My Life is in His Hands

Paul Carlson                                         Ottawa, Ontario

      Paul was busy building a deck for one of his customers in Barrhaven, near Ottawa, on August 14, 2009 when he started to feel a squeezing sensation in his chest, pains down his left arm, and to be faint and sweaty. Gasping for breath, he quickly grabbed his cell phone to call 911 and his wife because he knew he was having a heart attack. When the paramedics arrived, he had already collapsed. Three times in the next hour, once in the ambulance and two more times while he was being treated in the hospital, his heart stopped beating and he had to be revived. After one cardiac arrest, fifty percent of the people can be revived. After the second arrest, approximately ten percent will survive; but after a third arrest, almost no one lives to tell about it.
      Paul’s wife rallied the church to pray for Paul because things were looking so grim.
      After a week in the hospital Paul was stable enough to withstand surgery to replace four blocked arteries to his heart muscle. During the quadruple bypass surgery, things were not going well and it was “touch and go” as to whether he would to live until it was completed. His heart was only pumping at twenty-seven percent of capacity, but after special prayer by his church members, this figure jumped to sixty-seven percent and he began to miraculously improve. Paul fought his way through pneumonia, and still God would not let him go.
      After recovering from surgery, the Heart Institute recommended Paul not go back to work for three months, but seven weeks later, he was declared fit enough to do so. Paul says he “feels better after,” than he did before, his heart attack. His mind is clearer and he can actually work harder than he did before.
      All his life, Paul had battled with a “Spirit of Poverty.” There never was enough income to pay for everything. Since his heart attack, there is more than enough money to pay his bills, and even with losing two and a half months of work, he is in better financial shape now than he had been previously. Paul thought that one of the jobs that he had lined up to do would simply be cancelled, but the person who hired him, extended the time by six months to allow him to complete the job after he’d recovered.
      Paul has worked in eleven countries as an aid worker and missionary, in war zones and in Sarajevo, installing water purification systems. There were three separate times when he should have been dead. Rebels pointed machine guns at him, but God has spared him from all of this.
      Paul’s faith is stronger than it ever was before in his life, and he “doesn’t get upset and worried” and he “doesn’t have to be afraid of anything, anymore,” because he knows God is in control of his life. Even with all the things he has been through, Paul has never seen such a big miracle in his life as the one God did for him this time, when Paul states that God “literally” saved his life.
      If it weren’t for God intervening in his life, Paul knows he would not be alive today. He lives secure in the knowledge that his life is held safely in God’s hands.