Living, not just surviving: ENMU Alumnus Sean Wolfe’s story

By Blake Downs, Editor-in-Chief

Sean Wolfe’s life mantra is life is worth living. And as he tells it, the emphasis is on living, not just surviving.

The 43-year-old ENMU alumnus (BBA 16), Delta Mu Delta Honor Society Member, pastor, and United States Air Force veteran has been through his fair share of struggles and close calls, enough to justify the emphasis. As one who experienced a heart attack at the young age of 31, six subsequent heart operations, and an unsuccessful attempt to start a church, Wolfe is the definition of a survivor and an example of perseverance. 

THE ATTACK

In May 2012, Wolfe was working as a mechanic at the Ford dealership in Clovis. He knew something was wrong even though he had never experienced a heart attack before. He did not feel much pain, but he could feel his heart rate quicken at an alarming rate. “The best way I can describe it as being a former mechanic is as an engine with a dead cylinder: It was all out of balance,” he recounts.

By providence, a coworker had just finished EMT training and noticed Wolfe’s condition. He took Wolfe’s pulse and told him to sit down and eat something. When he attempted to complete a test drive of a customer’s vehicle, Wolfe knew something was wrong after he almost fainted while operating the vehicle. He returned to the office and his coworker again checked his pulse, noticed things hadn’t improved, and drove him to the emergency room.

At the emergency room, according to Wolfe, many of the medical professionals did not initially take him seriously, believing that an otherwise healthy and fit man in his early thirties could not be experiencing such a medical emergency. 

Finally, after one nurse measured his heart activity using an electrocardiogram, the workers began acting quickly and urgently. His blood pressure was so high that they struggled to insert an IV in his veins: “I think they collapsed seven different veins–three on one arm, four on the other–and they were trying to keep oxygen in me because my heart rate was at about 236 beats per minute in a complete arrhythmia.”

After EMTs who had just dropped off another patient were able to insert two IVs–one in each arm–the team administered several medicines to lower Wolfe’s heart rate, but nothing worked. 

When a cardiologist finally entered, he was able to help the group get his heart rate down to 90 beats per minute, with Wolfe spending a total of eight hours in the emergency room and nine days in the hospital after the initial attack.

Released with a cardiac medicine prescription, Wolfe was sent to the Tuscon VA Medical Center to see an electrical physiologist cardiologist two weeks later. Here they discovered that his heart was broken, as Wolfe puts it, and it still is to this day. “I do not have a normal heart rate,” he says. “My heart just cannot beat a normal rhythm on its own; it has to have vacation.”

After he was released, he attempted to return to work, but five trips to the emergency room later, Wolfe was told that he could not work in his current medical condition.

In August 2012, he suffered another major attack. This time, he was flown out to the Tuscon VA hospital. On his flight from the Amarillo VA, he experienced life-threatening attacks seven times. 

In Tuscon, the medical professionals administered a treadmill stress test, during which Wolfe ultimately experienced a cardiac arrest, which is when the heart stops beating completely. This lasted for three minutes, during which, according to Wolfe, his brain activity ceased. According to a nurse’s account later to Wolfe, after repeated failed attempts to restore his heartbeat, one cardiologist suggested they bring in a general physician to fill out a death certificate. “As soon as he finished saying that, I came back,” he says. This scared the medical team as they had not expected him to recover from the cardiac arrest. 

After this point, he did not work for another 25 months, which was hard on both him and his family. “We never said the word divorce, but we came really close, mainly because of me, not her… I didn’t feel like a man anymore,” Wolfe states, adding that not being able to work and having to taking 28 pills a day hurt his self-confidence. 

His initial emergency had come nearly two and a half years after he and his wife and two children had returned to eastern New Mexico from attempting to pioneer a church first in Round Rock, Tex. and then in Tyler, Tex. This effort had lasted nearly three years between 2007 and 2009 and according to Wolfe, “It just never really happened.”

All of this would be enough to cause any person to want to quit, but Wolfe credits his faith and key moments that keep him going.

SPIRITUAL ROOTS

This wasn’t always the case. “I didn’t like people, people didn’t like me, and I hated the world,” is how Wolfe describes his later teen years. “That is how I lived my life: A very hurt, a very abandoned, rejected kid is what I was.” Joining the Air Force was way to find some sort of purpose in life.

Even though Wolfe would have described himself as an atheist as a teenager, he wasn’t dogmatic about it: “I feel that I had to believe in something; I just didn’t know what it was.” Looking back now, he would label himself as a “whatever atheist,” understanding it as a way to practically reason away the accusations sent his way. As he says it, people would tell him, “Sean, you’re a jerk. You drink too much, you curse too much, you’re very cruel to women…”

To which he would reply, “Whatever, I don’t care.”

This flippancy was a response to the hypocrisy he saw from those who professed to be Christian and would try to correct his actions. He would often see them act in a way he knew wasn’t biblical: “The religion and the Christianity I had encountered before that was all hypocritical and false and empty. I didn’t see any realism and value in it, I just didn’t care,” he states, later adding that those same people trying to correct him and invite him to religious services would frequent the night clubs and compromising situations that he himself would enjoy. As is often the case, he was turned off from Christianity due to the self-righteous hypocrisy he saw in many churches.

