I Don’t Know a God Like That

I was eight years old the first time I heard John LaNoue talk about answered prayer.

It was 1967. The church was First Baptist Church of Canton, Texas, the town I grew up in, and the sanctuary on that particular Sunday smelled the way every East Texas Baptist sanctuary smelled in those years, like furniture polish and old hymnals and the faint sweetness of women’s powder. The man at the pulpit was telling a story about praying for something on a Sunday evening and watching God deliver it on a Monday morning.

I had been raised in the church. I knew the songs. I had read the Bible stories about manna and fish and water turning into wine, and I had filed those away as things that happened in the time of Jesus and the apostles, the way other boys filed Davy Crockett. I had not encountered the possibility that the same God was still in the business of answering prayer on a Tuesday in Texas.

The man at the pulpit was describing it like it had happened to him the week before.

I sat in the pew, my feet not yet reaching the floor, and I formed a sentence in my head that I have repeated more times in fifty-nine years than any other sentence in my life. I don’t know a God like that. But I want to know more.

That was the beginning of everything.

The man behind the pulpit

The man’s name was John Long La Noue, Sr., though by the time I was old enough to spell it he was already Dr. John to most everyone in East Texas. The beard he is famous for now came much later. The man at the pulpit in 1967 was clean-shaven, dark-haired, square through the shoulders, the kind of man who looked like he could fix his own truck and probably had. He had been a college football player before a knee injury sent him into the ministry, and there was still something of the linebacker about him when he was loading a relief truck. He liked tools. He liked logistics. He liked the kind of theological argument that ends with both parties on their knees. The white beard would arrive in the second half of his life. He has been telling people for a decade now that he is Santa’s baby brother. He is not quite kidding.

In 1967, the year I sat in that pew, he was thirty-two years old and serving as a Baptist Student Union director at four East Texas colleges. He chaired the Summer Missions Committee. His salary, by his own account, was “one step ahead of the poverty program.” He had a wife and two children and a habit of working past midnight.

He also had a Bible class he taught at Kilgore College that spring, and he was preparing a lesson on the Gospel of John when he hit what he later called a literary speed bump. The verses were John 14:12 through 15. He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do… and whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.

He had read those verses many times. The Gospel of John was the first book of the Bible he had ever read from start to finish, at seventeen. But this time the words refused to lie flat on the page. He pulled down his Strong’s Concordance and his Parallel Gospel and made an exhaustive list of everything Jesus had done in the four Gospels. When he finished, he saw that the list fell into two categories. Jesus met human need where He found it, and He introduced people to God. Every miracle, every healing, every conversation at a well or a tax booth, was one or the other or both.

Then John LaNoue did the dangerous thing. He compared his own life to the list.

He concluded, sitting at his kitchen table with the lamp on and his wife asleep down the hall, that he was a busy Christian. He was an effective Christian. He was an ordained Christian. And he was, by the standards of John chapter 14, an almost entirely talk-only Christian.

That conviction was the kindling. The fire came two weeks later.

The bus on the liquor-store lot

The summer missions assignment that year was a medical and dental clinic on the Rio Grande, in the villages of the Texas-Mexico border. The team was three students: two nurses and a dentist. The problem was that the clinic, as designed, would have to be torn down and rebuilt every time the team moved to a new village. Two days for breakdown. Two days for setup. In a ten-week summer that gave the team almost no actual clinic days.

LaNoue described the problem one Sunday evening to Dr. Kerfoot Walker, an old country physician in his church. Dr. Walker listened, nodded, and slid out of his chair and onto his knees beside the dining-room table. He prayed about forty seconds. God, this clinic project is to meet people’s needs physically and spiritually so they’ll listen to you as they’re told. I have no part in it. Show John how to do it. In Jesus’ name, amen. He got back into his chair before LaNoue had finished kneeling down to join him.

LaNoue would later say he had underestimated the power of that layman’s prayer.

At three in the morning the next Monday, he woke up. He was not a man who woke at three in the morning. His wife’s feet were not cold. He did not have to go to the bathroom. He lay in the dark trying to figure out why he was awake, and the thought formed: Father, is there something You’ve been trying to tell me, and I’ve been too busy to listen?

