[Where, pray tell, is God’s protection for ducks?]

Author’s Near-Death Experience in Hunting Accident Inspires Book on Miracles

By Tyler O’Neil , CP Reporter

September 17, 2013|6:28 pm

Don Jacobson, a Christian publisher who nearly died from a hunting accident in 1980, shares how his miraculous survival inspired him to encourage others to tell their miracle stories.

Don Jacobson almost died in a hunting accident, but God saved and transformed his life through a series of miracles, he says, inspiring him to publish other Christians’ tales about God’s amazing deeds.

“I ended up shooting myself in the stomach with a 12-gauge shotgun,” Jacobson, creator of the forthcoming project and book It’s A God Thing: When Miracles Happen to Everyday People, and author of God Makes Lemonade: True Stories that Sweeten & Inspire, told the Christian Post in a recent interview. He said his own miraculous survival led him to try to open other people’s eyes to the miracles God performs every day.

Jacobson’s story goes back to 1980, when as a 24-year-old, he was working in construction. One day he had his shotgun fixed, but the gunsmith accidentally drove a screw into the barrel. When the young hunter used the barrel to shove his dog away from some ducks, the weapon exploded.

Shell-shocked, Jacobson slowly realized that he’d shot himself. “I prayed a very intelligent and quick prayer – God, I’m going to need some help on this one,” he told CP.

“My gun was laying in half. I yelled, I hollered, I shot SOS shots. Nobody came, so I tried to walk, but my leg wouldn’t move.” When his leg stayed put, he realized he’d damaged it, and the “unbelievable pain” in his chest alerted him to his critical condition.

Twelve BBs entered his right side, with one on his left entering his heart and lodging itself in his lung. “If a BB had come out, I’d have bled to death,” Jacobson said. He credits God that none did.

Noticing his absence, his wife Brenda became anxious, but had no idea where he was. At 11:30 pm, his brother told her Jacobson had asked him to go hunting, and they rushed to find him in the woods.

The rescue party got lost on the way to the lake, and so they ended up in a spot the hunter had never visited before. In this foreign territory, they saw a little glint in the woods, and found his car. They finally reached him, “right on the edge of hypothermia.”

Once they’d found him, Jacobson was very thirsty, and asked for a drink. A man offered a can of grape juice, which the construction worker could have easily opened normally, but no one there was able to open it under the circumstances. “That was God’s protection,” Jacobson explained, because it he’d have swallowed that juice he would likely have drowned.

The medical helicopter sent to pick him up almost turned around due to fog, but just as it was arriving at his location, the fog cleared. It returned once the copter had picked him up.

Jacobson remembered an orderly at the hospital telling him “you’re in luck.” A missionary doctor who gained experience healing gunshot wounds worked at that hospital one in every eight weekends, and he just happened to be working that day. A Christian also, the doctor attended Jacobson’s church, but the two had never met.

After a tense surgery, the doctor told Jacobson’s wife that her husband would never walk again. God had other plans.

After 28 days in the hospital, Jacobson’s life was completely altered. “That took away my ability to work in construction, so I went back to college and into publishing,” he explained.

“Many people will say the miracles in the Bible are silly,” he said. “Maybe they are, but let me tell you about something else that’s happened.”

Jacobson’s upcoming project It’s a God Thing chronicles the stories of approximately 45 different modern miracles – from stories of survival involving 9/11 and the Boston Bombing, to a daughter getting saved in a capsized canoe, to a father catching a baseball for his son. The book is scheduled for release in December.