Lamar (purple shirt in the middle) and a group of TUJ leaders from his church in Texas along with Jim & Kathie Hobson.

All Three Phases in Just Two Weeks!

Dr. Lamar McNew from Bryan, Texas was in his upper seventies when he and his wife, Joanne, drove their motor home to Des Moines, Iowa, and completed all three phases of The Ultimate Journey (turbo format) in just two weeks.  Before attending the turbos, Lamar was still practicing medicine and retirement didn’t even seem to be on the horizon. “God had told me to quit, but I refused. I said, ‘I can’t quit. I need to keep doing this, my patients need me. Then I got vertigo. I was going to four different doctors but nothing helped.”

When Lamar came to the turbos he figured that at his age there wasn’t much anyone could teach him.  But he learned otherwise. “The Spirit had a lot of things to teach me,” Lamar says, noting that going through all three turbos in two weeks was extreme. “Kathie just beat the snot out of me every day for two weeks,” he says with a laugh.

TUJ helped Lamar see that his reluctance and refusal to quit medical practice was tied to the image he’d had of himself all these years.  That to have value, he had to perform and earn the approval of others.  “My father adored me, but he couldn’t tell me he loved me, and he couldn’t give me a hug, so I decided if I had any value, it was in what I did.”

“I finally said, ‘I can’t keep going. My hands are too shaky. I can’t stand up without holding onto things. I’ve got to quit.’ So I finally did what God told me to do.  I quit. And then without prayer, and without medicine, my vertigo ceased.”

It was soon after obeying God and retiring that God opened the door for Lamar to begin facilitating TUJ. “I thought it was my choice, but it was the Holy Spirit’s choice,” Lamar says, recalling how he became involved with TUJ by submitting to God’s will for his life.

Lamar was reluctant to get into anything where he would be on the go all the time and would have to perform, as he had in medicine. “But it was the Holy Spirit’s idea to get Joanne and I into this thing,” he says. “Some of the credibility we got with practicing medicine in a relatively small town helped us recruit people into the course. They came to see what the old guy could do. But they met the Holy Spirit, The One who’s really running the course.”

Lamar says upon returning to Texas after taking the turbos, neither he nor his wife were entirely sure that God could work through them as TUJ facilitators to help change people’s lives. “I really didn’t know when we started out, but I thought we’d try it and see. However, when the Spirit starts touching people, it’s an amazing thing.”

Even now, Lamar says, if he doesn’t see a certain number of people in The Ultimate Journey, at times he wonders whether he’s doing all that he should. “It’s awfully hard to step back and say, ‘OK, Holy Spirit, bring who you want to.’ And if nobody shows up, that’s fine. When I finally got to that point, all of a sudden we have six Phase 1 groups running.”

During his forty-five years as a family doctor, Lamar says he delivered about 7,500 babies covering three generations of families. Now he’s seeing a new kind of birth. “I see transformations. I see renewing of minds, and it’s beautiful.”

Editor’s note:  Lamar not only helped start TUJ at his own church, he helped start it at a local outreach ministry and is now focused on helping start TUJ at other churches in their region. Lamar decided to attend the TUJ turbos after hearing about them from his daughter Saralynn Morris and seeing the impact going through them had on the lives of her and her husband Bill.