God’s Hand of Destiny:
Pa’s Shocking Journey to Belief
Pa has been known to be stubborn: from refusing to go to the alter for salvation, because he didn’t want to be a part of Christianity if it meant he was like others in the church, to his electrocution in 8th grade. His life has been full of moments where God reached down and touched him in a way that reminded him of the true purpose in life: a living relationship with Christ that ends with eternity with Him.
Jeremiah: We wanted to talk a little bit about destiny in your life. Pa was going to relate the story to us about when he was in the 8th grade and got electrocuted in a science classroom experiment that went haywire. Turns out we don’t do those kinds of experiments anymore in school. So, you know Pa, I’ve heard this story many times as a kid, and this is one of your few stories that I never wanted to live up to, but a good story. So how about you just start us off, Pa. Kind of lead off with what led up to your electrocution in science class.
Double Pneumonia
Pa: Well, I can. Let me begin before that, because the question in my life has always been: Is God guiding me? Do all things work together for the good? How does a person know when God is saying, “Hey, I’ve got my hand on you, and you’re going to go where I want you to go.” And I think mine starts when I was two months old.
I was in the hospital, and I had developed double pneumonia. And the doctor came to my mom. My real father had abandoned us, and so it was just my older sister, and my mom, and me. But the doctor came to my mom and said, “Look, his temperature is spiking between 104 and 105. We have to bring his temperature down, or it will destroy his brain. What we’re going to do is put him in an ice bath, and we’re hoping that that’s going to lower his temperature. And if he can live through the night, then we have hope that he will survive this.” But she looked at my mom and she said, “Now you’ve got to remember something, Bessie, because of the damage done to the lungs, he will never be normal. He will never be able to run and play. He’ll never be in normal activities, because his lungs are so severely scarred that he will not be able to breathe on a normal basis.”
And my mom took it in by herself. And, as she told me later, she turned to God, and she said, “God, if You will let him live, I promise I will give him to You. He will be Yours. I will, instead of owning him, he’s Yours.” Almost like Hannah did for Samuel.
And so as to say, the night went on, and obviously, I survived. And the beautiful thing about it is that I’ve suffered no repercussions of the double pneumonia. As you guys know, I can be very loud and active and run and have been all my life. So, I would say God healed me, because otherwise I would have succumbed to the disease.
Well, the years go on, and my mom tells me about this. She says, “You know, I gave you to God.”
And I’m like, “Oh, great. You sold me, and I didn’t have a chance to decide where I wanted to go.” I resented it actually.
“Oh, you’ll be okay, because you’re God’s,” she would say.
“No, I’m not. I’m my own.”
Well, then come along. And most people, when they go to church all their life, get saved at an early age. Me? No. No. People would say, “You need to find the Lord.”
And I’m like, “Look. If I’m as good as that guy sitting over there who calls himself a Christian, ain’t no reason for me to be a Christian. I don’t want it, because uh-uh, that would fall into play with what my mom said. And I don’t want to be trapped.”
Electrocution
And so, I was in the 8th grade, and we were having a science experiment. We were using step-up transformers and tying them together with to increase the voltage or wattage, whatever it was. And I had a lab partner, and I was standing at the desk. We had split the wire in two, and I had one end. And he took it to the transformers. And so, we were going to charge them, and then discharge them. Anyway, he bumped the table, and I saw the transformers start to fall over. Well, when they did, I reached out and grabbed them to steady them. When I did, I got the other wire, so it connected me directly to the 110. And so I’m standing there, and I know what’s happening. I’m shaking violently, and I’m thinking, “If I can just let go of these wires, I’ll be okay.” And I could not open my hand. I mean, have you seen the old story of the frog that you touch with electric shock, and it pulls up? Well, I just couldn’t let go.
And my lab partner saw what was happening, but he just froze. He’s like, “Oh my gosh.” And so I’m standing there like this, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t do anything. And then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, the electrical charge flung me back against the blackboard about 3 foot away. It just blasted me. And I hit the blackboard with my whole body.
And I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And then the next thing, I realized not that I was falling, but that the floor was jumping up at me. It was going to hit me in the face. But I was there at that close point of blacking out and damaging . . . dying. And I remember, on my way down, in a split-second moment, I mean it was frozen time. And I heard this voice say, “Are you ready to meet God?”
