The Miracle Man

By Jeff Kurtzer

The Miracle Man presents the spiritual autobiography of Jeff Kurtzer, a man who struggled with a series of challenges, including physical and mental abuse, early use of drugs and alcohol, a diagnosis of manic depression, and multiple stays in psychiatric care facilities. Born in Long Island, New York, the author lived through times that remind many of the life of Job, the biblical figure who endured extreme deprivation, but who clung to his faith in God.

As he recounts the trajectory of his life, Jeff Kurtzer seasons his account with passage from the Scriptures that offered him encouragement at the time. His story was written to provide support to all who seek hope and change in their own lives. This approach flows from his faith that God sees the truth of ones life and will work to change it, just as he heard in a prophesy prayed over him: God has called you to His ministry and all you have been going through will be used to help many people. God is going to heal you completely and restore all that the enemy has stolen from you.

When you face those moments in your lifewhether brief or extendedwhen the obstacles are piling up and all passages to peace seem hopelessly blocked, then The Miracle Man can offer you words of encouragement that God does still work miracles in todays world. He worked one in the life of Jeff Kurtzer, and He can work a miracle in your life too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496968869

Jeff Kurtzer

Jeff Kurtzer graduated from Christian International Ministry Training College and spent a decade as a missionary in the Philippines. Known for his miraculous life and for instilling hope in others, he speaks and preaches internationally. He and Richele, his wife, have three sons and live in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Book preview

My Childhood

Childhood is supposed to be a time of wonder and happiness. For some this may be true, but for others it is not. There are those who are born into families and are loved and cared for, and there are those who are physically and mentally abused. There are those who grow up in wealthy families and those who grow up in poor ones. There are children in every country under the sun who are on journeys to find out what life is all about. For all children, life is about what they learn and experience. Some will learn good things and experience positive situations that will help them grow up to be strong individuals. Others will learn things that are not so good and experience negative situations that will cause them to become… let’s just say handicapped, not able to trust even their own mothers or fathers.

This story is about when life becomes shattered, like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, when troubles have overtaken it on every side, and there doesn’t seem to be hope anymore. Suicide enters the mind, a great fear comes and overtakes you, and life doesn’t seem to be worth living anymore. Then confusion enters, and you don’t know where to go for help.

What do you do?

Most will survive somehow. Others will give up and commit suicide.

As for me, I survived, and you can too.

Chapter One

The Journey Now Begins

In September 1974, my sleep left me and I started to become delusional, saying all sorts of things that didn’t make any sense, things that were very scary and off the wall. I couldn’t rest, my internal clock was shattered, I couldn’t sleep anymore, and everyone knew I had lost it except me. I thought I was fine and that everyone was against me. The drugs I had started taking when I was thirteen had finally done their damage now that I was nineteen. I never knew what was happening to me during all those years. I thought I was only getting high, but that was only a piece of it. There was so much more I never knew until many years later, when I learned the truth about what had really happened to me.

For years my life wasn’t my own. There was another force that had taken control of me, yet I didn’t know it nor could I have even believed it to be possible. I started out smoking marijuana and popping pills (uppers and downers); then I went on to do acid and LSD-25, then orange sunshine, which is also acid that makes you hallucinate.

I always hung out with my best friend, Jimmy. We went everywhere together, got high together, and even dated two girls who were best friends, Wendy and Dawn. We also ran away with our friend Frankie and made it all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, from Smithtown, Long Island. We went to my aunt’s house and took showers because we were so dirty from the four-day trip. The shower felt so good. We were then taken to the airport and put on a plane back to New York, where my dad and Jimmy’s dad came to get us at the airport. Boy, were they mad at us.