He went to the kitchen with his Bible and his notepad. He opened to John 14, prayed, and asked God to show him how to make the clinic mobile. The word mobile led to the word bus. By daylight he had a parts list, a rough floor plan on graph paper, and the dimensions of Dr. Walker’s examining room as a reference for the interior. God woke him at three the next morning, and the next, and the next. By Friday the design was finished. He showed it to his wife and made what he called a contract with God. He would not ask any human being for any of the money or any of the equipment. He would answer questions if asked. He would not solicit. He would only pray.

He went to the Summer Missions Retreat that weekend. His boss, Dr. W.F. Howard, asked how things were going. We’re going to have a mobile clinic this summer. Howard said good, see what you can do. He did not offer to help.

LaNoue went to a chair in the corner and repented for hoping Howard would offer. Then a man named Dr. McGlothin, head of the missions division, walked over. John, you’ve been mentioning a mobile clinic. What do you need? LaNoue said everything. How about money? The check was for four hundred dollars and arrived the following Monday.

Driving from Kilgore College to Longview that same week, LaNoue passed a liquor store with a school bus parked on the lot. A for-sale sign was taped inside the windshield. He pulled over. He prayed about it with his wife in the car. Then he made what he later described as his largest act of faith that whole month, which was walking into a Texas liquor store as an ordained Baptist minister, in broad daylight, while every gossip in Gregg County could see him doing it.

The bus was seven hundred and fifty dollars. The owner, a man from Carthage, dropped it to six hundred and fifty when he heard it was for a church project. LaNoue had four hundred. He prayed.

On May 12, 1967, a letter arrived in his morning mail from Mr. Cecil Worley, the man who had been LaNoue’s boss at a foundry in Beaumont during his high school summers. Dear John, I do not know why I am writing this letter. All I know is that God has told me to send you $250. You know that I do not do things like this. What’s going on with you? The check was enclosed.

LaNoue grabbed the phone. The bus owner had moved the bus to Carthage and told him another buyer was already on the way with cash. LaNoue called a student for a ride. He got there breathless. He paid the man, got the title, and started the bus. Black smoke came out the back. The transmission ground when he tried to put it in gear. As he was pulling out, the previous owner tapped on the window and added, almost as an afterthought, Oh, John, by the way, the brakes don’t work.

LaNoue drove the bus home without brakes through the five-way traffic circle in Henderson, Texas. He has been telling that story for fifty-nine years. It still makes him laugh.

What the bus became

The bus became the first mobile medical and dental clinic of what would become Amigos Internacionales. The clinic ran on the Texas-Mexico border that summer of 1967. It served villages that had never seen a dentist. It introduced people to God in the way Dr. Kerfoot Walker had prayed for. And it became the prototype, the proof of concept, for what the same man would do for the next six decades.

The list of disasters and countries that followed is too long for any honest summary in an article of this length. There was Hurricane Fifi in Honduras in 1974. There was the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which LaNoue helped coordinate while the Mexican government was still saying it did not need outside help. There was the Peruvian cholera outbreak in 1991. There was 9/11 in New York. There was Iran twice, including a return trip to Bam after the 2004 earthquake. There was Bosnia. There was Serbia. There was North Korea, where he and a small consortium worked for years to deliver food and medical aid in conditions that nearly every other Western nonprofit had abandoned as impossible.

Reporters called him “Indiana Jones with a Bible and a skillet.” The phrase appeared in the Tyler Morning Telegraph most recently this April, in a feature by Jennifer Scott. It is a wonderful phrase. It is also, as descriptions go, about half of him. The Indiana Jones part is the school bus and the brakeless circle in Henderson and the runway in Pyongyang and the dust of Karamoja. The Bible and skillet part is the kitchen table at three in the morning, and the contract with God about not asking anyone for anything, and the dining-room prayer that took forty seconds because Dr. Walker had already finished saying what needed to be said.

I want to be careful here. This is not the kind of story I am normally inclined to tell about a man I love. It is too easy in the Christian press to round the rough edges off a life and produce something that reads like a tract. John LaNoue is not a tract. He is a stubborn, funny, loud, occasionally aggravating, and entirely human servant of God who has spent six decades doing the work most American Christians admire from a distance.

He has also, as he is the first to admit, walked through broken places as a broken person. Chapter 14 of his book is titled exactly that. He has buried his wife Kaywin, his ministry partner for fifty-six years. He has known seasons of doubt that he has refused to varnish over in his own writing. He has cancer in his medical history. He has retired from the presidency of Amigos Internacionales four times. The fourth retirement, in 2016, stuck.

