Well, ol' Bill finally woke up.

Ol' Bill comes to our little fellowship in the Pizza place in Maypearl.  His son-in-law, Harry, is the pastor there - I say pastor, but it's just a little fellowship where a handful us gather on Sunday morning to praise the Lord and share the Word.  I don't know if most folks would consider it church 'cause there's no steeple or fancy pews with a choir and a pulpit.  We just sit around the table and eat Breakfast Pizza while we allow the Lord to speak to us through each other.  They don't even label us as a church in the local newspaper - just a Bible study.  But that's okay.  We got more church going on there on Sunday morning than  a whole lot of them bigger cathedrals have all week.

Well, ol' Bill got himself a parasite overseas back in the '60s, and 17 years later they cut it out of him, all 20 lbs of it ... 'cept they missed some.   Well, all these years later, it was back and all plumped up again.

They said they could get it out of him this time, but something went wrong in surgery and after a day and a half and 100 units of blood, they couldn't get Bill to wake up again.  Three weeks later, it wasn't looking too good for ol' Bill.  His nervous system was doing this thing called "storming" where his whole body would raise up off the pillow in what looked like a seizure over and over.  Looked like he was constipated or something, but Bill wasn't awake.  He'd just settle back, eyes half open with a blank stare until the next seizure took him.

The surgeons said he was brain-dead.  "Storming" meant that, because of the loss of blood, Bill's brain got fried, and he wasn't coming back.  100% sure, they said.  Vegetable for life.  Time to pull the plug.

Well, we didn't think so.  Harry wasn't going to let him go without a fight.  It was real tough for Bill's wife and daughter to handle. All that high-sounding talk about God, faith, and miracles was starting to seem a little thin.  When's the last time there'd been any miracles like that?  Anybody ever seen them?  How many of your neighbors ever get raised from the dead?  Yeah, I know some of 'em maybe look like they came back from the dead, but the real thing? 

But Harry knew he had to see this all the way through.  It wasn't just for Bill's sake and his family, but the honor of the faith that Harry had preached and claimed was true was at stake.  We really needed God to come through on this one.

A bunch of us went up one night and prayed over him.  It didn't matter that nothing happened that night.  It just mattered that we were taking the battle to the Throne. 

Me and Harry went up there one night by ourselves at 11pm.  Don't ask me why they got visiting hours at 11pm at night, but we were there and started praying like warriors.  Now, I gotta tell you, I never learned how to pray like a Baptist; I was taught that if you really wanted to get something from God, you gotta go get it.  So we commenced to go get it ... at the top of our lungs for an hour.  I figured they was going to kick us out, because if God didn't raise the dead on that hospital floor, our loud praying was liable to do something real close to it.  But nobody said nothing - they just let us pray.

I expected Bill to jump up and start dancing around the room at one point, and if he did, I would have been inclined to join him, but nothing happened.  I knew, however, that we had broken through something and had touched the Throne of God.  We had done everything humanly possible, and our faith wasn't about how much we believed or how many times we repeated a bunch of words, but in the fact that we had busted through to touch the hem of His garment.  God was going to heal Bill in His own time so that God got all the glory, not the ones making all the noise in that hospital room, and sure not the doctors who had given up on him.

The deadline was Wednesday to pull the plug, and on Wednesday morning,  Bill was still laying there storming away.  Millie, Bill's wife, sat there beside his bed asking God one last time to show her what to do.  We had showed up in prayer, but where was God?

And then Bill woke up.  Just like that.  Popped out of the coma and said he was hungry. 

Yeah, there sure was a big commotion after that, all the way from the nurses to the President of the hospital.  God showed everyone that He is still there, and He really does hear the prayers of his saints.

But what about the rest of us?  America has gone through a spiritual drought for so long that we don't even know how to believe anymore.  And when something like this happens, we still question it.  We say we believe, but we make sure we have a doctor's appointment in our hand as we raise it up to pray. We call it being prudent; I call it unbelief.

Unbelief doesn't come by choice. It comes from years of letting the raw fires of revival to die down to embers so we can get comfortable in church. We've turned God Almighty into a teddy bear and  have lost our fear of God so we're no longer scared of Hell, neither are we driven to warn others of it. We have lost our burden to witness to lost souls.  Oh, excuse me, it's not "lost souls" anymore is it?  It's "unchurched" nowadays.  We don't even have the guts to tell them they're lost.

No more all-night prayer meetings anymore.  No more foot-washings.  No more fire in our churches.  And please, no more hellfire and brimstone messages!  We're too comfortable and lazy to do those things that our forefathers did. Besides, we might offend someone if we stood up during our "moment of silence" at  football games to pray to the God in Heaven.  (Yeah, "moment of silence"  That's one term we got right.)

If we have lost our courage to stand up and pray at a football game, how do we think we will be able to stand up against the Antichrist?  If we are no longer burdened to pray with intensity all night until we get an answer, why do we think God will hear us?  If we no longer fear God, how will we be fearless before the enemy?  If we no longer witness to others, why would God send lost souls to our church?

We no longer believe in miracles because we have chosen not to. 

But you can ask ol' Bill sometime.  He believes.