By Aloma Arias –
His parents were on the other side of a curtain, ready to identify their son, killed by a 45 caliber bullet that penetrated his cheek and ricocheted around inside his head. Andrew Anderson’s body was inside of a body bag.
Then Drew woke up. Nurses freaked. He experienced 31 seizures that restarted his brain and heart.
“People start panicking, like not knowing what the heck is happening,” Drew says on a Delafe video. It was the grist of a grisly horror movie, the rise of an unkillable zombie.
Except that it was Jesus.
“My parents expected to see their son dead, and before that curtain got moved back for them to identify me, I actually came back,” Drew says.
Andrew Anderson was adopted in South Korea by parents in the U.S. Air Force. His birth mother had dropped the baby off at a fire station – an unwanted pregnancy rejection that hounded Drew throughout his life.
Because he was a military brat always moving, he could never make lasting friends. Whenever he was starting to establish a relationship, they moved. So he stopped trying. The pain of loneliness was preferable to the pain of losing new friends, he decided at age 10.
At length, his parents retired from the Air Force and landed in San Antonio, Texas. Drew was ecstatic. Finally, he could make friends. Unfortunately, he fell in with the wrong group of friends.
At the same time, he rebelled against his parents. The years of deprivation and his anxiety about his own identity as a kid who didn’t look like his parents and who was bullied at school had done their damage. He started demanding things like an entitled brat, and when his parents didn’t give them to him, he justified fighting against them.
He got into crime and vice. When he wound up in jail, his friends hashtagged their posts #FreeAndrew. He felt like he belonged.
One day in 2010 he was hit by an apparently drunk driver. When the SUV came to a stop, Drew was on the hood. He figured he would stop. He didn’t. He backed up, causing Drew to fall off the hood. He then drove straight over him.
At Brooke Army Medical Center at Ft. Sam Houston, the prognosis was appalling: he would never walk again.
One day he woke and had to use the bathroom. So he got up and walked to the bathroom. Nurses ran in.
“What are you doing?” they said.
“I had to use the bathroom,” he replied, still not thinking that what he had done was not, according to doctors, ever going to be possible.
It was a miracle, but Drew didn’t know God yet. When he walked out of the hospital, he thought he was some sort of superhero: invincible and regenerating. He went straight back to his sin.
He got a good job that gave him housing. One night, a noise awakened him. When he got up to check it out, he saw a home invader in his home. He bum-rushed him. What he didn’t know was there was more than one. From behind the couch, one guy fired off a 45-caliber handgun.
The bullet pierced his cheek. “The bullet ended up bouncing around in my head” before exiting behind his right ear, he says.
“Death was the diagnosis,” he says.
His parents were called to identify the body. His face was badly mangled. His body was in the body bag.
While his parents were behind the curtain waiting for the body bag to be opened, Andrew started having seizures. They’re called breakthrough seizures, and they jump-started his heart and brain.
He came back to life.
“My dad was waiting on the other side of a wall preparing to look at his son dead and instead he hears people start freaking out, panicking like what the heck is happening?” Drew relates. “Then they were telling him your son just came back. He had to go through the opposite shock instead of radical grief to insane joy.”
It was a nurse who was responsible for ushering Drew into the kingdom.
“Baby, God has a plan for you,” she told him. His case was impossible. God was whom she credited.
At the time, Drew wasn’t open to the Gospel. His mom had taken him to the Catholic Church, where robes and alien liturgy only turned him off.
He wanted to tell the nurse to shut up. But his mouth was wired shut – for a month. He had to endure her constant talk about Jesus.
By the end, he had grown affectionate of her, so when she asked him to go to church upon his discharge, he thought it was the least he could do to honor her.
The plan was simple: sit in the back and dip as soon as possible.
Worship was a shock; it was different from what they had in the Catholic church.
The non-denominational church did something unusual; it had an altar call in the middle of the singing. Drew, who didn’t know anything about what is supposed to be done in a church service, followed people up.
But when the pastor laid hands on people praying for them and they fell down under the power of the Holy Spirit, Drew’s eyes opened wide. “Yo,” he thought, “like maybe I shouldn’t have come up here.”
Then the pastor came to him. When he extended his hand to pray for him, Drew dodged him quick. “I Matrixed him,” he quips.
The pastor was startled. But then he looked piercingly at Drew and uttered a prophecy. “God has a plan for you,” he said.
They were the very same words that the nurse had uttered. That got his attention.
So Drew came back to church. He accepted Jesus.
“This whole time while I thought I was unwanted, there was somebody willing to pay such a high price just to have fellowship with me blew me away,” Drew says.
