First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Dr. Charles McGowen

A medical doctor, Dr. Chuck McGowen tells his life story of coming to faith after his own wife became desperately ill. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 11 Mar 2011
Audio Format:: other

A medical doctor, Dr. Chuck McGowen tells his life story of coming to faith after his own wife became desperately ill.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

"When I thought of the way that I had hurt my wife, I had been unfaithful to her. When I thought of how horrendous that was, I just wanted to get rid of my life. And I was looking for a hiding place and I found it in the Lord Jesus Christ." That is the voice of Dr. Chuck McGowan, our guest today on First Person. I'm Wayne Shepard. Welcome to this week's broadcast where we're going to meet a medical doctor whose life story took a dramatic turn when his own wife fell desperately ill. I'll introduce you to Dr. McGowan in just a moment, but first I hope you'll take a few minutes to visit us online at firstpersoninterview.com. Not only will you find more information about our guest today, but you can go back to the archive and listen to past interviews with previous guests, including Coach Tony Dungy, artist Ron DiSiani, and last week's guest Michael Joyner, one of the stars of the new movie The Grace Card, which is now in theaters. You'll find the audio archive, as well as the calendar of upcoming guests at firstpersoninterview.com. By the way, we have some new radio stations and listeners joining us today. Glad you've tuned in to what for you may be our first broadcast. I'm looking forward to having you here each week. Well Dr. Chuck McGowan is a dedicated medical doctor who continues to serve patients as a calling, but what compels him to do what he does is his own long-term relationship with Jesus Christ. I started by asking Dr. Chuck why he chose medicine as a career. As long as I can remember Wayne, it has been my desire to be a physician. You know, when the other kids were talking about being, you know, policemen and firemen and cowboys and physician was always my desire. Was your dad a doctor? No, my dad was a steelworker, my mother a schoolteacher. No physicians in the family when I decided that I wanted to become a physician. I decided firmly when I was in the seventh grade. Is that right? So what was the path? I mean, I know you were in the Air Force, right? Oh yes, but that was after I became a physician. Okay. Yes. The path was, of course, focusing my high school education around the sciences and then going off to college at Hiram College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, then getting into medical school at the Ohio State University and following that, I did a rotating internship. In those days, everyone was required to do an internship. We spent a couple months on OB, a couple on pediatrics, surgery, medicine, the emergency room and then we had some electives that we could do. During my internship, it was at the time it was in 1962 and we had just been informed that the government had set forth what they called the doctor's draft. Now that was because the government knew, but nobody else knew that we were going to enter a conflict in Southeast Asia and they were going to need a lot of doctors. Well, my dad had a friend on the draft board who said that my name had come up for drafting and if I didn't want to go into the Army, I better choose the service I wanted to go in. I was married with three children and that didn't make any difference. They took you anyway. Remember those days? Yes. So I joined the Air Force and I became a flight surgeon. I went to the School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio and following that, I served two years on active duty at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and then following that I went into my residency in internal medicine but having three children and I loved the Air Force, I stayed in the active reserve and so I had a bag packed at all times to head to Southeast Asia because my unit was a critical C-130 unit and we could have been called up at any time. Did you have a question you're calling? Never, never. I loved the practice of medicine. I loved the challenge. I went into internal medicine because in those days, there were no subspecialists. You see, I go back to the days when on the medical side versus the surgical side, we had general practitioners who had had one-year internship and had gone into practice and then we had internists and we were called diagnosticians and we would pick a certain subspecialty that we would focus more of our attention on after we got into practice and we would go to all of our continuing education meetings in that subspecialty. Mine was endocrinology, which is the study of glands and so forth. But in any event, I was a consulting physician for family practitioners and if I hadn't been an internist, I would have wanted to be a forensic pathologist on Miami-CSI because I have this detective instinct within me to dig down and get to the meat of the truth. You may have time to pull that off yet before I say. God willing, at 74, I don't buy green bananas. What do you say to young people considering medicine as a career? I know things are changing and they're changing rapidly and there's a lot of uncertainty right now in America about health care. Well, obviously, people whose