amazing story
Paul Janssen: Near Death and Nearer to God
By Mary Ruth Goochee
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– On July 2, 2006, Paul Janssen almost died.
“I don’t remember the instances of that night, but I woke up six and a half weeks later having come out of a coma,” Paul said.
Paul was driving home from a wedding and crashed into a wooded area. He stumbled out of the car and landed face down in a ditch filled with water. A policeman found Paul and took him to the hospital. He lay in a coma near death until he woke up six weeks later.
“Hearing the stories of how I almost died, laying there in that hospital bed just thinking about everything that I had done up until the car accident, and thinking to myself I didn’t deserve to make it through,” Paul said. “I deserved to die.”
Paul’s conscience was in conflict with the life he had been living before his accident.
“When I started going to college, I found myself doing a lot of things that I thought that I would never do and said that I would never do,” Paul said. “I would meet these girls and I’d start sleeping with them. Deep down inside I knew it was wrong, but I thought to myself, ‘How am I ever going to meet my future wife?’”
Paul met a girl and they married. Two years later the marriage began falling apart.
“One day I came home from work and there was a note on the table that said she had gone to live with her mother,” Paul said. “I just remember feeling so scared and so angry at the same time. I just started crying out to God. I just asked God, ‘Please bring her back to me.’ After a couple months went by and God didn’t bring her back, that desperation turned into anger. And I just started hating God. I started going out to bars. I started treating women like objects again. I would tell them my sob stories and get them to sympathize with me and then I would use them to get whatever I wanted.”
Paul grew up knowing about God, but he never felt God could really help him until a friend asked Paul a simple question.
“She asked if she could pray with me because she knew that I was hurting. She prayed for me and then she asked me to pray. And it was the first time that I really prayed out to God in almost a year,” Paul said. “I said, ‘God, you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to change my life.”
A week after he prayed that prayer he was in the car accident that left him in a coma.
“The doctors had told my family during the time that I was in the coma that I wasn’t going to survive. They asked my parents if I was an organ donor. They asked them if I wanted to be kept on life support. And my parents just said, ‘You know what? We’re going to pray. We’re just going to keep praying for Paul.'”
Prayer worked. Six and a half weeks later Paul woke up from the coma. Miracle after miracle took place, changing Paul’s perspective on God’s love for him.
“For the first time I felt like I knew God’s love. I mean, you hear people talk about God’s love all the time. But for the first time in my entire life, I felt like He moved mountains, and that he moved universes to save my life. Me. A person who knew God when He was little but chose to walk away,” Paul said. “When I left the recovery hospital, I left a new person. That old Paul that was living that life had died in that car accident. And now I was new. From that moment He just started restoring everything. He gave me a great job. He gave me a great girl that I married. God showed me, all this time that I was looking for love, that He is love, that with Him and only Him can you receive full love.”
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