For the Gateses, this was the second time God had healed their hearts. The first came when, after decades apart, they found their way back to each other and remarried. Photos by Christa McConnell.
Debbie Michel
October 30, 2025Known around the church as its faithful “sous chef,” he had spent the week preparing meals for over 200 people each evening.
But while most knew him in an apron, during the day LT wears a white coat. At 78, he still rises early to serve as a full-time physician for the Hamilton Southeastern School District. Whether in the clinic or the kitchen, people look to him when something goes wrong.
So when someone rushed downstairs to the church kitchen that evening and said, “You need to come upstairs right now,” LT assumed it was a medical emergency. Instead, he found his wife Emma, standing at the front of the sanctuary, responding to the pastor’s call to join the church by profession of faith.
“I had no idea that she was going to make a commitment that evening,” LT recalled with glee.
Emma’s giggled as she recalled the joy-filled night. “I hadn’t told him. It was just between me and the Lord. But when I went up, I felt such relief, such peace. I knew it was the right time.”
For the Gateses, this was the second time God had healed their hearts. The first came when, after decades apart, they found their way back to each other and remarried. Now, standing together on that summer Sabbath evening, July 26, 2025, in Indianapolis, God was completing what He had begun. Bringing them not only back to one another, but into one accord in faith.
LT and Emma first met as teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, and later married while in college. After graduation, they moved to Seattle when LT was accepted into medical school at the University of Washington. Their first child, Leisha, was born there. But when Leisha was just 7 months old, in 1971, their young family suffered an unthinkable tragedy.
They went to a Thanksgiving celebration and put Leisha down to sleep in a guest room. Unbeknownst to them, a 12-year-old guest with mental issues sneaked into the room and harmed the baby. The child was rushed to the hospital but “there was no way that she could recover from whatever he did to her,” Emma said, her voice cracking as she relived the pain. “That really took a major toll on our life together,” she acknowledged.
By 1974, a second daughter, Andrea was born but by 1977, the grief from their baby’s murder had fractured their marriage.
Yet even in that dark valley, God’s hand was not absent. The wound would shape their lives for decades, but it did not erase the possibility of restoration. As the psalmist wrote, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Though they could not see it then, God was already preparing a way for healing.
In the years that followed, LT poured himself into medicine and military service. While stationed with the military in Oklahoma, a friend persuaded him to attend a local evangelistic series and it was there, in 1978, he committed himself to the Lord and the Adventist church. He would remarry, eventually establishing his career as a physician in Indianapolis, while juggling duties as Sabbath school teacher and elder.
Emma, the daughter of a Baptist preacher, had always leaned on God’s presence—even as a child when she battled polio. “God has always been with me, never left me through all the trials and tribulations,” she said.
Emma raised their daughter Andrea and balanced a career as a respiratory therapist in a suburb of Atlanta; she also remarried but would later divorce.
Still, the bond between LT and Emma was never fully severed. At their 47th high school reunion in August 2013, the two saw each other again. By then, LT was also divorced.
“There was something there that just kind of rekindled in my own heart,” LT remembered.
Emma had felt it too. “The Lord was giving me dreams about him and us being back together,” she said. “I recorded those dreams in my journal, and even someone I didn’t know came to me and said the Lord told them my husband was going to come back. That shocked me.”
Their remarriage, in October 2013, was healing, restoring love they once thought was lost.
For most of the week at this summer’s evangelism series at the Eastside Church, Emma worked in the kitchen, tired from long days and living with pain from knee replacements and back surgery. But on the final night, she made it into the sanctuary. “It was the awesomeness of being in the presence and seeing the younger people going up to be baptized. That’s what struck me most of all,” she said.
When evangelist Kojo Twumasi made the appeal, Emma knew it was her time. “One of the elders came over and said, ‘I’ve been praying for you to do this,’” she recalled. “It was like God whispering, ‘This is the moment.’”
At 76, she went forward to officially join her husband in the Adventist faith—almost 12 years after their remarriage. For LT, it was another healing—this time of their spiritual unity.
For the Gateses, healing has come in chapters. The first was the miracle of reunion, when God brought them back together as husband and wife. The second came in Indianapolis, when Emma joined LT in the Adventist faith and they stepped forward in spiritual unity.
As Emma said of that night: “I was just so excited and felt so much relief. That was a beautiful night for me.”
LT added, “With our Heavenly Father, we get chances. When we make a mistake, He doesn’t say, This is it. He’s always extending an invitation to His children.”
Their story echoes God’s promise in Revelation 21:5: “Behold, I am making all things new.” The same Lord who was close to them in their heartbreak is the One who restored their love and faith, proving that no loss is beyond His reach, and no life too broken for His healing touch.
Debbie Michel is editor of the Lake Union Herald.
