Do Miracles Really Happen? Part 1

Are You the One?

“I WISH I had been going 100 miles per hour…,” Dave Sims told a hometown newspaper reporter several years ago. He regrets it wasn’t that exciting. Instead, he was only going about three miles an hour, on a bicycle ride with his children at a state park in Eastern Washington. The ground was flat, and as they came upon a curve, he moved over and slowed down but the front brakes locked. The momentum rolled Dave over the handlebars, and his head hit the ground full force. The successful young business executive couldn’t feel anything except a tingling funny-bone sensation all over. “I was like, ‘Uh-oh, this is not good.’”¹

At age 38, Dave found himself a quadriplegic, bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and abruptly retired from the corporate world. Now 63, he’s in a fight to live. In spite of all that though, he’s seen enough to know that miracles still happen.

I met with him on the internet, conversing through our computer screens. Imagine an ordinary person like me on something like a television. Behind me, he could see my office, a converted upstairs bedroom in my old house in Ticonderoga, New York. I saw Dave in his modern recording studio in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Behind him, painted gray walls and natural wood planks absorbed soft beams from overhead lights. Shaggy blonde hair framed his tanned face, like a crooked halo. “If you don’t cut your hair you don’t have to grow up,” is one of his tag lines. He has an easy laugh and his smile lines run deep. Every few moments he leaned forward, lifted his shoulders, and shifted his weight in his wheel chair. Black, fingerless, weight-lifting gloves protected his palms as he relieved the crush on pressure sores that doctors say will kill him one of these days.

Fighting to Live

“I’m constantly fighting pressure sores. But a while back, the doctor sat me down with Carolyn, my wife, and said, ‘This one, Dave, is probably going to kill you. And it’s not going to be long. You basically have two choices. We can throw everything but the kitchen sink at it and try to heal it. You’ll have a horrible quality of life. It’ll basically take two years—flat on your back—with no guarantees it’ll work.’” On top of that, Dave would lose his sense of balance and would have to start all over at age 65 to regain independence.

Dave said, “The doctor continued to tell us, ‘I’ll understand if you’re not going to take that one. It’s not going to be fun.’ He listed the multiple surgeries and other unpleasant things treatment would require. And then he said, ‘It will still probably
kill you.’”

The other option was to go home, enjoy the grandkids, and enjoy life because it would probably be short—six months.

The couple talked it over and decided to fight, mainly because of their grandchildren. This is a second marriage for them both, so they have five stepchildren between them. At the same time as the prognosis, Dave’s daughter, after twelve long years of trying to get pregnant, finally had a beautiful baby boy, Coen. Six months left to live was not enough time. Dave said, “I have eight other grandkids who have all ridden around in this wheelchair.” He wanted to be around for Coen, too. He was given six months to live about eighteen months ago.

Dave stayed in the hospital for four months, and had to lie in bed at home for two to three months, far from the two-year recovery the doctor had set out. “Then a couple times a week I’d go to the recording studio. But I’ve lost a lot of independence because I’ve got this wound-vac hanging off the wheelchair.”

“I just can’t be lying around. I’ve got to be doing something. People have me producing records for them and I love that. To lie around for another year—I just can’t do it.”

“QuadRocker” is spelled out on the corner of his computer screen. It’s his username and identifies the life he’s carved out as a quadriplegic and a rock musician. It didn’t happen in a day, however.

Why Me?

At first he was pretty angry with God when the accident happened. “I had this mentality of ‘Why me, why me, why me? Why is this happening to me?’ And one day, I began to realize what I really meant was, ‘Why not YOU?’” (He looked me right in the eye until I had to look away.) “I could be OK if you were the quad and I was the one coming to comfort you. How did I end up being the one everyone comes to? Why not you? It was not very nice,” he added,
“…a bit arrogant.”

He also tried to negotiate with the Creator of the universe. To describe that conversation, he looked up and called out, “Lord, if you’ll just heal me, make me get up and walk again, I’ll serve you forever!”

But God only offered him, “How about you just serve Me forever?”

He went on to summarize, “So me and the Lord had a kind of come-to-Jesus meeting, and I realized I wasn’t going to get my way. It was me who had to come to Jesus!”

Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do!

