Oh how I relish my morning coffee, and it was while I was into my third cup this morning—that I stumbled upon a video that made my heart pause mid-beat. There he was, Dr. Jonathon Blake from Pennsylvania. A firm atheist, logical to the point of clinical coldness, the kind who believes that the universe is just atoms swirling with no sense of humour or divine intent.
Dr. Blake was in India on a conference circuit in Nagaland, and had to catch Air-India flight 171 to London for another conference.
But fate—or should I say, God—had other plans.
As he was getting ready to leave his hotel room a local woman cleaner entered, broom in hand momentarily lost in a religious broadcast playing on her phone. Dr Blake, irritated by the sound, couldn’t help but comment, “Do you believe in all that nonsense? Someone in the sky watching over you?”
But the cleaning woman replied with a boldness that startled him, ‘The fool says in his heart there is no God, Psalm fourteen verse one”
He scoffed. She continued talking about her God.
But as things would have it, the delay caused by that brief argument meant he missed the train that would take him to Ahmedabad, and by the time he reached the airport taking another train the counter had closed. He pleaded and wept at the counter.
But as we all know, that flight never made it.
It went down.
And left Dr. Jonathon Blake, who was standing shocked in the terminal, watching the TV screens—speechless.
Now here’s where the story should begin. You see, surviving such a moment isn’t just about luck. It’s a whisper from heaven. A note from above saying: “You have work to do.”
Dr. Blake, in the video, even while processing everything, remembers the gentle voice of that cleaner who told him as he rushed for his cab, “I pray that God will give you a sign that this discussion was for a reason.”
And what a sign it was.
My dear survivor—yes, you—reading this, sitting with your scars of that near-miss on the highway, or that tumour they said was too far gone, or that night your heart pounded like a war drum but calmed just in time… you’ve all seen the sign in your life, but what are you doing with your second chance?
We walk away from the jaws of death, sometimes limping, sometimes dazed, quite often, indifferent. But do you realise that it’s so you can start living for something—no, Someone—bigger?
You who survive, survive for a reason.
Not to build bigger houses or earn fatter paychecks.
But to serve. To give. To love. To tell others with every breath of yours, about the wonderful One above? That cleaning woman was doing just that. Broom in her hand and a bold testimony in her voice!
What are you doing, yes, you who survived?