Our Guest Jim Maxim
JIM: He said, “We got you into the ambulance and by the time we was pulling you out of the car at the hospital, my partner looked at me and said, forget it, it’s too late, he’s dead.” I don’t remember this, but they said, I looked at him and said, “No, I’m still with you.” So they got me to the emergency room and they couldn’t find a plastic surgeon at 2:00 in the morning. So they just got this intern who started pulling shards of glass out of my eyes and my face. They called my mother. You can imagine a mother getting a phone call at 1:30, 2:00 in the morning. And they said, “Mrs. Max, your son Jim’s been in an accident.” And she said, “Well, can I come down in the morning?” And they, she said, for her, this was nothing new. I had just got out jail for minor stuff. And between my brothers and myself, well, this was nothing new.
SID: Not only was your father an alcoholic, but your brothers, some of them were alcoholics.
JIM: Yeah. Yes. Sid, five out of eight of us eventually became alcoholics. It just ran in our family. And so my mother jumped in the car by herself and she got to the hospital and they said, “Ma’am, your son at this point has fallen into a coma, with the amount of glass in his left eye. We just don’t know if he’ll ever see again out of it. He has a cut across the top of his skull it’s very deep. The possibility of brain damage is very real. His jaw was a compound fracture, literally came through his skin and the intern is in there now pulling shards of glass out of his eyes.” And so, they said, “Ma’am, there’s not much you can do now. You may as well come back in the morning.”
JIM: So Sid, my mother used to tell me, “Jimmy, when I got in the car, Satan was relentless with me that night. The enemy of my soul just continued to hammer me and hammer me by saying to me, ‘Where’s his God of yours now, Isabelle? This all powerful Jesus Christ you claim to serve. Where’s he at, Isabelle? Tell me about him. Look at your husband, look at Jack, look at Jim. Tell me about it, Isabelle. Where’s he at when you need him the most?'” So you can imagine the discouragement and the fear, the doubt, the unbelief that Satan was trying to throw upon her.
JIM: Sid she told me that when she got home, she just fell on her knees next to her bed, where we had heard her cry out so often before God, for us. Sid she told me she just started crying “Jesus, please don’t let him be blind. Jesus, please when’s it going to end. Jesus, please. When are you going to do something?” You can imagine a mother’s cry. But Sid it was then she told me that the Holy Spirit came alongside of her and said, “Isabelle, that’s enough now, Isabelle, that’s enough. Let’s begin to praise God, Isabel, because He’s holy and He’s worthy. Isabel, praise God.” So as hard as that is, Sid, in the midst of a crisis like that, my mother said, “Jimmy, I broke out in praise. I broke out in worship, an adoration to my God. I started to see the scriptures in, like a movie screen, in front of me. The Holy Spirit was putting in front of me to quote back to God that He is holy. That He’s righteous. That He’s true, that He can do anything.” And she just began to worship and worship Him.