grandchildren want to become doctors send them to me for counseling first of all. So I'm upfront and honest with them. I'll say, now, here are the reasons I went into medicine. Number one, the doctor in my community was the most highly regarded person in town. You know, they used to run the 10 most favorite people in the paper and you'd have physicians and then you'd have clergy and at the bottom, you'd have used car dealers or something. Well, in my case, you know, I wanted to be respected. And I highly respected our personal physician. The second reason I went in is I wanted to be my own boss. I never wanted to work for anyone. And of course, I had to work for a lot of people to get where I obviously got, which was running my own practice. But I always wanted to be my own boss. Third reason is that I had this innate desire to help people. I just, you know, I'm not bragging that I, you know, some, but I just wanted to help people. I was away with animals and away with people. And so that was the third reason I went in. Fourth reason I went in was because it was going to be a financially stable, you know, living for my family, ultimately, and comfortable living. It was all of those things have changed, haven't they? That's what I was getting ready to say. First of all, doctors aren't the most highly respected anymore. Second of all, we're not our own bosses. We have to take orders from an insurance company and regulated governments. Thirdly, we cannot help people like we'd like to help people because somebody is telling us, well, that's too expensive or, you know, people come in with their own ideas on how they want help. Well, that sounds a little discouraging then. I mean, what advice do you give today? Well, I give them this advice. It's still a noble profession. Don't expect to get rich. Don't expect to have a lot of time for yourself. Do a lot of praying. Pray for wisdom. Don't pray for knowledge. That's up to you. You've got to get the knowledge, but wisdom is the proper use of knowledge. And so, you know, then I say, hey, you go home, pray about it. If money's your focus, go do something else. Describe a high point and a low point in your career. Well, the death of every patient was a low point. I think so. Okay. Because my patients were my friends. And I, frankly, you know, they always told us not to get attached to your patients emotionally, but that's very difficult to do when you're a personal physician. Well, every time I diagnosed a case that somebody else had missed was a high point, you know, and especially when I was doing consulting work, I remember that there was this gentleman that was a steel executive and he was in the hospital, he'd been in the hospital. In those days, you stayed a long time, you know, and he'd been in the hospital for two weeks spiking fevers. And his primary care physician was a family doctor who used me as a consultant. And he said, he said, I've had this guy on every antibiotic I can think of, and he's still spiking fevers. Would you come in and try and figure out what's wrong with him? So I came in and the guy had been in the hospital two weeks, but he, but it was in January and had a deep tan. And so I said, where'd you spend your vacation? He said, all the Bahamas. I said, oh, I said, did you have a beachfront property? He says, oh, yeah, we had a cabana right on the beach. I said, uh-huh. I said, did you have a picnic table? He says, oh, yeah, it was out there. And I said, were there any bird droppings on the picnic table? He said, how did you know? I said, I think I know what's wrong with it. There's the CSI doctor coming out. There you go. So I picked up his pulse and his temperature was 104 and his pulse was 70. Well, when you have that discrepancy, it suggests a bird fever. It's called citicosis. And so the treatment for that is tetracycline. That's the only antibiotic they hadn't given them. We started them on that no fever after that. So that's the kind of thing that was a high point in my life. I would imagine that you said that you would do it all over again, but doctors make a certain amount of sacrifice. What are the sacrifices that a doctor makes? Well, my family sacrificed. I wouldn't say that I personally sacrificed if you want to say that I couldn't play golf two days a week. I couldn't play golf two days a week. And I loved golf. When I was in the Air Force, I played golf two, three days a week because I didn't have that, you know, personal caseload responsibility. But no, actually, I can't really think of a sacrifice that I made, but it was my family that made the sacrifice. They couldn't count on me always being there for dinner. If we went out to dinner, they couldn't count on me staying with them. And so those were things that hurt. But I always managed to get to their little league games and take them on a vacation once a year, a two-week vacation, and that sort of thing. You found ways to make up for it? Yes. I tried to. When we continue this conversation with Dr. Chuck McGowan, we'll talk about his conversion experience when he met Jesus Christ. Next week, our guest will be musician, Damaris Carball. It's like I tell people, you think that my heart has been in the right place since 1988. You have another thing coming. I mean, it's just so easily goes in the wrong direction, and God is so merciful. The minute you just kind of go, "Oh God, help me here. I hope I never stop eating over