This post is from Stories for Your Soul by Max Lucado. It is a true story about a doctor who was not a Christian and his near death experience. However, I am not including the story in the blog because of the NDE, but rather because of how the gentleman described the praying that was taking place for him. I am so grateful that we can connect with our Heavenly Father through prayer.
Rather than fretting about the future of your family, pray for them. Rather than assuming you can do nothing to help others, assume the posture of prayer.
At 4:30 a.m. on November 10, 2008, Eben Alexander's brain began to fail him. Pain shot through his body. He dismissed it as as virus he'd been battling for days. Within a couple of hours he knew it was more. He was in agony and virtually paralyzed. By 9:30 a.m. his body was stiff and spastic. His eyes rolled back in his head and he slipped in a coma.
The surprising and difficult diagnosis was a rare form of E. coli bacterial meningitis: meningoencephalitis. No one could explain its origin. No one dared to hope for survival. Fewer than one in ten million adults contract it annually. His odds of survival were estimated at 2 percent.
Ironically the man with the failing brain was a brain surgeon. Dr. Alexander's resume impresses even the most educated scholar:
Duke University School of Medicine
Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
A fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery
Fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School
Countless brain surgeries
Author of more than 150 chapters and articles for medical publications
Presentations at more than two hundred medical conferences worldwide
After Dr, Alexander had been in a coma for a week, the doctors began to prepare his family for the worse news.
Irony number two: Dr Alexander was not a spiritual man. He would be the first to tell you the was a realist. He used the tools of modern medicine to heal people. No one was more surprised than he at what he saw during his coma. "There was a whooshing sound, and in a flash I went through the opening and found myself in a completely new world." In this place, "shimmering beings arced across the sky," He heard "a sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant," He describes an "explosion of light color, love and beauty that blew though [him] like a crashing wave. . . There seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself."
What was happening? Prayer was happening. The doctor may not have been a spiritual man, but his friends and family were. In Lynchburg General Hospital they began to gather. They knew to pray individually and as a community. As the days passed they wondered if their prayers mattered. On Thursday, three days into the the comma, the pastor of their church was called, and a final wave of urgent prayers began. And the prayers began to break through.
Dr. Alexander wrote, "I moved down through great walls of clouds. There was murmuring all around me, but I couldn't understand the words. Then I realized that countless beings were surrounding me, kneeling in arcs that spread into the distance. Looking back on it now, I realize what these-seen, half-sensed hierarchies of beings stretching out into the dark above and below, were doing. They were praying for me."
On Sunday morning he awoke from his coma. Prayers brought the doctor back to earth,
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Think of a time that your prayers were answered. God is a good, mighty, powerful, and loving Father. (my comments)
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