And I said, “No, I’m not.” And I got this horrible, horrible feeling on the inside of, “Oh my God. Oh my God. I really messed up.” And then I blacked out.
When my friend, who was in the class, saw what was going on, he ran over, knocked my lab partner away, and pulled the plug. (Where I had the end of the wire, it burned a hole in my hand probably ¼-inch deep there. And everywhere I had a scar on my hand, it seared it. So, you can know how long it cooked me. And of course, the horrible smell of burning flesh. But anyway.) And then the teacher was so horrified, you know, because he was like, “Oh man, I screwed up. You nearly killed a student.” And he said, “Are you okay?”
And I’m going, “Uh-huh.” So, I sit down. I survived that. But still, oh my God. You can’t imagine that feeling of facing eternity and knowing you’re not ready.
Car Wreck
So, let’s fast forward from the 8th grade. I was 19, and I was preaching the Gospel. My cousin and I were evangelists: Ricky. So, we were going to Dallas to preach in this little church. And before we went, I can remember that we were leaving on Friday to get from Amarillo down to Dallas, God spoke to me, and He said, “You’re going to die. You’re going to have a wreck, and you’re going to die.” And I mean, it was so real, so emphatically real. And it was not me. It was real. And I was so convinced of it that I went to my mom. And of course, not my stepfather, because he was so out of the picture. Well, I told my mom. I said, “Mom, look, I’m going to Dallas, but I’m not coming back.” And she’s, of course, anything like that would blow your mind. I said, “I’m going to have a wreck, and I’m not coming back.”
So she’s like, “Okay, well, we’ll see you Sunday.”
“Okay, Mom. Well, I tried. After it’s over, you’ll realize that I told you goodbye.”
So I went to Rick, and we were talking about going. And I said, “Rick, I’ve got to tell you something. I’m going to Dallas. I’m going to have a wreck, and I’m not coming back. So you may not want to go. At the least, you don’t want to take your car.” He’d just got a brand-new car.
And he said, “Mike, we’ve been through everything.” We were cousins, too. “Mike, we’ve been through everything. I don’t care. Whatever happens to you, happens to me.”
I said, “Okay, Rick, as long as you know. I warned you.”
So, we got in Saturday night, no problem at all. Then Sunday night . . . Oh, I had preached so hard, and it was so long. We were so tired. We were coming back. I wasn’t driving, so you can realize I wasn’t predestining myself to do this. Rick was driving. And I remember, I was laying over, and I didn’t have the seat belt on. I had it laid across my neck to hold it up. I was to drive next, when we got to Abilene. And so, I looked up. I remember, I raised up, and I saw the lights of the city.
I said, “Rick, what is that?”
And he said, “That’s Abilene.”
I said, “Oh, great. Are you okay?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
I laid my head down, and then all of a sudden, I felt my body just jerk to the side. And then all of a sudden, I heard this crash. And what happened? Rick had gone to sleep and pulled over and hit the guardrail in the middle of the road. And I mean, it impacted; we took out 90 feet of guardrail. I mean, we crunched it, because he was going, I don’t know how fast. And we took it out.
The car flipped upside down and spun around. And I can remember so distinctly, because I had Sarah, my wife. I had her picture in a frame in the seat beside me, and it had glass. And I didn’t realize I was upside down. All I realized is how funny that glass was floating up in the air. And I’m going, “God, that’s strange.” But I was still upside down.
And then the back glass burst out. And all our clothes and everything was just sliding out the back. And I felt myself starting to slide out the back window. (And later we found our shirts, suits, whatever we had, and they were just perforated with glass. I mean, they were just torn to shreds with the glass.) And all of a sudden. . . quiet. . . no sound. . . no motion. And I heard this voice – same voice as when I was in the 8th grade – and He said, “Mike, you’re going to die.”
And for that millisecond, I said “It’s okay, God. I’m ready. I’m ready.” Then Peace, in the midst of this horrible chaos, just overwhelmed me. And I’m like, “It’s okay.”
All of a sudden, we hit something. We’re not sure what, but it spun the car over, flipped it over the guardrail and landed on the other side of the highway. And I said, “Rick, are you okay?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
We had to kick out what was left of the front glass and get out, because the car was smashed. And so, we got out. I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t cut. The only thing that broke was Rick had a knuckle that was cracked, because he had hit something. And so we got out, and we looked at it. In a few minutes, we were waving a car down saying, “We need a highway patrolman or something.”
