Testimony: Ronald Isley
As Told To Marcus Vanderberg,
Posted: 2007-07-20 12:43:15
Ronald Isley Gives His Testimony.
We were raised in the church. My grandfather was a preacher. Singing was a gift to me early in life; this is why I tried to protect it. Never did drugs, nothing like that. I thought I was taking care of myself.
A little over a year ago I had a stroke in England. Of course I didn’t want to call a doctor because I’m a person that never went to a doctor. [My background singers] called the doctor and he examined me and took my blood pressure and it was up extremely high. He had another doctor, a specialist, see me. He said, ‘You’re having a stroke,’ and I said ‘What? I got to get back, because I have a show tomorrow.’ He said, ‘No, I want you to stay here and run some tests.’ I said, ‘Look, I got to do this show.’
After years of struggling with
low self-esteem and drug addiction, Mary J. Blige finally had a ‘Breakthrough.’
I didn’t know I would be out of it for about a year. First I thought I would be back within two months. Then three months. Then four months. It really took a year to get myself together. My family, friends, we sort of stayed prayed up all that time.
When I go in to making an album, I do everything fast. So when I went into making [‘
Baby Makin' Music‘], it was quite different for me. Sometimes I had to go over a song three times. I began to get stronger and stronger every month until finally I was back to where I wanted to be.
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Then the thing happened to
Luther. For me to have to watch that and Dick Clark, I just thought nothing like that would ever happen to me. Not me. I have never been sick one day in my life. No broken bones, no nothing. I felt that I could do anything up until this point. I was a little overweight and now I’m just exercising everyday and watching my weight. I go up and down, but I’m trying to keep everything together. A lot of people, they don’t know. They say, ‘It’s like you never had a stroke.’ But it was the most frightening thing. The Lord brought me through.
It was impossible to do some of the things we have done in this business without the Lord’s blessings. It’s so hard for me to even try to explain, but man, at different times, our faith in Jesus Christ has taken us through all these years.
2006-05-17 13:34:03
