After a welding-torch accident, I lay in Intensive Care with 80 percent of my body burned. But I felt the presence of God, and I knew I was not going to die. I felt protected by the prayers of my family and friends. I was buoyed by an ecumenical prayer chain, by the children’s Sunday school class that made get-well cards, by the high school athletes who raised money for my hospital bills.
Then, as I began to improve, some discomforting thoughts gradually entered my mind. “Why do I deserve all this love?” I asked myself. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of.”
Suddenly I slipped into a relapse. My temperature climbed and I stopped making progress. In my feelings of guilt, I had stopped calling on God. Then one night—to my surprise—I found myself asking a nurse to read to me from the Bible.
She picked up my Bible and began to read from it at random. “Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord…”
It was Psalm 130—the perfect prayer for a man who felt unworthy!
“If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with Thee… with the Lord there is mercy…”
When she finished, she routinely took my temperature. But the look on her face when she read the thermometer was not at all routine. “It’s down,” she said. “You’re better!”
What strange events! God had saved my life; then I’d let my guilt get in the way of His healing power. But He wouldn’t have it! He used a nurse and a Scripture verse to unburden my mind so He could finish healing my body—completely.
