Dr. Peter J. Weiss

“A Well­ness Evan­ge­list, what’s that?”

When I tell peo­ple about my career it always causes a reac­tion, usu­ally a pos­i­tive reac­tion but some­times just the oppo­site.  A few peo­ple are a lit­tle put off by the “evan­ge­list” part.

Maybe they had a “toxic expo­sure” to reli­gion at some point in their life.   Sadly, there are many peo­ple, even reli­gious author­i­ties, who cloak them­selves in the man­tle of reli­gion while harm­ing oth­ers emo­tion­ally, spir­i­tu­ally and even phys­i­cally.  Trust me when I say that I don’t want to be like that.

What I want to do is invite indi­vid­u­als to be well and invite them to con­nect with God.  I’ll tell you a bit about my per­sonal faith below, but for the pur­pose of evan­ge­lism I’m not too dog­matic.  So you can relax.

Only you can know what’s right for you, and fur­ther, it’s your respon­si­bil­ity to decide it for your­self.

My role is to help you start seek­ing.

Seek­ing well­ness — phys­i­cal, emo­tional and spir­i­tual — and seek­ing God.  If you seek, you will find.  You will find your way to well­ness and to your own beliefs on spir­i­tual mat­ters.

Per­haps it will help if I sum­ma­rize my own story.  As a physi­cian, I’ve always been con­cerned about help­ing indi­vid­u­als to be well.  But I was not well myself, at least on an emo­tional and spir­i­tual basis.  I had no inter­est in God.

A per­sonal cri­sis woke me up to the fact that my way of liv­ing wasn’t work­ing, and I turned to God for help.  You don’t need to know the details; let’s just say it wasn’t a happy time.

The first step, admit­ting I was wrong and ini­ti­at­ing a change, was scary and painful, but I knew that not to do so would be worse.  I sought the help of friends, joined a church, con­nected with a small men’s group and started work­ing on myself.

It was hard at first, but as I learned, trusted God and kept at it, I grad­u­ally became well.  Not per­fect of course, but truly healthy — phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally.

Around the time I really became healthy in all respects, I felt God call­ing me to pass along what I had learned to oth­ers, and the book More Health Less Care was born.

At that time, I thought that God had placed me at the head of a health insur­ance com­pany to help oth­ers to well­ness, but He was to show me a dif­fer­ent path.

As the book’s pub­li­ca­tion neared, it was becom­ing clearer to me that God had other plans in the works.  A lit­tle over a year ago He abruptly called me to leave health­care to become a Well­ness Evan­ge­list.

Over the last year I have been speak­ing, blog­ging, and teach­ing on well­ness, and I’ve also launched two well­ness busi­nesses.

I’ve been try­ing and will always strive to “meet peo­ple where they are” with respect to their health, and many peo­ple aren’t look­ing for God; they’re just look­ing to lose weight.

Con­se­quently, up until now I’ve focused my mes­sages mostly on phys­i­cal well­ness, mod­er­ately on emo­tional well­ness, and a lit­tle on spir­i­tual well­ness.

In the last few weeks I feel God call­ing me to change that, to talk more about Him, Jesus, my faith and their con­nec­tion to whole-person well­ness.  So that’s what I’m going to do.

I hope that you’ll come along with me regard­less of your par­tic­u­lar faith or lack thereof.  This blog is for all who are inter­ested, not just for Chris­tians.  I don’t claim to know it all, and your thoughts are always wel­come.

I don’t bite and I try not to bark.

Whether you agree or dis­agree, I’m happy to talk — not shout — about it.

Who knows what our jour­ney will be like?  I’m not sure myself.  Some of my posts might even look more like those of a cler­gy­man than those of a doc­tor.

Let’s just go with it and find out.  Where Jesus leads, I will fol­low.