Miracles & Moments of Grace: Inspiring Stories of Survival

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Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Time Stood Still

BARRY M. WHITE, CHAPLAIN, LT. COL., U.S. ARMY, RETIRED

2. The High-Speed Chase

KATHY SCHWANKE

3. The Terror of Loss

ELSI DODGE

4. The Coming Storm

MICHAEL MELON

5. A Buddy for Life

TOMMY SOSACK

6. The Jewelry Party

JACQUELYN MARTIN HAGLER

7. A Melody of Love

DEB WUETHRICH

8. The Best of Everything

DEB LUXTON

9. No Room at the Inn

FRED KIMBALL, MD

10. Hazy Decision

DEBBIE SANCHEZ

11. The Shortcut

JOE ANSTATT

12. A Shattered Life

RACHEL BAREZINSKY

13. Pulled Under

ELLEN LIST

14. A Harrowing Flight

GARY POLIZZOTTO, DC

15. He Holds My Hand

LINDA JETT

16. Alone and Stranded

CORA LEE COLE

17. The Snow Day

S. MICHAEL CATANESE

18. Shards of Glass

SANDY L. MCDUFFIE

19. It’s Just a Pole

TOBEN HEIM

20. Walking with the Lions

JUDY TILLEY KOCH

21. Humbled by Homelessness

MARLENE E. KELLY

22. The Contest

JEAN L. CROYLE

23. A Shot in the Dark

VERONICA LEIGH

24. Finding the Words

BART TUMA

25. Emily’s Story

CHRISTOPHER S. JERRY

26. A Healing Touch

JEFFREY NEUBERGER, CHAPLAIN, LT. COL., U.S. AIR FORCE, RETIRED

27. A Soft Landing

JAMES BERTI

28. The Other Way

VICKY RUVOLO

29. Our Crowded Ride

KATE R. THOMAS

30. The Camping Trip

RUTH O’NEIL

31. An Ordinary Miracle

MICHELLE S. LAZUREK

32. Lost . . . and Found

ANNE KIMBALL

33. Cancer Takes It on the Chin

Daniel’s Visitor

PHYLLIS S. GATES

By the Skin of My Teeth

JAMES BABB

34. My DUI

NANCY B. KENNEDY

35. What It Takes

JACOB DELAROSA, MD

36. My Daughter’s Room

DAPHNE GREER

37. The Babysitter’s Story

DEBRA L. BUTTERFIELD

38. A Desperate Cry

MONA ROTTINGHAUS

39. Trapped by Fire

JIM DEFORTE

40. A Dangerous Fall

MARION GORMAN

41. Songs in the Night

SARA SCHAFFER

42. The Rescue

ARLENE LILA

43. Our Last Five Dollars

DEA SIPES

44. The Terrible Thought

CLAY CUTTS

45. Courage in the Cracks

SHARON L. PATTERSON

46. Starved for Love

MARIE NOTCHEVA

47. The Old Ladies at Youth Group

ELSI DODGE

48. The Canoe Trip

DUANE MILLER

49. My Last Bite

GORDON MEIER

50. A Surgeon’s Prayer

ROD GILLIAM, CHAPLAIN, MAJOR, U.S. ARMY

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Oh, dear God, we’ve left the road! We’re having a wreck!

Cathy Messecar and her husband were on Route I-20 in their eighteen-wheeler, delivering a load of pipe to an oil drilling company in New Mexico. It was nighttime, and a few hours after leaving their home in Montgomery, Texas, they ran into bad weather.

Bad weather on this day meant more than just a passing storm. It was October, and a cold front had moved into North Texas, bringing with it a terrifying kind of dust storm called a haboob. The winds of a haboob can reach 75 miles an hour and higher, tossing dirt from the dry ground and plowed fields into the air by the ton.

It looks like black smoke ahead, said Cathy’s husband, Dave, who was driving.

Suddenly, the car in front of them braked hard. Instinctively, Dave pulled the truck into the fast lane to avoid a collision. That’s when the couple hit an impenetrable wall of black, swirling dirt. Brutal winds sandblasted the truck, and all Dave could do was steer, step on the brake, and start gearing down.

But it wasn’t enough to avert disaster. Unable to see anything, Cathy and Dave felt the truck leave the roadway. They sensed themselves dropping down an embankment, running up the other side and across different levels of ground. The weight of the truck and its load—forty tons altogether—made every bump feel like a boulder. The storm roared around them as the truck hurtled through the black night.

When the truck finally came to rest—upright—Cathy and Dave looked at each other silently for a few seconds. They couldn’t believe they were alive. Every surface of the truck was covered in black dirt, and their mouths, noses, hair, and skin were clogged with grit. They couldn’t even open their doors against the force of the winds. But they were alive.

And they were thankful. Incredibly, the truck hit nothing as it skidded off the road, crossed an embankment and feeder road, and came to rest next to a plowed field. No guardrails, no trees, no signposts, no power poles, no other vehicles.

When we returned home after that trip, we looked closely at the scene of the accident, says Cathy. It was nearly the only place that didn’t have obstacles in its path. If we had been somewhere else or the haboob had hit a few seconds later, we could have been thrown from an overpass.

