Eight months ago, on April 20, the Rev. Larry Jahnke and his wife, Karen, were eating a delicious homemade chicken dinner with friends in Minneapolis. Then, someone asked Jahnke a question and he didn't answer.

He couldn't answer, because he couldn't speak. He was having a stroke.

He said he still associates that moment with the warm, wonderful smell of the chocolate chip cookies they had been served.

The eight months since have turned out to be the best time of his life, but not one he'd want to go through again, said Jahnke, who is the senior pastor at New Song Community Church in Bismarck.

The couple had landed in Minneapolis that day after a six-hour flight from a mission trip to Guatemala. The stroke was out of the blue, totally unexpected, he said.

There had been one small warning, he said, but it had been so brief. On their last day in Guatemala, the Jahnkes had visited Mayan temple ruins at Tikal.

On the flight to Tikal, Jahnke had noticed blurred vision and a feeling of numbness in his head. A minute or so later, it had passed. In hindsight, he knows it was a mini-stroke. But in the jungle, touring the Mayan temples that day, Jahnke estimated he walked about 10 miles and climbed four temples, each as high as North Dakota's Capitol building.

"Iwould probably be dead if (the stroke) had happened that day," he said from his home on Bismarck's Northview Lane, in front of a crackling fire and in the aroma of Christmas goodies that his wife was baking.

Even if it had happened on the flight back to the U.S., Jahnke wouldn't have been just a 10-minute drive from the Cities' North Memorial Hospital, where he received what he called the miracle drug for strokes, TPA, along with a study drug, where the hospital had a stroke center and the doctor who headed the department happened to be there when Jahnke came into the emergency room.

Though the doctors were optimistic when they saw how Jahnke was responding to the medication, his wife said, Jahnke had had a brain stem stroke, a clot, not an aneurysm, in the left side of his brain.

So the right-handed Jahnke lost function in the right side of his body: He couldn't walk, talked with great difficulty, had double vision. He could hear everything around him, but couldn't respond.

"I was scared," he said.

In intensive care, his thoughts went round and round:I'm done. How will Ilive? How will I work? What am I going to do? Can I talk again? Walk again? Be normal?

"Three days later, it hit me," he said. If this had happened in Guatemala, without the miracle drugs or the U.S. health care system, while climbing the steep temple steps, or on the long flight home, he very likely would have died.

Then he thought: "God's got this in control." God didn't cause the stroke, Jahnke said, but it didn't take God by surprise.

So then Jahnke said, "I got my mind off dying."

Father died young

Jahnke's father died at the age of 50 of a massive heart attack at Tom O'Leary Golf Course.

So in the back of his mind, Jahnke had always pictured maybe he would inherit the same fate:No old age, no nursing home, just dying young, in his sleep, painlessly, leaving all nicely in order for his wife. This was the plan. And like many plans, the exact opposite happened.

The stroke brought debilitation, helplessness, humility. And he survived.

Outpouring of love

The wave of prayer that followed Jahnke's stroke seemed to move at the speed of light.

Kurt Chaffee, the assistant pastor at New Song, was shocked when he got the news that day. Chaffee immediately got on the phone and started calling people. The prayer chain that followed took off at an incredible rate, he said.

Even while Jahnke was still in the emergency room, phone calls came in. Within an hour, probably a thousand people as far away as Guatemala were praying for him, Karen Jahnke said.

"He had such a prayer covering over him, I don't think anything could have gone wrong," she said.

Jahnke acknowledges a sensitive streak that makes him a movie crier, but this was something else. "There was such an outpouring of love, I was crying all the time,"he said. Usually, this outpouring happens after people die, he said. But he got to experience it in life - the affection, hundreds of cards, all the good wishes.

"I felt I've already had my funeral. I got to know my life made a difference. Everything I'm doing has an effect on people," he said.

Reality hits

Doctors say 95 percent of stroke victims will struggle with depression, Jahnke said.

"Not me," he thought. "I'm the most positive person in the world."

"But I've never had such a struggle with negative thinking. Such a battle. Will Iever preach again? When can I ride my motorcycle? Play golf?"

After a week at North Memorial, he was transferred to St. Alexius in Bismarck for a month of rehabilitation.

"That's when reality hit," he said.

The reality of helplessness, of having every personal detail done for him, from showering to eating, of needing nurses and aides and therapists to take care of every basic need. All the daily tasks that people take for granted had to be relearned. A task as simple as putting on his own socks was an ordeal.

But the morning in physical therapy when he took his first steps, "I was so excited, I could walk," he said.

"It was walking 'really ugly,'" he said, demonstrating the awkward gait of those first steps. But he made a decision of attitude:The glass was half full, not half empty.

A woodworker who made many of his own cabinets and furniture, he was frustrated because he couldn't work at the hobby he loved, and still can't turn a screwdriver.

But then he remembers, "Six months ago, I couldn't even move my finger. I'm so thankful."

Jahnke estimates that he has about 75 percent of his function back.

And at 58, he said, "I never dreamed I'd be back to my high school weight of 148 pounds ever again."

He walks an hour a day on the treadmill, about 3.5 miles. Writing is slow, so he's switched to using credit cards instead of checks. His right hand is stiff, but he can make a fist and sign his name. He's become an adept left-handed typist.

A standing ovation

Jahnke has been going to a stroke support group, where he sees how stroke has devastated others' memory, speech, mobility and vision.

That was another huge lesson, he said: "When you start to feel sorry for yourself, there is always somebody somewhere who has got things worse," he said.

With Chaffee handling New Song's day-to-day functioning, Jahnke has been practicing stepping back and keeping his hands off, focusing more on the pulpit and finding new ways to reach out to people.

Two months before his stroke, he had told his staff that he felt he needed to reach out more to people with handicaps, but that he knew he couldn't truly relate to their situation.

"But now," he said, with heavy emphasis on the "now," he can relate:"Now I understand.

"No question, God's had me in school for the last eight months," he said.

When Jahnke finally got back into the pulpit for the first time, he delivered a five-part series called "When You Hit the Wall." His first words on that topic were "embrace it." The day he first preached again, Jahnke got a standing ovation, Chaffee said, from a church packed with congregation members and friends from other churches.

Through all this time, Bible verses kept coming at him, Jahnke said, especially the verses which explain the paradox of how God works: That God uses human weakness to deliver His strength. "My biggest blessing is weakness," Jahnke said. People feel his vulnerability and allow themselves to be vulnerable, he said.

"Anything good I do is really (from) God. I believe I'm a much better pastor now, with a heart much more tender."

Now his deep wish is, "God, don't let me forget. Don't let me take things for granted."