Such simple questions as "Are you a Christian ? Have you ever thought about it?" save lives and souls and reverberate through time and eternity.
By Austin Ruse
Crisis Magazine
May 16, 2026
Robert Collins, M.D., was riding high. After medical school, internship, and residency, he was doing clinical research in oncology at a leading West Coast institution. He had a pretty wife, lots of friends, and was publishing in prestigious journals like The New England Journal of Medicine.
He had long ago left behind his childhood Baptist upbringing. He had seen a lot of suffering in his work, and that got to him. Why, God ? Why allow this ? He thought this was purely Santa Claus stuff, of course. And then, one day...
He was working in the lab on something called the homeobox gene, whatever that is; it is supposed to be the quarterback gene that controls whole developmental programs of organisms. He was working with his mentor, Peter, who had a doctorate from Oxford. They were studying how a fertilized egg develops into a fully formed organism.
In his new book, You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center (Ignatius Press), he says, "Peter and I were in the midst of this fascinating discussion about homeobox genes and the developmental plan and the complexity of it all."
He continues,
[T]he discussion was galloping along: how the body plan is laid down; how this homeobox gene controls these homeobox genes and is, in turn, governed by these other ones; and these multiple levels of interaction and gene regulation and signaling, the complexity piling on and on-stuff we knew, stuff we sort of guessed at, stuff we wouldn't know for 100 years.
And then he heard a voice. It said, "Isn't this all a little too amazing to have just happened?" He says that at that moment he was "slapped out of a deep sleep."
This book unspools like a modern-day television program. We live in the Golden Age of television, and what we have come to learn is that episodic television is kind of boring. What you need are long story arcs that last a season or two or three. In his remarkable telling, there are complete episodes telling individual stories of deep faith in the shadow of great pain and death, and there is this season-long story arc, the story of this doctor's faith.
Collins was treating a woman named Debra who had been diagnosed with leukemia. Not a lot of people know that a diagnosis of leukemia can be an emergency situation where you are rushed to the hospital right away. It is also possible for leukemia patients to live for quite a few years before succumbing to the disease. Collins explains that Debra had chronic myeloid leukemia and that she could go rapidly or last for a few years. At one point, early in the treatment, she abruptly asked him, "Are you a Christian?"
He said, no, but that he was open to it.
What Collins was at that time was a typical, arrogant, not terribly caring modern medical god. He remembers the time he rather cooly referred to a patient having a "cool case" of some kind of lymphoma subtype he had never heard of before, a kind that would kill the woman fairly rapidly. This and other similar memories of that cold Collins makes this Collins cringe.
For the first time, with Debra, he became friends with a patient. They talked, actually talked. She told him that among her favorite things was sitting on a boulder in the middle of a mountain stream, listening to the water gurgle. She said she was happy he was her doctor, even though he was not a Christian.
She passed, and Collins thinks of her every time he hikes in the woods.
There are so many patients who touched this nascent Christian's life. There is George, who fought in a key battle in World War II. George died, too. Hardly anyone in this book gets out alive, but all of them are blessed. Collins and George grew so close that Collins eulogized George at his funeral.
And all along, Collins is coming closer and closer.
William, paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor and dying, handed Collins Mere Christianity, which Collins says,
ended up being one of the most important books I read in my seeking, as has been the case for many, many others. It's an intelligent explanation of Christianity that deals nicely with most of the usual questions. It helped me gain a decent understanding of the faith, beyond what Lewis would call "a schoolboy understanding", which was the shallow understanding I had of Christianity until William gave me this present.
Collins says William played a huge role in the conversion of "this agnostic doctor."
Collins began to read: The Brothers Karamazov and the connectedness of all things, the reverberation of all that is good, and all that is bad. And then, A Severe Mercy, in which Sheldon Vanauken tells C.S. Lewis,
A choice is necessary: and there is no certainty. One can only choose a side. So, I-I now chose my side: I choose beauty; I chose what I love...I do not affirm that I am without doubt; I do but ask for help, having chosen to overcome it. I do but say: Lord, I believe-help Thou my unbelief.
Collins turned to his wife one day in the garden and said, "I think I'm a Christian now." Collins had chosen.
With an Episcopal stop along the way, Collins joined his Catholic wife in the One True Church. He was baptized and confirmed at the Easter vigil, eight of them that night, including a boy with Down Syndrome.
His faith grows, and he becomes an entirely new doctor. He sits on the edge of deathbeds and holds the hands of the dying. He prays with them, cries with them.
I will finish with the story of John, who had maybe the worst case of lymphoma Collins had ever seen. Collins had finished for the day and was heading home, but a voice said to him, "Go see John." Collins says he had learned to follow these nudges.
