This One's Mine: A True Story

By Gregory R. DeVaux

The power was in the voice and the voice became the light and the love came from the light. The voice, the light, and the love were all one in the same, and the Trinity was no longer a mystery to me.
I was lying in a hospital in Boston, in agonizing pain after a horrific car accident. All my hope rested in doctors’ hands, awaiting results from tests and X-rays. “If you live,” one doctor told me, “you will spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down and your leg amputated.” 
A nurse came to my bedside to deliver the final blow. “You have massive internal bleeding. They don’t know where it’s coming from and we need to operate right away.” 
With my hope of any kind of normal recovery shattered, I refused all operations.
As I waited for the unfamiliar and unwelcome visitor called Death, I wondered Where will it take me? When will it happen? Will it hurt?
Slowly, I closed my eyes. Trembling, waist-deep in utter darkness, a loud voice full of power came from above and He called me His own. With His light, immeasurable in brightness, He cradled me. With His divine, unconditional love poured out over me, He healed me. With a holy whisper, He sent death on its way.
This One’s Mine is a spiritual journey beyond the invisible curtain that separates this life from the next, a story of a miraculous recovery, a quest for answers, as I searched for the path that would take me back to that place of light, love, and peace, a peace we long for our whole lives. Discovering the power of prayer; building faith and hope, accompanied by love, mercy, and grace; that led me to a decision we all must make…before our last breath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory R. DeVaux
• Release date: May 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386283645

Book preview

Introduction

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When I was just a boy, seven years old, I used to love to build models. Models were all I wanted for Christmas or birthdays. Cars, trucks, planes, boats—it didn’t matter. I loved them all. I had a box of leftover model parts, and when I didn’t have one to build, I made up my own.

It was a Saturday morning, and I had gotten up early. I set up my table and chair, opened my new model, and laid out the directions and parts across my bed.

This was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, police edition. I worked steadily for three hours, and it was nearly complete when I came to a part I had to glue and let set before I could move on to the next step. It was time to take a break and snoop around my parents’ room, which was across the hall from mine. I had my electric racetrack set up in their room because there was more space, and it gave me an excuse to be in there. I sat down on their floor and began racing to see if I could get twenty laps off without flying off the track. I didn’t make it.

Looking around the room for something else to do, I saw my dad’s desk was open. He always had cool stuff in his desk, and going over to check it out, I was stopped by a black book on the corner of the desk. Now, being in first grade, I thought I could read anything. On the cover I read, Holy Bible, and as I got close I could feel a power coming from it, and it scared me.

I thought quickly, If my dad reads it, so can I, as if I needed a reason to pick it up. I grabbed it with two hands and jumped up onto the edge of the bed. I opened the book and flipped many pages, trying to find the first page. And finding it, I read:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2 King James Version, 1944)

That scared me, and I put the book down.

Ten years went by.

Chapter 1

November 29, 1980: This Was Not My Day

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The Lord God Almighty has had his hand on me my whole life. At the age of eighteen, after two motorcycle accidents with no injuries, I began to realize that there was a God, and He was trying to get hold of me. Finally, He did!

I had spent the night at my girlfriend’s house after staying up late the night before, waking up around eight a.m. My girlfriend was called in to work for half of the day Saturday, and I needed to find something to do for a few hours until she returned.

I really didn’t feel like going home and waiting around. I didn’t like being home most of the time anyway. Home was a crowded place.

Her brother, John, had asked me if I wanted to take a ride with him to Hyde Park, which was an hour or so from where we were. He had a 1975 Ford F-150 pickup, red, with a white cap on the back, and he wanted to sell the cap to his uncle who lived in Hyde Park. I agreed to go, figuring this trip would take about three hours. I walked out of his house that Saturday morning at about nine a.m.

The sun was bright, and the sky was blue with a few fluffy clouds. It was about thirty-five degrees out and cold, but the sun was still warm. Wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a brown leather jacket and work boots, I walked along the concrete walkway and through the open fence. As I walked around the front of the truck to get into the passenger side, I noticed that the front tire on that side was bald, with threads showing through. I looked over at John and said, Hey, that tire is in pretty bad shape, the steel belts are showing.