That would change, however.

It all started in January 2000 when he arrived at his first station as a single airman at Cannon Air Force Base. His trainer was Technical Sergeant Jack Evans, whom Wolfe cursed in a fit of frustration on a cold windy day. As this was a major infraction on Wolfe’s part, Evans could have reprimanded him on the spot, but instead told him, “You know what, Wolfe? You have an anger problem.” Evans decided that the first step in his discipline would be to come to church with him while he considered what steps to take next.

On the evening of the service, Wolfe smoked a cigar immediately before to repel anyone who would want to approach him. “But everyone was pleasant,” he says. “No one said anything, no one judged me.” 

Even though he cannot remember the subject of his message, Wolfe was enraptured by the preacher and the message. “If there’s a god in heaven, this guy really believes he knows who he is,” he remembers thinking, adding that he was impressed not necessarily by the sincerity, but by the genuineness of the pastor, Peter Aulson.

At the end of the service, Aulson made an invitation for anyone to come forward and use the front open area as a place to pray. This shocked Wolfe and he turned to Evans questioning him about it. “He began to explain to me that as a Christian, we’re not perfect: We’re sinners saved by grace through faith, not of good works, it’s a gift of God… lest any person should boast and that we’re broken vessels in need of healing.” Evans added that these Christians were praying for grace, deliverance, and healing, even though they were already professing believers.

Wolfe describes how these people seemed genuine just like the preacher and had a “soul-tie” to their faith.

Even though he states that he didn’t experience any sort of emotional or spiritual moment at that time, the next step caught him off guard: Evans asked him, “Hey, Wolfe, are you ready to get that chip off your shoulder?”

Wolfe didn’t know what to do: “For the first time said I don’t want to lie anymore, and I didn’t know how else to answer. I said, ‘I don’t know what to do’ and he goes, ‘Come on.” Wolfe followed him up to the front where they bent down to pray. Wolfe recalls saying, “Alright, God if you’re real, change me because nothing else has.”

After the prayer, Wolfe states that he didn’t feel anything overly emotional or spiritual, but, after being greeted once again by church members, he went to his truck to relight his cigar.

However, the desire and pleasure of smoking was completely gone. “It tasted like what it is–ash–in my mouth.” He realized that for himself, smoking had become a coping mechanism and was wrong, and he immediately threw away his smoking paraphernalia in his truck and when he arrived back at his dorm.

That night he slept through the dark hours without experiencing a nightmare for the first time in over a decade.

He experienced another shock the following week: When invited to a bible study, he automatically accepted without thinking about it. Says Wolfe, “After I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there’ I realized I meant that I am planning and will purposefully be there.”

This was just the beginning of his faith walk. He would go on to marry a member of the church, Selena Martin, and have two children, Tessa and Luke. 

STEPPING STONES

This faith propelled him through the difficulties of pioneering a church and the exhausting trials brought on because of his heart condition, but it was key points in this walk that kept him going.

For example, Wolfe points to a men’s ministry boot camp that God used to bring him out of a depression and saved his marriage. After reading John Edlredge’s book Wild at Heart, Wolfe attended the corresponding boot camp that aimed at helping men understand their sense of purpose and guide their natural desires for adventure.

Wolfe says when he returned home, his family immediately noticed a difference: “My kids were like, Daddy, you’re different; you’re a lot stronger’ and I was more confident.”

It was such a major turning point in his life that Wolfe began to feel the call to preach again. In July 2020, he was announced to pioneer a new church in the Fayetteville, N.C., area. In September of that year, he made the move with his family and is currently pastoring in Hope Mills, a suburb of Fayetteville.

Wolfe with wife, Selena, in a ministry homecoming service in September 2023.
Photo by Blake Downs

ENMU’S IMPACT

Wolfe also works as an environmental project manager for a native-owned company, DDC 4C, a subsidiary of the Diné Development Corporation (DDC), which generates “economic prosperity for the Navajo Nation by providing government agencies and commercial firms with high-quality IT, professional, environmental, research and development services that contracts with the federal government,” according to the its website.

Wolfe states that one goal of his branch of the company is to remove the hazards left by the uranium mines on the Navajo Nation in order to redevelop the area and preserve it for future decedents of the Diné people.

Wolfe credits his studies and work at ENMU as preparation for his current work for DDC 4C. Says Wolfe, “What I learned at ENMU Business School, I apply,” adding that finance professor Dr. Henley was a major influence. “He is the absolute hardest, but best teacher you will ever have and I learned a lot from him and have implemented what he taught me to this day.” 

Wolfe’s story is definitely one of not just a survivor, but a thriver. Over the years, he has gone through several doctors, has reduced his medication intake, now has an implantable cardio defibrillator, and is able to deal with everyday physical stresses much more easily. 

But the more important coping mechanism is the mental, emotional, and spiritual mindset he keeps. Says Wolfe about his life mantra, “I can get up, I can smile. Not every day is easy, but [I tell myself] to not quit.”