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CBN.com – Jason Black was a lead tenor on his way to the top. His future was set with his opera singing and with his talented wife Tausha.
“I loved Jason from the first time we met,” she says. “I remember it was probably six weeks after we met that I really felt that God just told me: ‘This is going to be the man for your life. This is who you’re going to marry.’
“Our dreams were to have a house in the Hollywood Hills with a view and eventually start a family. So we thought LA would be a great place to get started.”
It was at least for the first six months of their marriage. That’s when Jason’s life came to a crashing halt. The Blacks had just bought a new home and had one last thing to move: a six-foot glass table -- so heavy that Jason had to have somebody help him carry it.
“It probably weighed about 100 pounds,” says Tausha. “As soon as they walked out the front door, the kid accidentally dropped his side of the table and it cracked. It just split up the center, came straight down on Jason’s neck like a guillotine and nearly severed his head off. He was losing an immense amount of blood. There was so much blood on our floor. It was puddles around him.”
So Tausha wrapped a blanket around Jason’s neck to stop some of the bleeding. She called 911 and prayed. All Tausha could do was hope for the best at this point. She wasn’t even allowed to ride in the ambulance with Jason when he was rushed to the hospital.
The last thing Tausha remembers saying to her husband was “I love you.”
“I just remember praying the whole time, ‘God, I don’t care what the outcome is as long as he lives.’”
Initially, doctors didn’t think that was likely but they pressed through with surgery.
“There’s my husband hurting. Tubes all in him, not breathing on his own, and as a wife and someone who loves your spouse so much [but] is to not be able to do anything, that’s the worst of it.”
Well, Jason made it through surgery but not without a cost.
“The doctor said he’ll never speak again. You could not hear Jason above a whisper.”
Jason’s singing career was over. The glass had severed both of his jugular veins and nicked his spine and his vocal cord. It was paralyzed, as was Jason’s right arm. So, he spent a lot of time in his room in bed silent.
“We developed this system of whistling, and a whistle up meant yes and a whistle down mean no.”
The Blacks had one other major complication.
“Financially, he did not have insurance when this accident happened, and so we had racked up half a million or more dollars worth of medical bills,” Tausha continues. “We thought we were going to have to file bankruptcy.”
But both Tausha and Jason never gave up.
“Every day I woke up, and we would pray and have faith that something’s going to change. We don’t know what but something.”
Fast forward six months and something did change.
One morning Tausha woke up and as they lied in bed, she heard Jason say hello.
Tausha recalls, “It was almost like a dream. After that, I don’t remember him not being able to speak.”
Or sing.
“I was just completely naked,” Tausha says. “I had clothed myself in all the trappings of self-sufficiency, of power, of talent. [They] were stripped.”
Jason says, “I’m right-handed. God took my right arm, and He took my voice. At that point, the only two things that I counted on the most in my life -- He reminded me rather forcefully -- weren’t mine; they’re His.”
Jason didn’t complain because it wasn’t the first time he’d danced with death. See this car? Or what’s left of it? A few years before the glass accident, Jason was in a horrific car crash. It left him with brain trauma for awhile but ultimately with a stronger faith in God.
“I gave everything to Him,” Jason says. “It says the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. I was on countless prayer chains. I had full churches behind me praying, and miracles happen because people pray.”
Jason and Tausha are a committed to each other and to Christ. That’s why today they’re dedicated to helping other people trust God in the midst of their trials.
Tausha says, “Anything you want to overcome, you can overcome through Christ. Anything.”
Jason concurs, “You can be in peace in your pain if you’re looking to something greater than yourself, and you acknowledge that God’s got you in His hand. He’ll take care of it.”
He even took care of the Blacks’ huge medical bills.
“God, in one sentence, wiped that away, and said, ‘No, it’s been taken care of.’”
The hospital forgave hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the rest was taken care of by churches, charities and a Jason Black benefit concert.
“That’s the power my God has,” Jason says.
It was power to hold Jason and Tausha’s marriage together during tough times, power to get the couple out of enormous debt, and power to heal what doctors said was impossible.
Jason says, “When you got everybody who’s anybody in medicine saying that it can’t be, but it still happens, that’s my God!”
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