During his rehabilitation, he was frustrated that nurses and therapists would show him and the other quadriplegics how to do things, but no one showed them how to be independent. “So I started doing all sorts of things they told us we couldn’t do, starting with my shoes. ‘Get Velcro or get over it,’ we were told. That made me so mad!” Dave wanted shoes with shoelaces, and he wanted them tied tight and perfectly. He wanted each lace to be the same length, each shoe matching. So he worked and worked; three months later he was tying his shoes. The therapists were dumbfounded—“That’s not possible!” they told him.

He’s been knocking down impossibilities ever since. “It just makes me so mad when people tell me I can’t do stuff! Even to this day I never get Velcro. I still tie my shoes. It might take longer, but not much.” With the use of just a few muscles in each arm and no hand-function he dresses himself, drives a van, and earns a living through rental properties and a music studio.

He’s one of only a few quadriplegic guitarists in the world—perhaps the only rock music one. He plays with “Archer,” a Pacific Northwest rock band. On a wall in his studio, twenty-six guitars are displayed as art pieces, but he can play each one by placing it in a special stand that he designed, and using a unique technique he developed. He’s also a singer, songwriter, and producer. He loves helping people with “less-abilities,” and he volunteers with a financial counseling ministry.

In 2000 he married Carolyn only six months after they met. Ninety-seven percent of marriages don’t survive a spinal cord injury, but Carolyn walked into their marriage eyes-wide-open after his accident, saying, “I care more about your faith and who you are than I care about if you can walk.”

Disabled Less-abled

Once, when Dave was visiting people in rehab, he met a woman who’d gone from Coeur d’Alene to California to visit her grandchildren. She took them swimming and bumped her head at the end of the pool, which broke her neck. “I rolled into her room to visit her, and all she could do was move her eyes. As I sat and talked to her, I realized she would have done anything to have the little bit of function I have. That really got to me. To her I wasn’t even disabled.”

From that day on, Dave refused to use the word “disabled.” “I’ve changed it to ‘less-abled.’ Meeting her was really life-changing for me—to realize that there are people who wish they had what I have. I thought, ‘Dave, you need to zip it. You can drive, you have income, you got married, you can dress yourself... Lord, maybe I need to rethink things.’”

Something happened over the next year that Dave claims was an “angels-from-heaven miracle.” He went on to say, “I’m not so sure I ever believed stuff like that really happened. Do you?”

“If God came to you and said—‘I’ve got a plan to save a lot of people for all eternity, but sadly it means you’ll never walk again; but the plan’s good! Trust Me!’—how many people are worth it for you to do it? 1,000? 100? Yea, sign me up, break my neck,” he said with a touch of sarcasm. “For me, I’d never do it. But for the person who was saved for all eternity—it’d be worth it for just one. So I felt like one was really the most important number.”

Are You the One?

Two years after the accident, he ended up back in the hospital with a pressure sore, immobile for three months. “I’d tasted some independence and it was really awful. I believed with all my heart that if God wanted to heal me, He could. But, I reasoned, maybe I’m here for a purpose. Maybe there’s someone I can influence, and then God will heal me and I can go home.”

“But,” he said with a laugh, “knowing me, I’m just stupid enough that that one person could walk right up to me and say ‘I’m the one,’ and I’d miss it! So I called a friend of mine and asked him to make me a sign on textured paper and frame it. It sat on my bedstand every day with the question in big letters: ‘ARE YOU THE ONE?’”

“Every doctor, nurse, dietician, therapist, or guest saw it when they walked in. They’d say, ‘Am I the one what?’” Dave would tell them he figured God had him there to talk to somebody. Once he did, he could go home—and he really wanted to go home. “That silly sign started more conversations than I’ve ever had in my life.”

“We laughed about it at first but it went on for three months,” he said. After the hospital stay, Medicare allowed for fourteen days at a rehabilitation center. He took his sign with him because he still hadn’t found “the one.” Scheduled to go home on a Friday morning, the countdown was on. On Wednesday night of the week he was supposed to leave, the church elders came in and prayed for him. Afterwards a paraplegic teenage girl rolled into his room with her wheelchair. She was very quiet and never talked to anyone, except to say “hi” to him. This time, though, she asked what the church elders had been doing. She wondered about prayer, and as Dave explained a relationship with God, she said, “I want that.”

