On October 20, 2006, a fifty-three-year-old auto mechanic named Jeff Markin walked into the emergency room at Palm Beach Gardens Hospital in Florida, then collapsed from a heart attack. For forty minutes, emergency room personnel frantically labored to revive him, shocking him seven times with the defibrillator, but he was unresponsive.
Finally, the supervising cardiologist, Chauncey Crandall, a well-respected doctor and medical school professor, was brought in to examine the body. Markin's face, toes, and fingers had already turned black from the lack of oxygen. His pupils were dilated and fixed. There was no point in trying to resuscitate him. At 8:05 p.m., he was declared dead.
Crandall filled out the final report and turned to leave. But he quickly felt an extraordinary compulsion. "I sensed God was telling me to turn around and pray for the patient," he said later. This seemed foolish, so he tried to ignore it, only to receive a second — and even stronger — divine prompting.
A nurse was already disconnecting the intravenous fluids and sponging the body so it could be taken to the morgue. But Crandall began praying over the corpse: "Father, God, I cry out for the soul of this man. If he does not know you as his Lord and Savior, please raise him from the dead right now in Jesus' name."
Crandall told the emergency room doctor to use the paddle to shock the corpse one more time. The doctor protested: "I've shocked him again and again. He's dead." But he complied anyway, out of respect for his colleague.
Instantly, the monitor jumped from flat- line to a normal heartbeat of about seventy- five beats per minute with a healthy rhythm. "In my more than twenty years as a cardiologist, I have never seen a heartbeat restored so completely and suddenly," Crandall said.
Markin immediately began breathing without assistance, and the blackness receded from his face, toes, and fingers. The nurse panicked because she feared the patient would be permanently disabled from oxygen deprivation, yet he never displayed any signs of brain damage.1
Indeed, in light of the circumstances, natural explanations seem hollow and forced — and they can't account for the two mysterious urges that made Crandall turn in his tracks and pray for a victim who had already been declared dead. Absent those divine promptings, Jeff Markin would be in his grave today.
Can God still raise people from the dead? He can — and sometimes he does!
- A random, representative study of one thousand US adults completed this questionnaire. The sample error is +/- 3.1 percent points at the 95 percent confidence level. The response rate was 55 percent. The survey conducted as research for this book began in 2015.
- Based on 2016 US government estimate of the population over the age of eighteen at 249,454,440. See www.census.gov/quickfacts /fact/table/US/.
Excerpted with permission from The Miracles Answer Book by Lee Strobel, copyright Lee Strobel.
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