Miracles (19 page)

“I can't believe this,” he whispered. “How in the world?”

He moved his legs so they hung off of the gurney, then slowly slid his feet down until they bore his weight. He stood on them, expecting searing pain to shoot through them, but there was no pain at all! His legs felt stronger than they'd ever felt before, and an urgent need to move filled him.

“I can walk.” He marched across the floor, then jumped and spun around. “I'm healed!”

He knew without a doubt that the Lord had shown him mercy. No doctor had done this. It was clearly an act of God.

He wanted to tell someone, but that urgency to go rose up inside him, drawing him barefoot out of the room. His feet ran and skipped around the gurneys that blocked the hall.

Those feet led him faster, faster than his mind could keep up. They led him between gurneys and around the corner, up the hall. And then they stopped beside the bed of a boy who lay sleeping.

Carl looked down at the child and saw that his lips were blue. His skin looked as gray as death itself.

The boy wasn't breathing.

Carl grabbed his shoulders and shook him. The boy remained limp.“Help!” He yelled at the top of his lungs as he scanned the hallway for a nurse. “This boy isn't breathing. Somebody help!”

A nurse came running, saw the boy's condition, and called out a Code Blue. Doctors and nurses from all over the floor raced toward them to revive the child.

Carl stood back, watching as adrenaline shot through him, twisting around his confusion. How had he known to walk right up to that boy? It was as if his feet had known the child's condition.

How could that be?

He looked down at his bare feet. They looked the same, but something was different. That urge to walk had overcome him again.

He gave into it, and suddenly his feet were making that mad dash again, though he had no idea where they were taking him.

He left the hospital and went out into the bright morning. He started walking in a direction away from his own home, and then picked up his speed until he ran one block, and then another, turned a corner, and went down a hill.

He saw a team of people digging at a collapsed building, still trying to rescue anyone who was buried.

His feet led him to another collapsed building across the street, but no one was digging here. Instead, a crowd of people stood out on the street talking and chattering, as if grateful they had survived the quake.

Carl turned, staring at the rubble. His skin crawled with a certainty so powerful it nearly knocked him down. Someone was in there, trapped in the collapsed building. He grabbed a man on the sidewalk. “Is everyone in this building accounted for?”

The man nodded. “Yes. I work there. I'm pretty sure everyone got out.”

Carl knew that wasn't true, though he couldn't have said how he knew. He took off running around to the back of the building where the wall had caved in. The man followed, staring as Carl stepped over the rubble. “How do you get to the basement?”

“Well, there's a stairwell—” he pointed—“but you shouldn't go in there. The building's probably unsound.”

Despite the warning, Carl bolted toward the stairwell. He reached it and threw the door open. He started down the stairs . . . then stopped cold.

It was as if the ground had just come up in a heap to swallow up the floor and walls of the basement. There was nothing but dirt and rubble on the side where the building's wall had caved in.

There were people down there. He knew it with absolute certainty.

He ran back up. “Get some workers over here! There are people in there!”

Several of the firemen from across the street came running over and down the stairwell to see the rubble.

“Get some equipment over here!” one of the firemen shouted. “They could be alive.”

“They are!” Carl's voice trembled with urgency. “I can tell you right now that they're still alive.”

He didn't know how in the world he knew such a thing, but he had no time to question it. He had to get to those people before it was too late. He grabbed a shovel and started digging with the firefighters, determined to rescue these people who had somehow drawn him to their aid.

Within an hour, they made contact with the people who were buried, and one by one they managed to get them out, all alive. One man couldn't feel his legs. Another had a severe head injury and was unconscious. Two came out almost unscathed. When the fourth man came out, Carl knew they were finished. There were no others.

He turned and raced up the street, running like a track star for a couple of blocks, though his lungs panted and gasped for breath. A crowd of people stood in front of a store that sold televisions, and they watched the monitors as the news covered the earthquake damage.