Cathy and her husband consider it a miracle that the truck tires didn’t blow out, that they hit no other vehicles, and that, incredibly, their load of pipe didn’t come loose and crash down on top of them.

God favored us in that moment by sparing us, Cathy concludes. God’s grace to us brings me to tears, even today.¹

Cathy and her husband, like millions of others, have experienced traumatic events in their lives, fleeting moments that they know they easily might not have survived. And yet they did. Often, this close call with mortality brings about exuberant, life-affirming reflections.

My God, my Father, my Papa has been magnificently, exceedingly good to me all the days of my life! says Angela Watson, a Florida woman who also escaped harm in a near-fatal car accident.

When Angela’s pickup began fishtailing on a county road, she saw immediately that it—and she—would land in the woods beside the road and probably smash into a tree. When I saw what was ahead, I prayed, ‘Father, help me!’ she says.

Her truck flew through the air, jumped over some tall brush, flipped, and careened down a ravine on two tires. The tires exploded, the car flipped forward onto its roof and then slid along the ground until it came to rest upside down in a concrete culvert.

When the truck finally stopped, Angela was hanging upside down in the driver’s seat, still in her seatbelt. Although almost everything in the vehicle had flown out of the careening vehicle—even a tool box that was bolted down—Angela’s cell phone had stayed in the truck and she was able to reach it and call 911. It took rescue workers more than an hour and a half to find her and free her from the truck, transport her up the ravine, and get her into an ambulance.

Angela’s vehicle was totaled, smashed into a crumpled heap of metal—all except for one spot.

God wrapped himself around me. I know it, because the only part of the car left untouched was right where I was, she says. All Angela suffered was a small cut on her elbow and some pain in her knee.²

In this book, you’ll find stories like Cathy’s and Angela’s, stories of miraculous survival. Hiking accidents, medical crises, juvenile pranks, hurricanes, gunshots—even a lion attack. Our lives can be endangered in so many ways. It’s a blessing that we can’t even imagine them all.

As people told me about their moments of crisis, I was surprised in many ways to hear about their reactions. When faced with death, most people reported feeling calm, even detached, as though they were watching a movie.

God’s hand came down and covered my eyes. Fear completely evaporated. I simply felt as though I was on a fairground ride, says Angela.

But even those who remained fully aware of their situation told me that they were surprised to find they weren’t afraid.

In the midst of my emergency, I was oddly calm—peaceful even—and I knew that I would be in heaven, says Terri Camp Stevenson, a Texas woman who almost died giving birth to her eighth child.

Terri started hemorrhaging at home after her water broke. In the ambulance on the way to the emergency room, she went into shock from the massive loss of blood.

At the hospital, Terri underwent three ultrasounds while doctors prepped her for surgery. Groggy, she roused herself long enough to ask a single question.

Did you see whether I have a boy or a girl? she asked. Terri was certain she and her baby were going to die, and she wanted to know who to look for when she woke up in heaven.

In surgery, doctors found that the baby’s placenta had grown through the uterine wall and attached itself to several organs. That morning at home, it had detached and torn away, and Terri was bleeding to death.

At one point in the operating room, Terri’s blood pressure and oxygen levels bottomed out. The medical team pumped twelve units of blood into her veins in a desperate attempt to save her life. Doctors delivered the baby and performed a life-saving hysterectomy.

Both Terri and her baby—a boy—survived. Yet Terri is not the woman she was before the crisis.

I came close to touching the hand of God, and it has made me look at life differently, she says. I know what the peace of God is, I’ve experienced the presence of God and I feel it every day of my life now.³

In this book, you’ll hear from dozens of people who consider themselves fortunate to be alive and grateful for their second chance at life.

Miracles do still happen! says Jacquie Hagler, a Lake City, Florida, woman who found herself in a desperate situation at home. When you read her incredible story, you’ll see why she can so confidently say that.

But survival isn’t always a matter of a single moment in time. Many of the people you’ll meet in this book have survived and are weathering tragedies that have reverberated down through their lives—the death of a child, an abusive marriage, an eating disorder, homelessness, poverty. Sometimes even to live is an act of courage, said the Roman philosopher Seneca. How true this is.

Having persevered through their experiences, survivors don’t simply just return to business as usual. Traumatic experiences can act like a knife that cuts through a life, severing who you were previously from who you are now. And most survivors considered this transformation a blessing. For some, this kind of internal death was the only way through to a fresh start in life.

In Clay Cutts’s story, for example, you’ll read about a fleeting moment of awful clarity when the Atlanta man realized that if he continued in his way of life, he would not survive. I was at a crossroads and I didn’t know what to do, what my next step would be, he says. I prayed a prayer of total humility from the core of my soul. In that desolate moment, the seeds of hope were born.

In every age and in every circumstance, people have discovered the same truth that Clay has.

You may never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have, Dutch Christian Corrie ten Boom said often.