I ran away because I was so sick and tired of being beat up all the time, and now I was going to get it again. I soon lost a close friend; a guy shot him up with a hot shot, an injection of pure heroin. My friend hemorrhaged from his eyes, ears, and mouth. There was blood everywhere in his bed. He died in his sleep. His mother found him this way when she went to wake him for school. My friend was supposed to give this mean guy money to buy drugs, but then he changed his mind, so the guy killed him. Later this guy was sent to Attica State Prison for killing a girl named Christine in the woods at Miller Pond in Smithtown, Long Island. He was never charged with my friend’s death. As far as I know, he is still behind bars and has never been paroled.

Following the death of my close friend, I lost my first girlfriend, Linda, who was killed in a house fire with her dad and older sister. I will never forget the church funeral with three closed caskets rolling out the church doors. This was a very sad day for many in Smithtown. Linda was such a beautiful girl and so young to die a terrible, painful death. My friend Dave and a guy from Sweden were coming home from a bar and saw the fire. They tried to get in the house, but the flames were too fierce for them. I will always miss her and her family.

We were just young teenagers caught up in the drug world. I thought it was cool, but I didn’t know it would take hold of my life. This was only the beginning of many years of drug abuse. After the acid came mescaline and selling pot in high school. Then came cocaine and THC, which is actually horse tranquilizer. It was a white powder that I snorted up my nose, but it was too much for me; it was so strong. I’d had enough. I finally broke away after six years of drug addiction and abuse. My life crashed. I cracked up and lost it. My life was turned upside down and I had to be hospitalized.

I lost all my so-called friends because of my breakdown. When you have a mental breakdown, nobody wants to be your friend. They all think you’re crazy and don’t want to be around you. Your life falls apart, and the shame and guilt of having a mental breakdown puts you in isolation. You don’t want to be around people, because you’re ashamed of yourself. There may be some of you who are reading this book who have experienced this life for themselves and know what I’m saying.

I was greatly ashamed and decided that I didn’t want to see my family or any of my so-called friends.

I was nineteen years old when my life fell apart. My mom and dad had just committed me to a mental hospital in Long Island, New York, where I grew up as a boy. The name of this hospital, that I would be in and out of for many years, is Kings Park State Psychiatric Center. At this time I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was put on strong medicine to help bring me down from a manic high that had lasted for weeks. During this time I couldn’t sleep and had become very delusional and extremely angry at everybody, especially my parents.

This change would begin a whole new world for me. I would become a guinea pig for the psychiatrists and psychologists in this hospital. As I sat in front of the psychiatrist, I couldn’t believe that a woman from India, who could hardly speak English, knew what was wrong with me. I said to myself, Am I now going to look to these doctors for the answers to my problems?

The doctor put me on Thorazine, which was a very powerful drug in its day. They gave it to me by inter-muscular injections, which really hurt. I soon had trouble with my thinking. My thoughts seemed to become cloudy like I was in a dream. My words were hard to speak. I felt like I was losing touch with myself. I went to sleep for hours and woke up to this world inside the walls of a state mental hospital. I could see a day-room where the furniture was so ugly and plain. The covering on the couches was a pale green hard plastic. People lay all over these couches most of the time. As I looked around, I noticed that the windows had big mesh screens over them so you couldn’t clearly see outside. When I tried to look outside, I saw through thousands of little holes. This seemed very strange to me, but there were many other strange things I would experience.

We were fed three meals a day in a dining hall, which was a far walk from the day-room. Everything was locked up in this place. Long hallways had big metal doors that were locked so you couldn’t escape. Dinner was at five o’clock. The food was tasteless. Then at eight o’clock we were served a snack, which everybody pigged out on, especially a young man named Louie who was committed to this place for flipping out on drugs. Louie always rubbed his stomach in circles as he laughed in a weird way. He had only a few teeth. He too was in and out of that place for many years. Sadly, Louie eventually committed suicide.

My diagnosis wasn’t shocking to my parents, since my older brother by eighteen months, David, had also experienced emotional problems while growing up and had already seen many medical doctors. Keith, my other brother, is five years younger than me.