He stopped in that crowd, looking around. He had expected to find another building, more people buried, rescue workers with shovels, but instead there were just people standing and looking at the television monitors, tears on their faces.

He saw a man in the crowd and quickly walked toward him. His feet seemed to know that the man needed help, but Carl stood there not knowing what to say or do. The man gave him an uneasy look.

“May I help you?”

“No . . . uh . . . I'm sorry.”

Something strange was happening to him. He felt the man's pain, as if there was something within him that needed rescuing, but Carl didn't have a clue what it was.

He suddenly felt very tired. His head had begun to ache, and he thought about his parents in North Dakota. They had probably been calling his house all night, frantic to know if he was alive.

He needed to get home. He needed to make contact with the important people in his life. He needed to rest.

A tidal wave of weariness and confusion crashed over him, crushing him with its weight until he could barely stand. Trembling, he started walking home.

8

A
NDY DIDN'T REALIZE HE'D BEEN HEALED UNTIL his sister and her husband showed up at the hospital that morning. He still had a tube down his throat, but it didn't burn like it had yesterday, and his breathing came easier.

When the doctor made rounds, he pulled the tube out, and it was only then that Andy knew something had happened.

“I couldn't talk at all last night,” he said in a rapid-fire cadence. “I'm telling you, I couldn't talk. My throat was burned, and my lungs felt parched, and I had blisters in my mouth and down my trachea. And now there's not a trace of smoke inhalation, not a cough or a wheeze or phlegm in my throat or anything. Do you think I've been healed?”

The doctor looked baffled and went to study his test results again.

Andy looked up at his sister, Karen. “I thought I was a dead man yesterday, and I was in a lot of ways, but I'm telling you something strange happened to me last night. I shouldn't be able to talk at all.” He glanced at the man on the bed next to him, who was watching and listening quietly. “Sir, I'm telling you that I was healed miraculously, just like in the Bible. It's almost like Jesus came in and touched me and I was healed, only I don't know why He'd heal
me
, of all people, because I've never been much of a soldier in His kingdom. It's not like I'm worthy of a miraculous healing, but I'm telling you that's what's happened.”

Karen started to laugh. “Andy, I don't think I've heard you say that many words in a day, much less in a minute!”

“I know!” Andy swung back around to her. “But all of a sudden I feel like I just have so much to say. I have to tell everybody about the miraculous healing power of a God who cares about us. Jesus is good! I don't know how it happened, but I know
what
happened, and God healed me just as surely as I'm standing here with you.”

The doctor came back in, still reading his chart and scratching his head. “I can't explain it. When we looked at your vocal cords and your lungs last night, you were in serious trouble.”

“I'm well now!” Andy lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Examine me and you'll see.”

The doctor listened to Andy's lungs and looked into his throat. Finally he pulled the stethoscope from his ears and gave Andy a long look. “You can go home, I guess. You look fine to me.”

Andy sprang off of the bed, hugged his sister, and slapped his brother-in-law's hand. “I'm outta here.”

Karen just stared up at him. “You're not acting like yourself, Andy. Are you sure you didn't hit your head?”

“I was only buried under a three-story building, Karen. I hit my head and everything else. But nothing on me is hurt.”

“But you're not acting like yourself.”

“I don't know what you mean.” He started out into the hall, not even bothering to wait for the paperwork that would release him. When he came through the door, he bumped into a gurney parked there. A woman lay on it, groaning.

He stopped and bent over her. “Ma'am, I'd like to pray for you if you don't mind. See, I was healed, and the Lord who owns the universe and everything in it has the power to heal you too. So I'd like to pray and ask Him to send you the help you need, to comfort and help with your pain.”

The woman started to cry. “Get away from me.”

A nurse touched his shoulder. “Sir, can I help you?”

“I just wanted to pray for her,” he said. “I didn't mean to upset her, but she's obviously in pain, and I thought prayer might be something that would help her because it sure helped me. I didn't mean to offend her.”

