February 8 - Richard Brady

In 1979 at the age of 19, I had an alteration with my brother. We had a fist fight, and I got the best of him. My brother left the room, and I was staring out our bedroom window. We live together in the same room.

Very deceitfully and quietly he came in the room and plunged a knife into my back and left it there. I blurted out, thinking that he had punched me, as I turned around and my father entered the room to ask what happened? I saw the knife in my back by a mirror that was hanging on the wall. It was a stainless steel steak knife in my back down to the handle. Afterwards, my father and I got into the car and proceeded to the hospital only five minutes away.

My dad, a Law abiding citizen was waiting at the red light on Nostrand Avenue and Kings Highway. It was there that I literally cried out to Jesus that I would live and not die, and then I told my dad he had to go through the light and get me to the hospital. I was afraid I was dying. As I entered the hospital, they immediately took me for X-rays. They were not too sure what to do because they told me the knife was one eighth of an inch from my heart.

After contemplating my condition, they decided to take me up to surgery and somehow open my chest cavity and somehow take the knife out through the front. As they were wheeling me to the elevator, there was a surgeon about 60 feet away who asked them where they were taking me. They explained the situation, and he had walked towards me. After seeing the knife and X-rays he ask me to stand and do one more. I didn't want to. I was in pain, but afterwards I agreed. He asked me to raise my arms a little further higher than I had previously done to take another x-ray.

The next thing I know he gives me a few instructions. He puts a board in front of me and tells me they're going to flip me on my stomach and he is going to put a rubber mallet in my mouth and on the count of three I was to bite down as hard as I can. The knife was pulled out of my back with the same trajectory that it went in. I was in ICU for three days and on the third day I signed myself out. The doctor told me that the wound would heal from the inside out.

Before I left, he had a curious question for me. When they pulled the knife out, they told me that it was bent. It had curvature to it. I told him, well I like to exercise; I like to work out and it probably hit a muscle and bent. They told me no, it just went through tissue. We did not have the answers at that time. In God's mercy and grace towards me, I still was a rebellious young man on my own path to destruction.

Sixteen years later, I was in a federal prison for thirteen years and I gave my life to the Lord in 1996. Now as an evangelist, I was witnessing to some others in the prison, and I was telling them about how I lived a rebellious life, and how I had got into a fight with my brother and I was stabbed in the back. And I was rehearsing the part in the hospital with the doctors and how the doctor sat me down and had a curious question for me. And I was telling them about how there was really no answer to the bent knife and I remember as I was speaking to them about that part, I heard so clearly from within my heart, the Lord had told me, "that was my hand that stopped the knife." Right there and then, I told them what I heard that it was Jesus who stop the knife and gave me life. It was Jesus who healed me from the inside out. They all titled the sermon, Who stopped the knife?