Illusionist Recalls 'Real Magic' That Turned Him Toward Christ
Jim Munroe is an illusionist who, unsurprisingly, once found the idea of a God "really silly" – that is until he received a life-saving bone marrow transplant.
Before he even began to ask himself "the God question," Munroe was playing with cards and developing more than just magic tricks.
"Learning how to become a magician, I have developed a skepticism," he says in a newly released video on the I Am Second website.
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As a magician, he understood everything to be "some kind of scheme" or that something was going on behind the scenes that was "ultimately fake or false."
And God to him was like "the wizard of Oz" or "the wizard behind the curtain making things happen."
It wasn't until college when Munroe was asked to check out a church. He agreed and "something happened to me that morning that I couldn't quite fit into my worldview," he testifies in the video.
Though he began to ask questions, he needed something more before making a leap of faith.
"If I was going to believe in this God, if I was going to believe in the Bible, if I was going to acknowledge who ultimately the Bible points to who's Jesus, if I was going to acknowledge all those thing I asked God 'I need you to make this real to me,'" Munroe recalls thinking.
"I need You to take me back behind the curtain."
Munroe was only 29, as he states in the video, when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia called Philadelphia Positive Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. The married father of two was told he only had two months to live.
And even if treatment were to work and Munroe were to go into remission, the cancer would come back again and again, doctors told him.
A bone marrow transplant was his only chance of living.
"What they wanted to do was to get me into remission by treating me with chemotherapy, but then find somebody somewhere in the world, whose DNA matched mine so succinctly that they would literally take their immune system out of their body and put it into mine and hope that my body would recognize it enough as its own; and it would essentially start growing new white blood cells from an entirely new person," he explained.
"That is like real magic."
Out of some seven million persons, they found "one perfect match" – a 19-year-old female.
Throughout the transplant process, doctors repeated terminology similar to what he had heard from Scripture. "You will be born a new person" and "you will be like a baby inside a mother's womb all over again," they'd say.
The procedure was a success and the illusionist found new blood – someone else's blood – flowing in him. Afterward, he found it difficult to ignore what he ultimately saw as an answered prayer.
"A substitution of blood on my behalf so that I could live again, and so that the deception of my body would die – that to me is really difficult to ignore when I ask God to reveal Himself to me," he testifies.
"It's no longer I who lives, but someone else who lives inside of me."
Munroe shares his life-changing story as he travels the country leading an entertainment project called the "M?ZE."
It's not your typical magic show, he maintains. Rather, it's meant to spark discussions on truth and what is really true.
"We believe everything is OK as long as you don't hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt and to the best of your definition of knowledge," he says in his show as he performs a floating metal trick. "We believe ... Jesus was a good man just like Buddha, Muhammad and ourselves.
"We believe all religions are essentially the same. We believe man is essentially good; it's only his behavior that lets him down. We believe that man must find the right truth for him, the whole world will readjust, reality will change, ... there is no such thing as absolute truth."
"Collectively, we might as well believe that a piece of metal can really float."
While performing illusions for thousands, he wants to convey one truth.
"There is not a question in my mind that the only answer for the human condition is that of Jesus," he says. "As a skeptic and a magician I fully believe, I fully believe in not only who God is, but also what He did for me. There is no question in my mind."
IAmSecond.com features testimonies from celebrities such as Josh Hamilton, Jason Castro and Michael W. Smith, all of whom affirm the saying that Jesus is first and "I am second." The site has drawn more than 3.3 million people.
