“One of his therapists made a very good synopsis, describing someone’s brain before aphasia being a neatly categorized file box but after a stroke, everything gets thrown about and put back in,” Mariah said. “The retrieval part of words that Jeff is trying to communicate is being thwarted.” “It wasn’t until towards the end of his therapy there that we realized, other than miraculous intervention, Jeff would never be able to preach again. This was very hard to wrap our minds around,” shared Mariah.

Chapter 1

Jeff Windt enjoyed preaching and working with local families. The tools of his trade were words. For years, Jeff had been a pillar in his community. He was a leader at Second Presbyterian Church [PCA] in Greenville, South Carolina, where he served as the Assistant Minister of Youth and Families for four years. Leading youth groups and bringing people together had always been a passion of Jeff’s. He also has a family of his own, three young boys and a wife, Mariah.

Then, everything changed one night in June 2020. At 44 years old, Jeff had an acute ischemic stroke at home. Ischemic strokes are the most common type of stroke, accounting for nearly 90% of stroke incidents each year.

“I heard Jeff’s phone hit the bathroom floor with a smack,” said Mariah Windt, Jeff’s wife. “That was a bit alarming because it was a brand new phone he had purchased the day before.”

Mariah said Jeff had come home from work that evening and complained of having a headache, but that he seemed normal — for him. She asked him what had happened with the phone, repeating the question when he didn’t respond. He just shook his head and said ‘I don’t know,’” she recalled. “It was a little odd but I didn’t dwell on it.”

A Night They’ll Never Forget, Even Though They Wish They Could

The family sat down and ate dinner together. During dinner, Jeff seemed to be acting normal. After dinner, while cleaning up, Mariah noticed Jeff pacing about the house. This again seemed odd to Mariah. It was at this point that she started keeping more of an eye on his behavior.

“I was trying not to overreact about the strangeness of his behavior but at the same time I just felt that something was wrong,” she said.

It was then that a friend called Jeff on the phone.

“They were on speaker phone, and I couldn’t really hear the conversation but I did notice that the other person was talking, but Jeff wasn’t really responding back,” she said. “The other person hung up, and when Jeff held his phone to hang up he dropped it in his lap and was having a hard time picking it back up. It was then I knew something was terribly wrong.”

Read More