Oh, that tire is fine, he said. I’ve been driving with it for the last three months that way.

That didn’t make much sense to me because, if you think about it, the tire was definitely in better shape three months ago. For some unfathomable reason, I did not put my seat belt on that day.

This was the first time that I’d been in his truck. It seemed like a pretty nice truck, aside from the tires; it didn’t have any rust on it. But as I looked around the cab, I noticed that the stereo was missing. In fact, it was more than just missing; it had been ripped out of the dashboard, and there was jagged metal all around the opening, as if it had been taken out with a crowbar. What was more noticeable was one piece of metal, about two inches in length and the shape of a knife blade, sticking straight out. Having installed a few stereos myself, I wondered why they took it out that way. All they would have had to do was unscrew the stereo, and it would have come right out.

After brushing off the issue about the tires, John started the truck, warmed it up for a few minutes, and off we went.

It was a bit of an awkward ride. You see, John and I didn’t really hang around each other very much. In fact, we didn’t hang out at all. He had his group of friends, and I had mine. I was the jock type, into sports and working out at the gym. He was a partier.

The ride wasn’t too long, mostly highway, until we got to the Blue Hills exit. He said he knew the back roads to Hyde Park, and we would take that route. It didn’t matter to me; I had never been on these roads before, nor had I ever been to Hyde Park. We traveled along this road at the base of the Blue Hills. I could see where it got its name; it was a very big hill. I actually would have called it a mountain, and it did look a little blue in color.

Shortly, we came to a stop to take a left-hand turn onto a road that was long and straight, as far as you could see, and that was about two miles. I didn’t catch the name of the street as we passed the sign. We weren’t really talking at this point, but from what he had told me before, it was going to be a ten-minute ride from here.

As we got to the end of the straightaway, there was a very sharp turn. I didn’t know how fast we were going at that point, and it didn’t seem like our speed was excessive. But I did know this: we were not going to make the turn. I felt the tires’ grip on the road give way, and with a quick glance at John’s face, I saw panic as he lost control of the truck. I still was not wearing my seat belt. John turned the wheel, but with no response, we slid right off the road and were heading straight for dense trees.

Instinctively, I lay down on the bench seat on my left side and braced my right foot firmly on the floor of the truck. The last thing I saw was the speedometer, and it read fifty miles per hour.

Chapter 2

Waking Up

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I don’t remember the impact. I was instantly knocked unconscious for what seemed to be twenty to thirty seconds, regaining my senses quickly. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, and my vision refocused, was a hole in the windshield. Its shape was a horizontal oval. My hand was bloody with chunks of glass embedded in it. As I looked through the hole, I saw the treetops, and what was once a sunny day with clear, blue skies was now cold, cloudy, and gray.

I looked over to where John had been sitting. He was gone. I wondered if he could have been thrown out of the truck through the windshield, but the hole seemed too small for that.

The steering wheel had collapsed forward at nine and three o’clock. The bench seat was re-formed to the shape of John’s back. The rear cab window also had a hole through it from the back of his head. The driver’s door was ajar, as if someone had opened it and forgotten to close it. I began to think that he must have gotten out that way.

In fact, we had hit an oak, and the impact had driven us right up the tree. The truck was slanted up at about forty-five degrees, which is why I could only see the tops of the trees and the sky. The smell of gasoline was strong, but there was another smell that I didn’t recognize. The freshly bent and mangled truck was smoking, and its metal was creaking as it teetered against the tree.

Now I heard shuffling around outside of the vehicle, which sounded like sand being thrown. John was calling my name. I could hear him but didn’t have the strength to answer. My senses were sharp and my head was clear, and I knew I had to get out of the truck. I looked over to my door as a possible exit, but the door was not there. The door was completely crushed to nothing. No window, no handles, nothing. The dashboard was touching the seat, and I looked down and saw that the motor had come through the fire wall and was lodged under my thighs. I was sitting on the hot motor, and the unfamiliar smell was my own flesh burning.

