Jack's Miracle

Week of November 20

Good Friday Jack was working out at the gym, as he often did. Without warning he collapsed on a weight machine and slid to the floor. A cardiac nurse happened to be working out nearby. She normally would not have been at the gym at that hour but a schedule change at work allowed her workout. She had the presence to remove vomit from Jack’s mouth which cleared his air passage. Jack, unconscious but breathing on his own was rushed to a nearby hospital.

In the emergency room Jack remained unconscious, a couple of times the doctors lost a pulse. He remained in a coma. The doctor told his wife that a cat scan showed no activity. If he regained consciousness he probably would be a vegetable.

Jack’s youngest daughter, Colleen, a high school student, told her mom not to believe the doctor.

“Our God is bigger than that,” she said. Later after the rest of the family arrived Colleen found her way to the Chapel. She was alone. She prayed for God’s healing power. She said she clearly her a voice in her head say, “I will restore those (brain) cells Sunday to glorify my son’s resurrection.”

When she reported this revelation to her family she was met with skepticism, heads shaking in disbelief, and eyes rolling. The next day Jack was still in a
comma and on life support. Twice Colleen, in talking to her dad, got such a strong reaction on the monitoring machine that the nurses came in the room. The second time she was asked her to leave the hospital room. She insisted her dad was going to be ok. “You don’t know my God or my dad,” she told the nurses as she left.

The next day, Easter morning, there was a banging at Colleen's bedroom door. It was her little brother reporting that, “Dad woke up.”

An excited Colleen, while driving to the hospital stopped at every convenience store she passed to exclaim “Behold the Lamb of God, my dad is healed.” She arrived at the hospital to find her dad sitting up and being his old feisty self.

When Colleen returned home that day and turned on her favorite Christian station the first thing she heard was “Behold the Lamb of God.”

Jack Reilly
Tucson, Arizona (as told by his daughter)