“She'd rather be left alone,” the nurse said calmly. “If you don't mind.”

Andy gave a plaintive nod. “Sorry.”

He walked to the next gurney and bent over it. “Sir, do you know the Lord? Because I do, and amazingly and miraculously, He healed me this morning after I'd inhaled smoke while buried under a three-story building. And I feel that I have to use my voice now to glorify and praise Him, and what better way to do that than to tell everyone I see about the love of Christ—”

Someone grabbed him and pulled him away from the man. He turned to find it was Karen. She glanced from side to side, as if he'd embarrassed her. “Andy, you've got to stop talking. They're going to call security.”

“But there are people who need to hear what happened to me, and I can't stop speaking about what I have seen and heard. I think that's a verse from Acts 4, when Peter and John were arrested and told not to speak anymore about Jesus, and they said they couldn't stop speaking about what they'd seen and heard. I know exactly how they felt now, because as much as I'd like to, I can't seem to stop talking about it.”

He pulled away from her then and stopped a nurse coming his way. “Ma'am, do you understand how precious you are in God's sight? Do you know that He knit you in your mother's womb, and that He knew you even before the foundation of the earth was laid?”

“Well . . . uh . . .”

Karen's husband, Ed, grabbed Andy's arm and pulled him away. “Come on, bro. They're going to admit you in the psychiatric ward if you don't shut up right now.”

Andy towered over his brother-in-law, but he allowed him to pull him from the building. “You've never told me to shut up in your life, Ed. What's gotten into you?”

“I've never
had
to tell you to shut up! You don't talk much. It's not your nature. You're quiet and pensive and mutter a lot.”

Karen grabbed his other arm. “Andy, I know you're excited about being healed, but it wouldn't hurt to rest your vocal cords to keep from straining them again.”

“I'm fine.” They went down the front steps of the hospital and toward the parking lot. “I'm just realizing that when the Lord gives you a gift, you have to use it for His glory, and I've been given a gift. I've never thought of my voice as being a gift from God, but it is, Karen, and yours and Ed's are too. Only I've had something so amazing happen that I can't help feeling marked by God in some way, like He has a special plan for these vocal cords of mine, and if I'm quiet about it I'll just be throwing that gift back in His face, and besides, I don't think I could hush if I wanted to, because I just have all these words right on the tip of my tongue, and if I don't let them roll off, I think I might wind up in that psych ward, after all.”

They got into his sister's car, and he ducked his massive frame into the backseat. “So where were you guys when the quake happened?”

“We were both at home, thankfully,” Ed said. “It didn't do too much damage in our part of town.”

“Well, what if that had been different?” Andy leaned up on the seat. “What if you had been in a building that collapsed? Say you died. Do you think you would have gone to heaven?”

“I don't know if I believe in an afterlife,” Ed muttered.

“What if you're wrong?”

Ed rolled his eyes. “Andy, I can't deal with these hypo-theticals right now, okay? I'm just going to take you home.”

Andy wasn't daunted. “I'm serious, Ed. You need to think about that, you know. Everybody needs to think about it, especially in light of what just happened. I mean, if you don't believe in an afterlife, you must have reasons for it. But one of us is wrong, and I think it's you.”

Ed chuckled. “Well, you're entitled to your beliefs, and I'm entitled to mine.”

“We're going to find out someday, Ed. I mean, I survived this, but I'm going to die one day, and so are you.”

“Not for a while, I hope.”

“Could be today . . . or tomorrow. There could be another quake in the next few minutes, and the ground could swallow us up, and we could all be lying there dead.”

Karen's mouth fell open, and she gave him a disgusted look. “Andy!”

“You can't hold off death forever,” he went on. “That's my point. There's going to come a time when you're going to find out for sure whether there's a heaven or a hell. Now, while you can, you need to consider Jesus Christ, like it says in Hebrews 3:1. The Bible also says that broad is the way that leads to destruction. That the way to heaven is through a narrow door, and that door is Jesus Christ.”