So a highway patrolman came up, and he asked us, “Who are the guys in the wreck?”
And we said, “We were.”
He looked at us, and he said, “No, you weren’t.”
I said, “Yeah, we were. We were in that wreck.”
He said, “Man, you couldn’t have been in that wreck. That car is totaled.”
“Well, we were.”
We had to take a Greyhound bus back home from Abilene to Amarillo, because we had nothing else. And I called my mom. Of course, it was 3 in the morning. I called, and I said, “Mom, I just want you to know we had a wreck, but we’re okay.”
My mom, preciously. “Okay, I’ll see you when you get here.”
“All right, Mom. Sounds cool, Mom. Sounds cool.”
So, we get home. And the thing is, Ricky’s watch broke at 3:18. Well, the next day, I get a call from Roy Page, who was my dear mentor, dear friend. He was my father, really my spiritual father. And he said, “Mike, are you okay?”
And I said, “Yeah, what are you talking about?”
And he said, “Last night, I woke from a dead sleep, and the Lord told me, ‘You need to pray for Mike and Rick. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what was going on. I said, ‘Yep, you got it, Lord.” He got down on his knees to pray, and he looked at his alarm clock. It was 3:17.
This other woman who’d been really a spiritual guide in my life, called me and said, “Mike, are you okay?”
And I said, “Well, yeah.” Because we didn’t tell anybody about it, and we weren’t broadcasting it. And I said, “Why?”
She said, “Well, because I was awakened last night, and the Lord told me to pray for you.”
Now a lot of people have said . . . and I’ve got other instances where I should have, could have, would have been killed. And my life has been eventful that way. But people say, “Well, if God told you that you were going to die, and you didn’t, how do you explain that?”
I say, “What died was the fear of death.” I no longer feared dying. I now knew that I knew that I knew that God was there with me, and that no matter what happened, until God decided my time, it wasn’t my time. And so, I look back at that and I say, “God, You’re omnipotent. Everything is in Your hands. Everything is in Your guidance. These things don’t happen except that they’re for the purpose of providing purpose and destiny for a life.” And from that time on, I began to realize that if I live, I live unto the Lord. If I die, I die unto the Lord. Whether I live or die, I am the Lord’s. It doesn’t really matter (Romans 14:8). So that is my journey of believing that I have seen the end, and yet I see the providence and the sovereignty of God saying, “Not until I say so.”
Jeremiah: Well, thank you for sharing that, Pa. That’s a powerful story. And I really enjoy listening to you tell these in this context, because I think it hits at a different emotional level for you when it’s just you and I talking as opposed to you preaching. But I really find it valuable to hear those things . . . and meaningful and important to me.
Sovereignty
You know, you’ve been preaching a lot lately on the idea of sovereignty. In some respects, the idea of radical sovereignty feels like this very cold, dry thing. God’s going to do what He’s going to do, and that’s just what He’s going to do. And that’s just how He is and who He is. And although that’s truthful, there’s a flip side to the coin of sovereignty that I hear you telling here is that God’s going to do what He’s going to do. And as long as we acknowledge and know that He’s doing that – we know that God is God – there’s a peace that can come with that. There’s a peace that can get you, because He was there with the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3). He shut the mouth of the lion (Daniel 6). He was right there beside Christ when He when dying on the cross, right up to the point that He took on the sins of the world; He followed Him as absolutely far as He could (Matthew 26:42; Matthew 27:46). And He was there when the car rolled over and was sliding on the top. He was there. He took the time to be there.
So even though He’s sovereign, and He’s God – sovereign over all the universe – He still takes the time to step down into our lives and be there with us, even in His sovereignty. No matter how good or how bad it is for us, He’s right there beside us in that.
Pa: You’re so right, Bear. You’re so right. When we see those things, it causes us to know He doesn’t have to, because He’s God. He doesn’t have to, because we’re so important. He does it, because that’s His nature. He’s more comfortable when we call Him ‘Abba Father’ than when we call Him ‘King of Kings.’ Because kings, we don’t understand, but ‘Abba,’ ‘Daddy,’ we understand.
Jeremiah: Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Pa. That was very meaningful to me. I appreciate it.
Pa: Thank you.
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