well." She does love the Lord, and she loves to sing about him. We'll hear the story of Damaris Carball next time on First Person. Dr. Chuck McGowan says he's retired, but I don't believe it, he sees patients all the time. I ask him if he didn't feel like a country doctor at times. I made house calls all the time, Wayne. Absolutely. The day I retired, I made a house call on a 99-year-old lady who hadn't been able to come to the office for five years. Six months after I retired, my wife and I got an invitation to her 100th birthday party. Is that right? That's right. Yes, I practiced in town. My office was in town, but a lot of my patients were farmers, and so I went out into the countryside to see them at home. When you started practicing medicine like that, what were your fees? My fee was $6 a visit. For a complete physical, they paid me $40. If they couldn't pay? Well, if they couldn't pay, they didn't pay. But these are of service. Oh, absolutely. These people were not the kind of people that enjoyed not being able to pay. They would try and pay me in kind. Next time in, they'd bring a jar of preserves, or gosh, one day I was out making a house call, and the husband said, "Look, Doc, I don't have the money to pay you," but he said, "I'll be right back," and he went out and he cut it head off with chicken. No. No, he did. So you already were one of those country doctors? That's right. That's amazing. Well, I really admire you and how the Lord has worked in your life, Chuck. And I know if there's anything that's more important to you than medicine, it is the Lord. Oh, definitely. There's no question. The Lord Jesus Christ changed my life 40 years ago, June 28th, 1970. How did it happen? Well, here's how it happened. First of all, I was a flaming reprobate. Let's put it that way. I'm not going to go into the dirty details because they're terrible. But my wife was getting ready to divorce me, my wife with whom I celebrated in December this year, 54 years of marriage, by the grace of God. But she became very ill with a condition called ulcerative colitis, and she was so ill that they gave her a 50% chance of living. And when she went into the hospital, I was fishing in Canada. I had gone up there for a three-day fishing trip, and we'd flown into a remote area of Ontario, and this is pre-cell phones and satellite phones. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And when they got the call, they knew where I was because they called the seaplane base. And the seaplane came out to get me and said, "You've got to come back. Your wife is in the hospital thing." And at that point, I can recall rising up off the lake. Now, here's the point now. I was a church-going person. I was an elder in my church. I even taught the Old Testament. I didn't teach New Testament because it was convicting. But I taught history from the Old Testament. I was a chairman of the church board. I sang in the choir. I mean, I was more churchy than you can imagine. And yet, I had this other life that I lived six days a week. But here I was rising up off this beautiful lake in Ontario, Canada, into a rising sun. And I said, "God, if you're real, I mean, I've been playing church all these years. If you're real, and if you save K's life, I will serve you the rest of my life." You remember that? I remember that like it happened just a minute ago. And I got back to the seaplane base and called my dad, and he told me how critical she was. And then I had to wait for the seaplane to go. My guys were breaking camp, and he went back to get them. Well, it was an hour-around trip. So I had an hour to just sit there on my own, and I went out to the end of the dock, and I looked down into the water, and I saw my face reflecting in the water. And suddenly, it was all these pictures, it was like home movies running through that water. Like somebody had edited all the home movies of my time from the day I met K until now. And somebody had edited and cut out all the bad scenes. And all I saw was this beautiful life that I was going to lose. You knew we were about to lose it. Yeah. So that's tough. It's still tough to talk about it. But it was that moment that the Lord became personal to you. Well, no, it was that moment, oh, yes. The Lord at that point, He had already touched me by His Holy Spirit. But when I flew home, K was in the hospital, went right there, shaved off three days of beard, and then went to the hospital. And she was really critical. She had IVs in both arms and both legs. They were dripping blood into her and giving her antibiotics. I mean, she was delirious. And so again, I began to pray, but it was though my prayers were bouncing off the ceiling. The next day, a pastor came to see us, not our pastor. He was not one who talked about being born again and so forth. He was more highfalutin. Anyway, this pastor came in and he knew us because we had sent our youngest daughter, Brenda, to his daily vacation Bible school. And we had gone to their final program and we sat on folding chairs because that's kind of a little church it was. But anyway, he came to see me. His name was Don Hicks. And he came in to see K, he said, "Doctor, I wonder if I could pray for your wife." And I said, "Yeah, you sure can." I said, "My colleagues aren't doing much for it right now." I said, "Maybe God can't." And so he prayed for her and then he left and he left a book on a bedside stand by Quaker lady