the age of seventy-five, and my father still lives and is seventy-seven.
Before my knowledge and experience of the Lord as our healer we buried eight members of the family. A strange train of sickness, resulting in death, had followed the family, and for thirty-two years some member of the family was an invalid. The home was never without the shadow of sickness during all this long period. When I think back over my boyhood and young manhood there comes to my mid remembrances like a nightmare of sickness, doctors, nurses, hospitals, hearses, funerals, graveyards and tombstones, a sorrowing household, broken hearted mother and grief-stricken father, struggling to forget the sorrows of the past in order to assist the living members of the family, who needed their love and care.