Dr. Richard Furman A Willing

With today’s worldwide scale of Samaritan’s Purse and it’s medical arm World Medical Mission, it’s easy to forget that the people at the birth of these ministries didn’t have a large-scale vision as much as a desire to meet needs and follow the Lord’s leading, even when the Lord’s involvement wasn’t clear until seen in hindsight.

In fact, it’s with that hindsight that Dr. Richard Furman of Boone, one of the founders of World Medical Mission (WMM), sees the ways the Lord shaped him and used his awareness and knowledge at the impetus of WMM.

Growing up in a Christian home, Furman accepted Jesus while in 5th grade during a revival week at his Baptist church, the same church where he heard visiting missionaries speak. “We had missionaries who came to our church, so I was familiar with the mission field,” he explains. “I remember talking to my mother about it, that maybe I ought to be a missionary, but I never really felt the tug on my heart that I should be a full-time missionary. [With] World Medical Mission we realized you can get a lot more doctors on the mission field than if you went yourself full time. We send 600 doctors a year short-term, and I’ve realized that when I was young and first felt that feeling that maybe I should be a missionary? This is a hundredfold better than just me being over there by myself.”

In the previous edition of The Journey, Dr. Furman shared memories of the formation of WMM and the role Billy and Franklin Graham played in establishing it. Now, he shares other memories from those early days.

“First of all, we didn’t start World Medical Mission; it wasn’t our plan,” Furman recalls. “We look back and see the Lord’s hand there and it’s just unbelievable. Knowing what man can put together versus what God can put together is no comparison.”

One “coincidence” Furman recalls from those early days embodies World Medical Mission’s goal in a nutshell: Furman had the opportunity to minister to a man’s medical needs which, in turn, opened the door to share God’s love.

“I had been on a World Medical Mission trip and had an overnight flight to London. In the middle of the night they asked over the speaker that if there was a doctor on board to please come forward. So, I went up and this fella had had a heart attack. I needed to get medicine in his vein to try to stimulate his heart, so I asked the crew to ask if anyone had nitroglycerin. Several people brought forward little bottles, so I laid the man out across the seats with his head in my lap and about every ten minutes I’d put a pill under his tongue where he’d absorb the medicine fastest. His heart was hardly beating and it wasn’t pumping effectively, but after about a half hour or so, the man was coming around and the captain came to me and said, ‘We’re ten minutes from the halfway point. Should I turn back or go on to London?’ I told him that the sooner we got the man on the ground, the better chance he had of living. The captain didn’t say anything, but turned around and walked back to the cockpit. I’ll never forget looking out the window and seeing the moon and the stars start moving the other way back to Newfoundland. As the man was being loaded onto the ambulance, he pulled his card out of his suit coat and handed it to me. He was Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer; he was president of [The Dunes] hotel in Las Vegas; and he was Jewish. Morris Shenker was his name.

“I got back on the plane and was [overseas] for a month and didn’t know what had happened to Mr. Shenker, but when I got back to the U.S. they had sent word that he had survived. [After that], he’d send me Christmas presents and kept asking Harriet and me to come out to Las Vegas as his guests. One time, Billy Graham was having a crusade there in about a month and it dawned on me and I said, ‘Mr. Shenker, we’ll come out if you’ll go to the Billy Graham Crusade.’”

That particular Las Vegas crusade was held in November 1980, the year of the MGM Grand Hotel fire in which 87 people died and 700 were injured.

“The first morning of the crusade,” Furman continues, “Franklin came by and said the hotel across the street was on fire and that I needed to get over there. I went to one spot where there were six ambulances and they had stretchers but no doctors because the medical set-up was on the other side of the hotel. The firemen were bringing so many limp bodies out and placing them on the stretchers where I was that I grabbed a handful of endotracheal tubes, intubated the unconscious people so I could “breathe” for them, and in a few minutes they’d be breathing on their own.”

Later that day, Billy Graham asked Furman to speak at the crusade about the fire. It was the same night Shenker had been invited to come. “I’ll never forget; we were in the big auditorium and I was going to speak and was up on the platform. Mr. Shenker came in late, but I saw him come in the middle door, and he walked way down toward the front and sat down and listened. I got to speak a little bit about the passage that says wood, hay, and stubble will be burned by fire, but the ones that accept Him will get into Heaven. But the main thing was that he heard Billy Graham’s message. Later, Billy Graham gave him a Bible where he’d written a verse from the Old Testament and the New Testament in the front.”

Though he believed the Lord was at work, it wasn’t until the third year of WMM that Furman clearly recognized that while man had started the ministry, God’s hand was in it and He was blessing the efforts of His children. “I took my wife and our three kids to Kenya with Franklin for a month. I spent more time with them that month than I did the whole year back in Boone. It was good family time. We went to Tenwek Hospital which now is the biggest missions’ hospital there is but at that time was a 40-bed hospital with three to a bed. Dr. Ernie Steury was the only doctor working there and he was getting ready to go on furlough for a year. When we came, he looked like a little whipped puppy because he had just gotten a letter that his replacement couldn’t come.

“He asked us if we could get a doctor a month to come and take his place [for the year]. So, we stood in the hospital and put our arms around each other while Franklin led a prayer asking the Lord to send a doctor a month for the next 12 months. After the prayer, Ernie was smiling; he was so relieved. But, later, I told Franklin, ‘You gave him false hope. You have no idea how long it takes to get doctors to go. Last year we sent seven doctors and it takes a long time.’ I just went on and on.

“When we got back to the hotel, there was a note to call Becky Williams at the WMM office. We called and she said she had gotten a call that afternoon from a doctor in Pennsylvania who was going to take his family on vacation for a month starting in three weeks. He was wondering if there was a need for him starting next month,” Furman recalls, chuckling. “We called Ernie and told him to keep packing because we got the first month covered. After that, we got a doctor a month. That’s when I realized the Lord’s hand was in it. It wasn’t us, it was Him. From then on, we didn’t try to plan or organize anything, it just happened.”

In many ways, the formation of WMM began to take shape when Dr. Furman and his brother Lowell were invited by a friend to the Billy Graham Crusade in Asheville in 1977. Though Furman already knew Franklin from riding motorcycles in Boone, it was at the crusade that he met Dr. Graham who asked the brothers if they would help with a medical need in India. While Furman can’t say WMM wouldn’t have happened without meeting Dr. Graham at that place and time, he is very certain the Lord used the crusade, the people involved, the timing, and the place in the formation of the ministry.

“Billy Graham played a big role in the start of World Medical Mission,” offers Furman. “Our relationship with him has been great. I’ve always looked to him as a spiritual leader and the main thing I’ve learned from him and something we go by at World Medical Mission and Samaritan’s Purse today is from one of his favorite verses, Psalm 115:1. After the crusades, he’d go over [the verse] with the staff. It’s, ‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name goes all the glory.’ I just think that so much with World Medical and Samaritan’s Purse is that you can look back and see the Lord’s hand in all that has happened. That’s the good part.”

To learn more about Dr. Richard Furman and his book, Your Cholesterol Matters, visit his website: www.prescriptionforlife.com