That is when I took the chair.

How a boy in a pew becomes a president

I joined the Amigos Internacionales Board of Directors in 2004. By then I was forty-five and had spent more than three decades watching the man at the pulpit become the man across the dinner table. He had been the first phone call when news that mattered arrived. He had taught me, by example more than by lecture, how to pray about a problem and then trust the answer enough to act on it before the answer was fully in hand.

The board years were an apprenticeship I did not know I was serving. He would call me with a logistical problem from Uganda or Tanzania or somewhere I could not pronounce, and we would work it out on the phone. He would send me a draft of a chapter from a book he was writing and ask if it sounded all right. He would tell me, more often than I deserved to hear it, that he was proud of the work I was doing.

In 2016, when he retired for the fourth time, the board asked me to take the presidency. I said yes. I did not feel ready. I was fifty-seven years old, the boy in the pew was somewhere inside me still saying I don’t know a God like that, and I was about to inherit an organization that had been answering that question for almost five decades.

What I have learned in the ten years since is that the organization does not actually belong to either of us. It never has. The bus on the liquor-store lot was not John LaNoue’s. The check from Cecil Worley was not his to spend. The four-hundred-dollar gift from Dr. McGlothin was not his to keep. None of it was. He built the organization on a contract with God that included the line about not asking any human being for anything, and the strangest thing about the sixty years since is how often that contract has held.

What the bus became, sixty years later

At amigosmedical.org today there is a registry of patients that ran to 66,295 names in 2025 alone. Ten point two million dollars of medical care was delivered on a hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars raised. The math is one dollar in, up to seventy-one dollars of care out. Our director of medical services in the field is Dr. Paul Mulyamboga, a Ugandan physician who has the same expression LaNoue had at thirty-two, which is the expression of a man who has already started the next project before you finished asking about the last one.

In April of this year, in Napak District in the Karamoja region of Uganda, our team treated six thousand patients in eight days. Six hundred and fifty of those were children’s surgeries. Five hundred and forty-nine of those patients made a profession of faith on the same trip.

That figure is part of a larger ledger. According to monthly field reports from Amigos missionpoint leaders, Amigos has recorded 19,555 first-time professions of faith from January 2023 through May of this year. The annual numbers tell the story better than any sermon I could write. There were 1,156 in 2023. There were 4,380 in 2024. There were 9,097 in 2025. There have been 4,922 in the first five months of 2026 alone. The work is accelerating. It is not slowing down.

I do not believe these numbers because they make the organization look good. I believe them because they come from the same pastors and field workers I talk to every week, who do not know how to lie about the work they are doing because they are not trained as marketers. I believe them because I have stood beside them and watched the lines form.

What sits with me, as a former eight-year-old in a pew, is that 19,555 is only the number for the period of 2023 forward. It does not count the conversions in Honduras in 1974. It does not count the patients in the Mexico City rubble in 1985. It does not count the North Koreans who heard the gospel from a man with a skillet. It does not count, frankly, my own profession of faith.

The man at ninety-one

Dr. John LaNoue is ninety-one years old. He lives in East Texas. He is still writing books. The most recent one is called Walking with God in Broken Places, and his wife Kaywin, who died several years ago, is listed as co-author because she wrote half of it before the Lord took her home. He records a podcast with the title Friends Helping Friends. He has narrated all twenty-four chapters of his own book on the podcast feed, complete with the whoop of his laugh when he gets to the part about the brakes failing in Henderson.

He still prays at three in the morning when he is asked to. He is still, in his words, in the business of meeting human need where he finds it and introducing people to God. He has retired four times now, and I would not bet on the retirement holding.

I am sixty-seven years old this year. The boy in the pew is still in there. He still says, when something arrives in the morning that we prayed about the night before, I don’t know a God like that. The difference between eight and sixty-seven is that he no longer means he does not know. He means he is still being introduced.

That is the work John LaNoue handed me in 2016. It is the work the 19,555 are doing themselves, in Ugandan villages and Tanzanian fishing towns and Malawian district hospitals and the medical clinics that bear the name our founder gave them. Each one of them is one more person saying, in their own language, I don’t know a God like that. But I want to know more.

We are still in the business of introductions.