I was very close to my dad while growing up. We did so many things together. I always wanted to be with him and go with him wherever he went. My dad was a garment salesman in the ladies’ wear business in New York City. As a boy I was always with my dad, Seymour Kurtzer. My mother is Lita Kurtzer. We had three boats while I was growing up. I was referred to as my dad’s shadow. Dad and I spent many years, just the two of us, going fishing together in the Great South Bay on the south shore of Long Island. My two brothers were often afraid to go out fishing with my dad because of his explosive temper.

My dad put me in the emergency room many times, when he would lose his temper and hit me with his closed fists as if I was a grown man; I was maybe five years old when this happened the first time. An incident stands out in my mind when I was five. My dad and I were washing his white 1963 Chrysler convertible in our driveway. As a car drove by, I thought squirting the driver with the garden hose would be funny. To my surprise, the man didn’t think it was funny; he stopped his car and told my dad what I had done. Dad was so mad at me that he picked up a rock and threw it at me, hitting me right between the eyes. The blood started gushing out as my grandmother, who had watched everything, opened the screen door and pulled me inside the house. She put some ice in a dish towel and put it between my eyes, where all the blood was coming out. Mom and Grandma took me to the emergency room, where the doctors stitched me up. This was only the beginning of the abuse I would suffer for many years. I was told to lie to the doctors and tell them I had fallen off of my bicycle. My parents had feared that dad would be arrested for hitting me.

My childhood is a bit foggy now, but I can still bring back some memories. As a young child, I was always expected to listen to my parents, but children will be children. It was when I didn’t listen that I got hit—and got hit hard. Emergency room doctors had already stitched up my eyes and nose by the time I was eight. These trips to the ER still didn’t bother me, because I loved my dad so very much and always forgave him. Sometimes when he hit me, I was on the kitchen floor, and my mother yelled, Seymour, get off of him—you’re killing him. My dad got so mad at times but that was my dad, and I will always love him anyway.

I always got hit throughout my childhood and into my teenage years up until the time I was seventeen years old. This was the last time my dad ever hit me, giving me a black eye because I didn’t come home on time. Dad came looking for me and found me hitchhiking home on Landing Avenue in Smithtown, where we lived in the seventies and eighties. He told me to get in the car, and before I knew what hit me, he punched me giving me another black eye. It wasn’t easy raising me because I had stopped listening to my dad a long time before that because of all the abuse. With all the years of abuse, I just shut down inside and took my drugs to cover up all the pain and bad memories. One day Dad was nice to me, and then he beat me up again the next day. My dad also teased me mentally. This was his way of fooling around, which later in life I hated, but as a child I didn’t realize he was tormenting me, and I just played along with Dad.

When I was seventeen years old, I was on probation for a marijuana charge. My probation officer didn’t like me very much and was cold towards me, always looking to give me a hard time. This man really had it in for me, which my mother and I were soon to find out upon when we reported at the probation office in Hauppauge. Even though I was clean from drugs, I was arrested for dirty urine. My mother was shocked and so upset; I have never forgotten the incident. I ended up going into the Rockefeller Drug Program for the next sixteen months. I did time in both of their facilities: Ridge Hill in Yonkers, New York; and Arthur Kill Rehabilitation Center in Staten Island.

While I was in these places, my dad felt so terrible and was in a bad place emotionally. He was very worried and could hardly sleep, but my mother was at peace and knew I was going to be okay. Dad was a worrier about a lot of things. He knew I wasn’t really a rough guy like most of the young men in these places. He figured I would get beat up or even raped, but thank God that never happened.

I survived my sixteen-month sentence, which was really hard for me. I felt like the time clock of my life had shattered. Minutes seemed like hours as the days just dragged on so slowly. I missed my parents very much while I was locked away. When my time came to be released, I lied to my parents and told them I was getting released on a Monday when actually I got out on Friday. After getting released, I took the Staten Island ferry to New York City and got on the Long Island railroad to Saint James, where I got off and went to the neighborhood bars to meet up with my old friends.

It was good to be back to my old lifestyle, but not for