Dave’s voice caught and he said, “Forgive me; I have a hard time telling this story.” She was “the one” who God wanted him to meet. Dave helped her pray to receive Christ, and then she wanted to know what was next in her new life. He explained that she could find a church once she got home, and she could get baptized. But as they both noticed the large tub with a gurney for paralyzed people right across the hall, she asked Dave to baptize her right there. When he began to realize how complicated it’d be for her to be baptized by immersion in a local church without a gurney, Dave went from a “maybe” to he’d “love to!”

Later, when the hospital chaplain came by on her rounds, Dave told her what they’d planned. She was far from pleased or excited, but agreed to think about it. At 11:30 p.m. she returned and expressed serious concerns.

On Thursday morning, during Dave’s last therapy session, his name was called over the loudspeaker to go to the administrator’s office. The chaplain and the administrator scolded him for suggesting the baptism. Because of the girl’s unique situation it would be impossible. “Mr. Sims, sixteen people need to sign off on this, and half of them are out of state. It’s not going to happen.”

Dave was shocked. All he could say was, “When we get to heaven, I’m glad I can say it wasn’t me who stopped her from being baptized.” He rolled his wheelchair back to his room and got ready to leave the next morning at 9:00.

Very late that evening his doctor came to visit. “Dave, would you like to stay another day?” she asked. His insurance coverage had run out, fourteen days was the maximum per year. However, something unusual had happened at the staff’s out-take evaluation meeting for him. Citing his helpfulness in visiting and encouraging other patients, the entire staff agreed to give him one more day—free of charge! That included hospital charges, meals, doctors, therapists, nursing, wound care, etc… everything would be free. He wondered, “Hmmm, what is going on here?”

The next morning, instead of going home, he was back in physical therapy. Once again his name was called over the loudspeaker. “Dave Sims, please go to the administrator’s office.” Anticipating another scolding, he rolled in, closed the door and faced a repeat of the day before. But this time he was told, “We understand you are staying here one more night. If you’d like to baptize that girl, you can. We can’t explain it, but all sixteen people called in yesterday and signed off on it!”

“So,” Dave said, “when people tell me there are no miracles, I don’t believe it. I got to be a part of a miracle. Her home was over 100 miles away and she was a minor. So the sixteen people that had to come together—including her birth parents who were hard to reach, her caretakers, the hospital CEO who was back east—God brought them together to sign for her. Plus an extra day of rehab for me—free! And over fifty people gathered around to see her get baptized. After that happened, I went home and realized this wheelchair isn’t a prison, it’s a blessing. I expect to see her in heaven.”

The Grand Adventure

“Everything else is really cool, but things that are eternal are much more important. Now I realize it’s all about surrender. Just do things God’s way, and then you can look at life like a grand adventure. Then you don’t just sit around. That’s not to belittle anyone’s hardship; if people don’t have it as bad as me, I realize that their situation may still be a terrible hardship for them.”

“Instead, I want to use what I’ve got. I want to do what I can do. I don’t give two seconds of thought about walking again. I really don’t care—there’s nothing I can do about it. Jesus could heal me—although He’s evidently not doing it here. But there are no golden wheelchairs in heaven, so I think I’ll leave my chair behind. It’s been my salvation though, not my prison.”

“I’m Dying, How Are You?”

“I heard about a man on his deathbed, a member of our church years ago. Our pastor, Jim Putman, went to visit, found him smiling ear to ear, ministering to the other patients and even the staff. When asked how he was, the man said, ‘I’m dying, how are you?’ And I went ‘Wow, we’re all dying from the day we were born!’”

“I love working with kids because they’re so honest, but adults are worried about political correctness. So when someone comes up to me, puts on my mom’s voice, and asks a very concerned, ‘How are you?’ I sometimes say, ‘I’m dying, how are you?’ That usually breaks the ice and loosens them up a bit.”

Do you have some ice to break and loosen up in your conversations? Does whatever imprisons you need to be transformed into a blessing? Why not close this magazine right now? Go have some porch time, or shop talk, book club, Bible study group, quilting circle, prayer meeting, or roll your wheelchair over to visit the person next door. Like Dave, just do what you can do. Ask questions like “Are you the one?” or “I’m dying, how are you?” Truly listen. Tell them what they are yearning to know about Jesus. Maybe you, too, will find “the one.” Maybe you, too, will be part of a miracle.

1) “With a little help from his friends,” interview by Devin Weeks, Coeur d’Alene Press. February 23, 2020 | www.cdapress.com/news/2020/feb/23/with-a-little-help-from-his-friends-5/