named Hannah Whittle Smith, the Christian secret of a happy life. And I looked at that and I've always been an inveterate reader. I just had to read everything. And I saw that book and the title intrigued me because I knew I wasn't a Christian and I knew Christians and I knew they were devout people, but I didn't know what their secret was. And so I picked that up and that lady had written that book in the late 1800s. And I sat down and read that. It's a classic. I read that book through and I've got the book at home now. There's a place in there where I scribbled so hard underneath if you would like a new life now, just bow your head and pray. And I just scribbled right there under that new life so hard it went through three pages. And that's when I bowed my head and asked the Lord Jesus to be my Savior. You still have that book. I still have that book. As a reminder and a marker? Oh, absolutely. And I was alone in a hospital room. There wasn't no dusty trail to go to Billy Graham's altar or there weren't any angels singing that I could hear or no choir singing and just K and me and the Lord and my new life. You're a man of the Word. When did you get into the Word then? And that night, really? That night, the Christian I knew very well was my sister-in-law and that was Kay's sister. And she was a nurse and she came into the room that night and she had a Bible on her hand because she'd been coming in after work every night to pray for Kay. And she came in and with that Bible and I said, "Barbie, could I have that Bible?" Could I read that Bible? I kind of had something to read. She said, "Her eyes lit up." She said, "What happened to you?" And I said, "Barbie, I just prayed to God to save my life and to save Kay and I just need that Bible." And she said, "Chuck, here, take it." And I said, "Where should I start?" I said, "I've already been through the Old Testament several times." She said, "Read the gospel of John." I said, "Okay." So I sat down and Wayne, I tell you, I read that gospel of John with understanding. And I had such a hunger for the Word. I just sat and read that until I just fell asleep. I have to ascribe that to the Holy Spirit. Oh, no question about it, the understanding to the Holy Spirit. Those without the Holy Spirit do not understand the things that come from the Spirit of God. And so, yes, from that moment on, I had a love for God's Word. And so I started going to this little church with the folding chairs and one of their Sunday school teachers so inspired me. And I said, "Lord, if I could only be a teacher like Him." I mean, oh, I want to be a teacher, Lord, somehow, well, late in Ford, who is a personal friend of mine, he told me later when I told him that story. He said, "Chuck, let me tell you something. There are three things that confirm your gift. Number one, you enjoy it. Number two, you are effective. And number three, the church confirms it. And you confirmed His gift and you were longing for His gift and you aren't going to long for a spiritual gift that the Lord hasn't given you already. So you'd already had that spiritual gift. The Lord just gave you time like He did the Apostle Paul who had to go off and get a little smarter. And I know how effectively the Lord has used you to teach His Word for many years. Dr. Chuck, do you have a verse of Scripture that you look back on and you think of that verse when you think of your own life? You have died and your life is now hidden in Christ with God. That's from the book of Colossians, and that's my Scripture. You have died and your life is now hidden in Christ with God. And the reason I choose that verse is because my life before June 28th was so horrendously bad that I wanted to go hide. I had to, as a matter of fact, contemplate suicide. I had such guilt. Well, just finish that thought a little bit for me. When I thought of the way that I had hurt my wife, my sweetheart that I had met when she was 13 and I was 15, I had been unfaithful to her. When I thought of how horrendous that was, the trust she'd put in me and how I'd broken that trust, and yet I had no power over that. There was this overwhelming evil power that came over me in those days. I just wanted to rid my life. I just wanted to get rid of my life. I was looking for a hiding place and I found it in the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank God for men like Dr. Chuck McGowan. As you've listened today to his life story, and maybe you've sensed that what he has found through his relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ is missing in your life, I would urge you to take the next step right now and simply ask Christ to forgive you of your sin. Romans 10, 9 says, "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." And if you'd like to talk with someone right now, call this number 888-NEDHIM, 888-333-3446. Today's interview will be available online at firstpersoninterview.com along with previous interviews. It's there when you click on the Listen Now button at firstpersoninterview.com and you can also listen via iTunes and the podcast when you search for first person. Next week, our guest will be musician Damaris Carball, who's singing is deeply rooted in her faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. I hope you'll set a reminder to join us at the same time next week. And now with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening, your first person. [music]