I am Mike Thorstenson and I’m a member of the Rochester 1st Ward. I’ll be five years a member as of September 2020.
As I’ve sat and looked back at the things that have happened to me, miracles come to mind. One started when I was living in Faribault at the time. I was sick with what I thought was maybe the flu. I expected to be feeling miserable that weekend and then go back to work the following Monday. Instead I just kept feeling progressively worse as the weekend wore on. By that Sunday I was thinking about going to the hospital the next day. That Sunday night two of the members of our ward came by and gave me a priesthood blessing and then took me to the hospital. After I’d been there two or three days, I was talking with one of the nurses and he told me an interesting story. He said he was talking with the nurse who admitted me and said she’d described me as the sickest she’d seen anybody come in for quite a while. I had a temperature of 107 when I first came in and spent a week laid up at the hospital. I can’t help but think that were it not for that priesthood blessing I could have gone to the hospital feet first. While I was there I also saw the power of scripture in action. I was reading The Book of Mormon while I was there and went from being in pain when I started to none after just a chapter or two of reading that day.
Another miracle comes to mind. I had a part time job at the time running a rural route for the Faribault Post Office. On one occasion I had one of my bosses riding in my truck with me just so he could see how the new guy (me) was doing. While we were out like that, I noticed I was very short on fuel with the distinct possibility I would run out of gas before I finished my route. What a way to impress your new boss. Fearing this, I was praying fervently unto the Almighty to save me from that. He did and I noticed something remarkable the next day when I gassed up my truck. I put 20 gallons of gas into a 16 gallon tank. Never before or since have I ever been able to do that so I know very much that our Lord is a Lord of miracles and for this I am grateful.
I had another neat experience on one occasion when I went out with the missionaries to teach. They told me before we left that the people we were going to were Spanish speakers only so the only thing I was expecting was to be able to say, “Yes.” I went out with the missionaries. At that time my Spanish didn’t go much farther than Buenos Dias. While we were there with the missionaries, there were a couple times they asked me to read something from the Book of Mormon in Spanish. None of the words looked anything like English so I wasn’t expecting anything other than hopefully get the pronunciation right. And when I finished reading I couldn’t have given you a word for word translation of what it was and yet I was able to tell you what it was I had read. Whether it was about baptism or repentance or whatever it was, I was able to understand. This was truly a miracle and as I look back at it now it’s just like what Paul said in his letter to the Romans when he said (I paraphrase): All things work together for good for those that love God. The Gospel truly does bring people together. This I know.
There is one more miracle of healing I should mention also. One night at work I had what I thought was a cramp in my leg that just wouldn’t quit. I went to the doctor the next day to get it looked at. He was thinking I had a spider bite and in the process of trying to find what it was he talked to some specialists in Minneapolis. It turned out I had an infection of some kind but no one knew the cause. I went in that Wednesday and that same day I was in the hospital. I was laid up and on IV’s that whole rest of the week. That Saturday the missionaries and one other member of our ward came to visit me in the hospital and they said a priesthood blessing for me. By the following Tuesday I had recovered and went home. The doctors never did find out what it was that I had. I do know that I was healed because I’d gotten a priesthood blessing. This is truly a miracle.
Our Father above is the author of miracles. This I know and so testify in Jesus’ name. Amen.