We Can Love Each Other Through The Storm

We can love each other through the storm.

I am so excited about today’s interview. I get to finally interview Mr. Joshua Christopher who was involved in an accident a few years ago with his fiancée and cousin.

Thank you for joining us today, can we meet you Sir?

My name is Joshua Christopher. I am a published author, an emotional intelligence coach, an inspirational speaker and the CEO of king and Jules. I am married to my best friend Chisom .S. Christopher.

Thank you for the brief introduction, and for accepting to do this. You were in an accident a few years ago, can you tell us about it?

Yes! I was involved in a car accident on 23 October 2016, I had just proposed to my fiancée.

We were involved in an accident on our way back from Jos to Abuja. Truth be told we kept telling the driver to calm down. I actually had a prediction that we were going to have an accident. I prayed about it and settled it with God. By the time we got to the motor park, we didn’t realize that the guy loading our stuff was actually the driver.

If we had realized much earlier we wouldn’t have taken the car because he looked pretty rough and unkempt. We paid for our seat, got in, and sat down.

There was this guy who came around to preach to the people on the bus, after some minutes he got angry that no one was listening to him and he went back to his seat.

I told my fiancée that I wanted us to sow a seed into his ministry and she agreed.

Before we left the driver had already brushed another car with his side mirror, we asked him to be patient and to drive carefully but he didn’t listen.

At the moment it happened, the driver was trying to overtake a truck and there was another truck coming on the other lane, he was running 120/140 there about, in the process of trying to get back to his lane, the car picked up, and we somersaulted a multiple times.

My cousin was flung out of the vehicle before the car could stop somersaulting, she had a femur fracture, my Fiancée had a pelvic fracture and I had a spinal cord injury. They had to bring us out of the car, my Fiancée tried to push me, but she had a voice say, if you love him you won’t push him.

Waging War Against Forgiveness

I tried moving but I couldn’t, it was obvious I had a spinal cord injury, I thought about it and agreed it was going to be fine, at the end I will just be a fine boy on the wheels.

By the time they brought us out I had difficulty in breathing, I started speaking in tongues and I felt a little better. My wife and cousin were in serious pain, I kept trying to encourage them through the journey to the hospital. I wasn’t feeling my body, I was incapacitated from my chest down.

We were taken to the hospital, everyone on the bus aside the three of us was fine. By the time we got to the hospital they were no doctors, the doctors were on strike, it took about seven hours for them to finally attend to us, and that was when we were given paracetamol injection.

We had to call my friend and fiancées dad to come check on us, by morning we were in an ambulance to the national hospital where we started treatment. By the time we got there, our families were already waiting for us. We were taken straight into the trauma center. I thought I was in ER the movie or Grace anatomy, the whole science was fresh. LOL

They took care of my Fiancée and cousin, I had a surgery around my spinal area, my wife was the first person to leave the hospital. I was there for a month, we went from ICU to the ward.

I was picking up and responding to treatment at home, I was slightly able to move my fingers, but by the time I got home, I started running temperature. When the doctor came to check on me they found out that the bedsores were awful, the surface was kind of try but it was rotten underneath.

By the time they debrided the wound in the hospital, they found out I was seven centimeters deep, five centimeters wide and seven centimeters long and the bedsore was at my anal area. It was a battle we had to go through for another eight months.

The Holy Spirit told me it wasn’t an accident, and it changed my whole perspective about everything. At no point did I feel bad or dejected.

That’s how I kept moving on! We had to treat bedsore for six to eight-months and normally bedsores don’t heal fast.

Wow… I didn’t imagine the accident to be this big. You look so strong and perfect in your own way. Did you ever get to that point where you felt neglected and abandoned by God, did you get to ask why it happened to you?

Every time as Christians we always ask God why he allows certain things to happen to us. But if not you, who else. It happened to me because I had the capacity to bear it!

The truth is we never realize that what we go through in life is a spring ball to what God is taking us through.

Yes it might look like God is abandoning you, it might look like you are going through pain and struggle. But In pain we find God speaking to us the most. For me, at no point did I feel neglected or abandoned.

When God told me this wasn’t an accident but a process. I stopped seeing the problem and started seeing God in it!

It was just a moment that I felt God needed to get my attention, it looks or sounds funny, but God is a very jealous God. And He will use anything to get your attention. But we don’t realize that God knows the end from the beginning. The Bible says He will never give us more than we can bear, He knows that we can go through it and come out strong…

I wrote in my book, never let your condition determine your position. At no time should we feel that what we are going through can change our perspective of who God is. He is God and He never changes. The question we are supposed to be asking is,

”Lord what are you trying to teach me that I am not paying attention to.”

Our solitude time is the time we are supposed to communicate with God the most, but we are most times distracted by pain that we don’t listen to what God is trying to say to us!

