THE DAY OF MY DEATH (2)

There is a bullet in my leg, but there is nothing wrong with my leg.  

When I slammed into a lamppost trying to escape from armed-robbers, I heard a “still, small voice” which said: “Femi, nothing is going to happen to you here.”  Thereafter, I was shot in the leg.  Nevertheless, the voice insisted: “There is nothing wrong with your leg.” 

As my wife ran down the road screaming for help after the departure of the robbers, I calmly reassessed the situation, wondering what “nothing” meant.  Although I was bleeding profusely from the bullet-wound, all I could see was the finger of God. 

Food-for-thought

In spite of slamming into a lamppost at top speed, nobody in our car was hurt.  We had no seat-belts on.  Nevertheless, I did not even hit my chest on the steering-wheel.  Five-year old Femi-Kevin, sitting between my wife and me, could easily have been flung through the windscreen.  But God, in his infinite mercy, did not allow that to happen.

I discovered that the lamppost, which I thought had scuttled my plans, had actually saved my life.  My daredevil escape plan was suicidal.  The road was a descending flyover.  Without the lamppost, I would have driven clean off the road headlong onto another road down below where cars were moving in the opposite direction.  As it was, the lamppost was a lifesaver in that it broke the fall.  God used this to show me that reliance on my ability could prove to be disastrous.

But the biggest imponderable of all had to do with the gunshot.  The bullet pierced the body of our car and came out on the inside.  Had it continued in its trajectory, it would have hit me in the stomach.  Failing that, it would have hit little Femi-Kevin.  But having come through the car door, the bullet did something strange.  It changed direction inexplicably and headed downwards, burying itself in my leg below the knee. 

The deliverer

God used a young lady belonging to Zoe Ministries to rescue us.  She came with my wife in a taxi, and I was rushed to the nearby EKO hospital.  On getting there, the nurses quickly wheeled me into an emergency ward where the first order of the day was to have an x-ray on my broken leg.  But I felt again a pressing need to reassure my wife.  So I appealed to the nurses that I needed to talk to her.  When she came, I said to her: “Karen, there is a bullet in my leg, but there is nothing wrong with my leg.” 

Suddenly, she burst out laughing.  She laughed and laughed.  I have thought about that laughter so many times since that day and have yet to understand it.  Did she laugh because she thought I was crazy?  Was she just relieved at the deliverance?  She has not been able to explain it to me herself.

The x-ray revealed that the bullet had splintered a bone.  The doctors told me their first concern was the bone.  Only after the fracture was dealt with would they address the issue of the bullet since it was not life-threatening.   

Hospital evangelists

In all, I spent five days in EKO Hospital.  Those five days were remarkable because of uninvited visitors who came to see me while I was there.  They were Christian evangelists who go from bed to bed in hospitals witnessing to the sick.  In my five days at EKO Hospital, I became hostage to quite a number of these people.  Under normal circumstances, I would not have given them the time of day.  But stuck in a hospital bed, I was entirely at their mercy.

I noticed that, in the main, they were shabbily dressed.  Most of them also spoke very bad English.  (Such irrelevancies were important to me in those days.)  Nevertheless, they all spoke with great conviction about things I did not learn in all my nine years of university education and ten years of working in a research institute.  It was clear to me from their terms of reference that the one basic source of their knowledge was the bible.  Therefore, once I left the hospital, I buried my nose in a bible, read it voraciously and it turned my world upside down. 

I am fully convinced the Lord had been trying to get my attention for a long time before then, but I was not interested.  However, in the middle of a life-threatening attack, my ears were finally opened. I say this now to the amusement of some, but with all seriousness.  In order for me to really know the Lord, I had to be shot. 

Nevertheless, “nothing” indeed happened to me on that fateful night.  Today, there is still a bullet in my leg, but there is nothing wrong with my leg.