I walk around with a hat that says "Jesus is my real boss." This usually gets people to open up and talk religion with me regardless of their beliefs. What I found was that people all around me would talk about the day they almost died, but got to live another day by being rescued by some unseen event or person who they don't remember seeing but once. Such was the case with a painter who I hired to paint my house. After telling him about my near death experience he also told me a story about having come very close to death before calling out to God.

While still in his early forties he awoke one day feeling drowsy and just made it out of his house before he collapsed in his car. His daughter found him there and rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was taken to the emergency room. After several test the doctors told her that her father had some type of blot clot in the brain and it did not look good for him. As he came to it was explained to him that he needed an operation very quickly or he would die.
After hearing this he went into a funk believing that he had seen his last days and that he needed to fix his things in order to leave everything as neat as possible. That night he decided to make his peace with God, just in case there really was a God. He told me that after he prayed a light came into the room and a feeling of peace came over him, at that moment he knew that he would not die. In the morning he told the doctor that he felt much better and wanted to go home. The doctor told him to take some more test and he agreed. When the test came back there was no sign of the blot clot and the doctor called again for just one more test which also came back negative.

He went home and told his wife and children that God had intervene in his sickness. The next day he went back to work as if nothing had happened. I asked him why he had not kept praying to this unseen God to find out who he was. He said that he was not really interested in this type of thing and just wanted to forget it had ever happened. But that yes he knew without a doubt that God did exist, but he could not imagine why God had been interested in him that day. After we spoke about it for a while he said he would try and reach out to God and see if there was really anything to it. But several weeks later when he came back to finish some work he never spoke about it again so I never bothered to remind him of our conversation.

My next door neighbor said pretty much the same thing after seeing me with my hat on. She said that she had lost control of her car while driving down one of our streets. The next thing she knew she had jumped a curve and was on her way to hitting a huge tree when she felt someone take the steering wheel and steer the car away from the tree and onto the street once again. The car rolled to a stop on its own and she just thought it had been all luck or something like it. As she spoke to me she smiled and told me that now she realized that it had been divine intervention of some kind. She kept asking herself why at the time she thought it was all luck when she knew beyond a reasonable doubt that she would have hit the tree if someone had not taken the wheel.

She too decided on the spot that she would find out more about this person who had taken the wheel of her car even though she had no idea how to find him. I told her to start with the bible but especially the New Testament since we are New Covenant people. I don't think she ever did since she never mentioned it again. Now she just looks at me in a strange way as if to say "boy is he gone." I look for God to intervene in every area of my life on a daily bases, but of course I have been doing it for twenty eight years now and it is fairly simple to me. But I understand why most people would be fearful of looking for this person of God. There really is no telling how your life might change and most people hate any type of change.

In my own life when I was twenty five I was very brave and foolish. One afternoon I decided to go surfing alone to one of the remote beaches of San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was a very windy day and there was no one on the beaches which suited me just fine. I remember going out beyond the first and second reefs to catch one of the really big waves. As I tried to stand up on my board a wave spit me out as if I were a shirt on a clothes line flying in the wind. I landed on my head and immediately was crushed by another big wave. Everywhere I looked there was rough water and then another wave crashed down on me and smashed me to the bottom of the reef. I was rolling around on the floor of the ocean talking to myself and telling myself that I had been so foolish and was now paying the price. I looked up and I could see the sun from where I was but I did not have the energy to swim any longer. That's when I said "God thanks for everything, you did the best you could and now it's the end for me." As I said that I could feel myself falling asleep and then it happened. A person who I could not see picked me up from the bottom and dropped me onto the beach. Within a few minutes I came to and found myself lying on the sand a few feet from where the waves were breaking.

I felt bruised, but outside of that I was perfect. I looked up to the sky and muttered a thank you and looked around to see if anyone had seen me. But I was the only one there. I would like to say that my life changed after that but it didn't. I kept on living as if life was a challenge which had to be contested every day, and I had to break as many laws as possible. Not until twenty years later would I understand why God had extended a hand to me while I was underwater. It had never occurred to me that all this divine intervention was meant to catch my attention before something worse happened, and something worse did happen. I had a massive heart attack. That's when I remembered the God who saved me from drowning.

And yes once again he saved me from dying, but this time it was me who called upon him and pleaded for my life. That was a long time ago but I made it my life's goal to investigate this person who is the Creator of all things. That was 28 years ago, and from that day I have been his friend and he has been my Father and Savior. To Him be the Glory, for all the great things he has done.

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