John had
a gigantic mass in his abdomen, as big as a pillow and intensely metabolically active. There were multiple sites elsewhere, including throughout John's liver. We were treating him as aggressively as we could: several rounds of high-dose chemotherapy, to which he responded, but not completely; a bone marrow transplant, to which he responded further, but, again, not completely; and now, a donor lymphocyte infusion.
She passed, and Collins thinks of her every time he hikes in the woods.
There are so many patients who touched this nascent Christian's life. There is George, who fought in a key battle in World War II. George died, too. Hardly anyone in this book gets out alive, but all of them are blessed. Collins and George grew so close that Collins eulogized George at his funeral.
And all along, Collins is coming closer and closer.
William, paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor and dying, handed Collins Mere Christianity, which Collins says,
ended up being one of the most important books I read in my seeking, as has been the case for many, many others. It's an intelligent explanation of Christianity that deals nicely with most of the usual questions. It helped me gain a decent understanding of the faith, beyond what Lewis would call "a schoolboy understanding", which was the shallow understanding I had of Christianity until William gave me this present.
Collins says William played a huge role in the conversion of "this agnostic doctor."
Collins began to read: The Brothers Karamazov and the connectedness of all things, the reverberation of all that is good, and all that is bad. And then, A Severe Mercy, in which Sheldon Vanauken tells C.S. Lewis,
A choice is necessary: and there is no certainty. One can only choose a side. So, I-I now chose my side: I choose beauty; I chose what I love...I do not affirm that I am without doubt; I do but ask for help, having chosen to overcome it. I do but say: Lord, I believe-help Thou my unbelief.
Collins turned to his wife one day in the garden and said, "I think I'm a Christian now." Collins had chosen.
With an Episcopal stop along the way, Collins joined his Catholic wife in the One True Church. He was baptized and confirmed at the Easter vigil, eight of them that night, including a boy with Down Syndrome.
His faith grows, and he becomes an entirely new doctor. He sits on the edge of deathbeds and holds the hands of the dying. He prays with them, cries with them.
I will finish with the story of John, who had maybe the worst case of lymphoma Collins had ever seen. Collins had finished for the day and was heading home, but a voice said to him, "Go see John." Collins says he had learned to follow these nudges.
John had
a gigantic mass in his abdomen, as big as a pillow and intensely metabolically active. There were multiple sites elsewhere, including throughout John's liver. We were treating him as aggressively as we could: several rounds of high-dose chemotherapy, to which he responded, but not completely; a bone marrow transplant, to which he responded further, but, again, not completely; and now, a donor lymphocyte infusion.
A donor's lymphocyte is supposed to attack the cancer, but it can turn and attack the host. And this is what happened: grade IV acute graft-versus-host disease, which is fatal in 90 percent of cases. Anyone with any experience of bone marrow transplants will understand how dire this moment became.
They threw at John all of what Collins refers to as "modern barbaric oncology."
And then that one night, a voice told Collins, "Go see John."
John was alone in his quiet room. He was surprised to see Collins, and they exchanged smiles and hellos. John asked what brought Collins by, and Collins said he didn't know, that he was on his way home and felt he should come by and see him. Both of them were believers, and Collins said it felt natural enough to tell John that he had felt nudged by the Holy Spirit.
They sat and talked for a good long while about how difficult the whole process had been and about all of the suffering-physical, psychological, and spiritual. They talk about how the suffering continued with seemingly no end in sight. They talked frankly about how serious all of this was and that he might not make it. And then they talked about how he was handling the possibility of death, how he was hanging in there, hanging on a thread of faith. They talked about the feeling of desolation of being alone and suffering. Collins told John he should remember that Jesus on the Cross suffered too, for us.
John survived. He says cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him-because with the cancer and the suffering, his faith grew ever more rapidly. He wrote an essay about that late-night visit. He says his pastor had told him, "In the middle of the night, when you can't sleep and are all alone, imagine the Lord Jesus on the cross, suffering for you."
A couple of days later, he had taken a bad turn and was particularly discouraged. At about 10:30 at night, unexpectedly, his oncologist walked into the room. The oncologist said he felt a definite nudge of the Holy Spirit to drop by before he went home. John says they talked honestly about life and death, and then the oncologist said, "As you lie here alone, imagine the Lord Jesus on the cross suffering for you." John says it was yet another moment of God pouring his love into his heart. John says his own faith was saved in those suffering rooms.
This is a remarkable book on par with other great works of conversion and faith. And it reminds us never to be afraid to ask anyone, as Debra asked Collins, "Are you a Christian ? Have you ever thought about it?" Such simple questions save lives and souls and reverberate through time and eternity.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
Austin Ruse is a contributing editor to Crisis Magazine. He is president of the Center for Family and Human Rights in New York and Washington DC. He is the author of several books including, Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic (Crisis Publications). He can be reached at email protected.