Testimony of Healing January 23, 1995 Issue

During World War II, I was an infantryman in the British Eighth...

John David Wilson

During World War II, I was an infantryman in the British Eighth Army, in the North African desert campaign. My company had been out on an armored patrol for a few days, and I was driving a radio truck. Normally we would scatter left and right when under aircraft attack, but as one dive bomber attacked, I waited for his bomb release and then moved. I watched several bombs drop—one, two, three—and accidentally swung the truck off the road right into the path of the fourth bomb. This blew up my truck, with me in it. When the smoke cleared, I was in a twenty foot crater—alive, but very severely wounded.

Now, the only mental preparation I had had for this was the reading of a copy of Science and Health that my mother had given me when I left home. I'd found time to study this book on the troopship traveling to Africa, and had gained a glimmer of understanding about the spiritual nature of all things. Parts of Science and Health (such as "the scientific statement of being") and the ninety-first Psalm from the Bible were uppermost in my thoughts. I was calm, even though my leg was shattered.

As I crawled out of this crater, I felt I was in God's care. I lay there for a long time, surrounded by my fellow drivers, whom I remember talking to. It was not until the next day that an ambulance picked me up, but I did not lose consciousness; and, maintaining a clear sense of God's presence, I had no pain. I remember the journey back in the ambulance, over the rocky desert. I had no anesthetic, but rather a peaceful sense of God's love.

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