I was hurt bad. My face had hit the dashboard where the radio used to be. That jagged, blade-like piece of protruding steel had punctured my forehead over my right eye, and the wound was bleeding heavily, streaming down and dripping off my eyebrow. My nose was torn to pieces; I was told later that only bone and cartilage were visible. My lips, both top and bottom, were cut clean through between my lower lip and chin, and my upper teeth cut through my right cheek.

My right arm went clean through the windshield. My right foot had gone through the steel floorboard of the truck up to my knee. I couldn’t see the lower part of my leg. It felt like it was still there, but I couldn’t be certain. It was outside the truck, and if it was still attached, I knew it was broken.

The pain in my leg, lower back, shoulder, neck, and face registered all at once. I was cold and tired, with little or no strength. John, afraid that the truck might blow up from the leaking gas tank just behind the seat I was sitting in, had climbed up the back of the truck bed. Looking through the hole in the glass, he said, I got to get you out of here!

I could hear him, but I couldn’t see his face. He smashed out the rest of the cab window with, I think, his fist. He then reached down, putting his hands under my arms to try to pull me out through the back window. I fought the pain each time he pulled and lifted. I wanted to get out. But it was no use. My right leg had swelled up, and I could not pull it out of the hole it had made.

My leg is stuck; I can’t get it out! I said. But he had disappeared, and I didn’t know where he went.

The blood was still streaming down my forehead and off my eyebrow. The puddle in front of me was getting larger. I didn’t know how much blood I had in me, but I knew most of it had poured out. I kept wiping the blood away from my eyebrow as if it was helping in some way, but each time I wiped it, I was cutting my eyelid with the glass that was embedded in my hand.

Was anybody going to rescue me?

Did anyone even see us go off the road?

I wiped the blood again and again, and the blood began to mix with my tears. But these tears were different than most. These tears were not from the intense physical pain I was in. I’ve held back a lot of tears before, but these just came out, and I couldn’t hold them back. You see, my life was ending right here and right now. I knew all I had to do was close my eyes and go to sleep, and it would all be over. Deep in my heart I knew that there was a God, just as all men know. But how could this God let this happen to me? Did this God who created me even know me?

I didn’t know I could call upon Him in times of trouble:

You did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask of the Father in My name, He may give to you. (John 15:16 New American Standard Bible)

I didn’t know that I could have a relationship with this God. I didn’t know this God loved me. Truth is, I didn’t know anything at all about God—only that there was one.

I was very tired, and everything got still and quiet. I could hear the wind as it whispered through the windshield and out the back window. The naked tree branches moved slightly in the wind. The pain didn’t bother me anymore; the tears streamed out on their own, as did the blood. I decided I wasn’t going to wipe that blood anymore.

Time was definitely not on my side. I told myself: Two minutes, just two minutes. You can stay awake for just two minutes. Two minutes, and then you can go to sleep.

I remembered that in elementary school I ran the six-hundred-yard dash in one minute, fifty-seven seconds. I knew exactly how long two minutes was. I always came in first. I was twenty seconds ahead of everybody else. I thought it was kind of lonely running in front. I felt like I was running the race all by myself. I remember one time I let six people run in front of me so that I’d be running seventh, because seven was my favorite number. Also, I would have someone to pass once I got close to the finish line. I only did that once; after that, I always ran first. The other runners were way too slow. My two minutes were just about up, but this was one race I didn’t want to finish...not yet.

Chapter 3

The Rescue: Can I Hold On?

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Way off in the distance, I heard a siren. At least I thought I did. I opened my eyes, although I didn’t remember closing them. Was that a siren?

Are they coming here to get me?

It was far off in the distance, and I traced the route we took in my mind to try and figure out where they were coming from. My sense of direction was gone. I couldn’t figure out anything.

"Wait, I’ll just wait to hear