Corrie ten Boom, of all people, would understand this truth. Her family joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, hiding hundreds of Jewish people in their Haarlem home and placing them in safe houses in the Dutch countryside. Corrie ultimately was captured and imprisoned in a Nazi prison and two concentration camps, ending up at the notorious Ravensbrück women’s camp. She suffered the deprivations, the torturous treatment, and the humiliations of imprisonment. She watched her beloved sister waste away and die, endured her elderly father’s death in prison, and came close to death herself. She knew about desperation and survival.

But nothing—no humiliation, no deprivation, no pain, no anguish—shook Corrie from the deep faith that sustained her. There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still, she could still say after her ordeal had come to an end.⁴

For Pastor Gordon Meier, whose story you’ll read in this book, a dramatic medical crisis became the catalyst for clinging to God’s grace and examining the things in life that truly matter. Despite the many pleasures in life that he can no longer experience, he is nothing if not a grateful man.

I can assure you that there are at least ten thousand reasons and more to praise God, he says. When we stop, look, and listen, blessings appear everywhere.⁵

In saying this—and in taking it deeply to heart—Pastor Meier echoes a theme that many people in this book expressed. For many, the reason to tell their story was not simply to share hair-raising details, but to impart the hard-won lessons that arose from their experiences. Stronger marriages, deeper faith, an awakened sense of gratitude, a renewed wonder at the beauty that surrounds us. I didn’t hear a note of self-pity in anyone’s voice.

A few people in this book speak eloquently about their role as supporters and caregivers to those from whom health and wholeness have been wrenched. A husband prays for strength to care for his stricken wife. Military chaplains speak of their ministry to those whose lives and bodies have been torn apart by war.

For a fortunate few, divine help takes a recognizable form. It amazes me that I can so easily say this and mean it. I am a skeptic at heart. Earlier in my life, I would have said that anyone claiming the intervention of visible angels or of God himself was merely speaking in colorful metaphor. But one of the stories you will read is my own. What happened one night at a dark and deserted gas station has me convinced that the veil between heaven and earth is gossamer thin in places.

It is a blessing that life is not composed solely of heart-stopping moments like those you will read here. In our day-to-day lives, we often joke about surviving one silly thing or another—a holiday dinner with crazy relatives, team-building exercises with coworkers, a day spent cooped up with antsy toddlers. You name it, the daily experiences of our lives can provide us with deep wells of laughter that can get us through the most absurd situations. Several of my contributors wrote amusing stories of survival—you’ll love Jean Croyle’s story of a contest at a Girl Scout camp and Ruth O’Neil’s account of a family camping trip. And for the animal lovers among my readers, you’ll also find heart-warming stories of man’s best friend.

I want you to know that all of the stories you will read in this book are absolutely true. In all but a few cases, contributors chose to use their real names. A few decided not to reveal exactly where they live or where the events of their story took place, for reasons of privacy. But beyond that, nothing about the stories is fictional. Where I could, I corroborated stories with news reports or other sources that confirmed events.

This book is a collaboration between myself and the contributors, as were all previous titles in the Miracles & Moments of Grace series.⁶ Some people told their own stories, writing them specifically for this book or having written them previously in their own books, articles, or blogs. In some cases, I adapted the stories and, through interviews with the contributors, expanded on them. These stories contain a publishing history in the contributor’s biography that follows the story. In other cases, I acted as a ghostwriter, interviewing people and telling their stories in their own words. Writers aren’t the only ones with good stories to tell!

Having written three previous books in the series—stories from military chaplains, from doctors, and from moms—I was surprised that these stories of survival came in so quickly. It made me acutely aware of how fragile life is for all of us. But it was also an encouragement to see how eagerly people wanted to share the meaningful life lessons they’d learned in the most dramatic ways.

I want to extend my thanks to all my contributors, although I can’t help but regret that you’ve had to endure such devastating life events. To all of you, and to the readers of this book, I would like to extend the well-loved and timeless Old Testament blessing:⁷

The LORD bless you

    and keep you;

the Lord make his face shine on you

    and be gracious to you;

the Lord turn his face toward you

    and give you peace.

Nancy B. Kennedy

September 2014

Oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.

— THE REV. DR. PETER MARSHALL

1

TIME STOOD STILL

BARRY M. WHITE

CHAPLAIN, LT. COL., U.S. ARMY, RETIRED

LAND O’ LAKES, FLORIDA

I was fairly new to the Tampa, Florida, police force when one night I was assigned to what was called the walking beat in the downtown area.

It was a typical summer night for Florida, hot and oppressively humid. My partner and I were parked at a curb, both of us sitting in the front seat. I had the door open, trying to catch what little breeze I could.

We had been talking for a time—it was about 10 o’clock at night—when we heard footsteps coming up quickly from behind us. I got out of the car, and a man ran up to me, breathing heavily.

It’s being robbed! The Franklin Street Bar! the man cried, out of breath.

We were only a few blocks away from the bar, so I jumped back into the squad car. My partner did a U-turn and quickly drove the four blocks to the intersection where the bar sat on one corner. The front door of the bar faced catty-corner, across the opposite side of the intersection.

We stopped in the middle of the intersection. It was a small intersection, so we were only a few feet from the sidewalk, and the bar opened directly