There is so much to learn in the place of quietness, but we make our pain look bigger than God!

We lose more when we focus on our discomfort; pain makes us overwhelmed, and we incline to struggle with almost everything; the health challenge, the discomfort, the finance.

I still don’t know where the bills we had to pay in the hospital came from, but God provided. I wasn’t bothered about where the money would come from, when the bedsore was going to end.

An Undeserving Miracle

We joked about everything, we made friends with the Doctors, nurses, student-doctors and even the cleaners. People came around to talk to me and my wife, and that was when I started writing my book. It was in the hospital God taught me about love, and how to overcome challenges.

You don’t stay strong because you have the capacity to stay strong, you stay strong because you depend on God to stay strong

Joshua Christopher

It’s in our weakness we find strength, it is not in our strength we find strength. We are to look up to God in any challenge.

Did the accident change how you perceived the surrounding people? Were you ever afraid that your fiancée was going to leave you?

Yes it did…

It made me start appreciating people. What we don’t honor can not bless us, what we don’t recognize can not bless us.

I haven’t been able to fully move my body the way I want to. At every point in time I started appreciating my body, what God has done and the people He created. Sometimes if I want to move one part of my body, the other part ends up moving.

I learned how to appreciate moving a finger, how to go to the toilet, how to stand up from the bed to take a walk, we take a lot of things for granted, we take the blessings of God for granted, we take life for granted.

And this is it, the importance of life is in the value we place on ourselves, so when you don’t value yourself you can’t value someone else, when you don’t value what God has given you, you can’t value what God has put on another person.

I started thanking God for my hair, my mouth, my fingers, to the ability to stand up and walk.

The whole back is an amazing work of God. I am not the kind of person that likes depending on people for things, but right now I have been humbled to the point of depending on people for almost everything.

When I am being taken care of I’m grateful and when I’m not I still appreciate it. I have learned how to treat people better, the measure to which people serve is amazing no matter how little it is.

About my fiancee leaving me, at the time we were just the best of friends. Chisom loves God to her bones and she will do anything as long as God gives her the strength to.

We started as just friends, it wasn’t about beauty, we were just people who loved each other.

It was while in the hospital that we fell in love the way everyone talks about love. It was a phase that we went through together. We were not even thinking of marriage and all, it was, later on, we started talking about it. We prayed about it, and we took that bold step, God gave us a word.

Did I ever feel she was going to leave me? It never crossed my mind, she was there for the moment God needed her to be there in my life, she was available and God used her to be there for me.

She was also just recovering from her three-months bed rest and also had to take care of me, in that period she lost her mother to breast cancer, it was double tragedy for us, but we fought through the storm.

Were you bothered or should I say did it make sense to you that she agreed to marry you without knowing if you could walk again?

The truth is when you know God for yourself and you hear God for yourself it saves you from a lot of things. Why am I saying this? A lot of people go into relationships without hearing God first.

When things start to go wrong you are able to go back to God who gives you the assurance of where he is taking you to. Was I scared of her leaving at any point? Those things didn’t cross my mind. At some points, yes… she would tell me how tired she was, it wasn’t easy. In a way, I felt she lost her feminine side trying to be there for me, but it wasn’t just her but the grace of God that kept her through the period.

Remove The Spec In Your Eyes

I honor the beauty God has given me, we had days I couldn’t poop, and she had to put her hand in to bring it out, days I fell, and she had to muscle her strength to lift me up, her human strength has failed, but she held unto her will to do certain things for me. It was just a lot she had to go through, but I thank God for her. She couldn’t do anything for years, she couldn’t work for four years just to make sure I am okay.

If you were to go back in time, what would you change about your life right now?

If there is anything I want to change, it would be the ability to hear God per time, I have learned how to hear him per time now. There is really nothing to change, God is aware of everything and there is perfect timing for everything. I’m enjoying the process, growing in it, and learning what he wants me to learn from it.

In your videos we see that you’re taking baby steps, how do you feel about being able to stand, and the hope of walking again?

Well, each day has its own excitement, it brings its own hope, when you know you couldn’t do something before, and you try to them, you get to see the efforts you are making, and it makes you believe more. I don’t look like someone who is in a wheelchair, my legs aren’t thin, my physique is fine.

I have learned from the Holy Spirit to never let my condition determine my position, when I wake up every morning I do everything in my power to be normal. When people see my wife and me, they think we are always balling! We have learned over time to be patient; I try to do things on my own, to stand to squat, to do a lot of exercises to keep my body in shape. This is how far we have come, loving each other through every storm!

WOW. Thank you for taking out time to share your beautiful story with us. God bless you!

Download Mr. Joshua Christopher’s first book Here

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I will be uploading another beautiful post written by Mr. Joshua Christopher tomorrow, stay connected!

Love, Lima❤️