The offer of this with-God life has not expired in our day. When my friend Kim was a young girl, her dad pulled the car off the road one day to help a woman change a flat tire. While he was lying under her car, another vehicle accidentally swerved to the shoulder, and in the collision the car was shoved onto his chest. His right thumb was torn off at the joint, five of his ribs were broken, and his left lung was pierced and began filling with blood. His wife, who is barely five feet tall, placed her hands on the bumper of the car and prayed, “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,” and lifted the car off his chest so he could be dragged out. (Some weeks later she found out that she broke a vertebra in the effort.) Kim’s father was in a state of shock as he was taken to the hospital.
Doctors prepared for emergency surgery. “His thumb won’t do him any good if he’s dead,” one of them said. His survival was iffy. Suddenly, spontaneously, the man’s skin changed from ashen to pink. He experienced a miraculous healing. He invited a surprised surgical team to join him in singing “Fairest Lord Jesus.” They did not even bother to hook him up to oxygen.
He did not find out until later that this was the precise moment his father-in-law, who was a pastor, had his congregation start to pray for him. Sometimes these stories come from not-very-credible sources—such as publications sold in grocery checkout lines that also carry news about extraterrestrial creatures secretly playing third base for the Boston Red Sox.
In this case, however, the subject was James Loder, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. His life was not only saved, but changed. Until then, although he taught at a seminary, God had been mostly an abstract idea to him. Now Jesus became a living Presence. Kim writes that her father’s heart grew so tender that he became known at Princeton as “the weeping professor.” He began to live from one moment to the next in a God-bathed, God-soaked, God-intoxicated world.
John Ortberg in God Is Closer Than You Think
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