I was very inquisitive as a child and was fascinated by everything that had to do with nature in the broadest sense.  I always wanted to know how things worked and was enthusiastic about all technical connections. What seemed interesting to my peers was boring to me. I increasingly lived in my own cosmos, which was shaped by the natural sciences and mathematics. It was therefore obvious that I would later decide to study electrical engineering.

My enthusiasm for everything technical/rational meant that I became a confirmed atheist. I was absolutely convinced that God or the Bible were only for people who had a problem with logical thinking. I made fun of those people who believed in God because for me science seemed to have answers to all questions.

As a student I had a friend whose parents owned two houses which they heated with wood. Every few years, therefore, a large amount of wood was cut for this purpose. But when wood was needed again, my friend's parents were ill and so I helped with the work in the forest: cutting down trees for weeks, transporting them away and splitting the wood. Thick and wet tree trunks were particularly difficult to split, so I had the idea of using explosives to help. I hoped it would make our work easier.

I was just 24 years old at the time and had also enthusiastically studied chemistry as part of my training. So I knew a lot about explosives in theory. This idea was a challenge for me to test whether my theoretical knowledge could be put into practice. So I made my own explosives in the laboratory, which I then attached to a thick tree. However, during the preparation for ignition, I made a momentous mistake due to lack of experience and the explosive blew up right in front of me.

My friend immediately transported me to the nearby clinic in Mannheim. I had survived, but looked terrible, covered in blood from top to bottom, my body peppered with countless splinters of wood. A splinter had gone through my right eye and destroyed it completely, my left eye was riddled with many small splinters. Both eardrums were shredded and the inner ear bones were hanging out.

When I woke up from the coma three days later, I noticed that I was blind. I registered that I could no longer hear anything either, except for a permanent unbearable whistling. Panic began to spread inside me. I realised that I had ruined my whole life through this unspeakable stupidity. I became aware that I had become completely helpless, unable to communicate with other people: I could not see, read or write anything, nor could I understand anything anyone might say to me. I also became aware that I no longer even had the option of ending my life. It was horrible.

Suddenly the memory came to me of having heard from Christians that you should turn to Jesus when you are in need. In my desperation and panic, I did something I had never done before. I cried out inwardly to God. "God, forgive me! If you exist, let me see again and let me hear again. I promise I will follow you then, whatever that means!"

God heard me, something I had never thought possible before. From that day on my condition began to improve, I could first see shadows and again began to hear, at first indistinctly, then better and better. By the fourteenth day of my hospital stay, both my vision and hearing were 100% restored.

I had never been a patient in a hospital before and was not surprised that 10 to 15 doctors came to see me several times a day for rounds, I thought this was common in a hospital. In reality, my incipient healing was a medically unexplainable phenomenon that all these doctors wanted to see. 

On the day I was discharged, the doctor who had been primarily responsible for operating on me came to me, closed the door and told me the following: Because of the dramatic injuries I had suffered, from a medical point of view there was less than a 3% chance that I would ever be able to tell light from dark. The probability of ever being able to hear anything again was also extremely low, less than 5%. The nerves had been severed by the blast, which was considered a completely inoperable injury. He told me that he did not have the slightest explanation as to why I had regained all my sight and hearing.

I then told him about my desperate prayer to God. He looked at me for a long time and finally said that maybe he could understand the healing now. He would have known that there are things between heaven and earth that cannot be explained. But for a miracle to have happened so obviously before his eyes, there could only be one reason: I must really have someone in heaven who likes me very, very much. I was then discharged from the clinic in Mannheim 14 days after the explosion as completely cured.

It was interesting how things progressed from there.

Suddenly I was no longer an atheist because I had experienced the work of God in an incredibly impressive way. From that point on, I wanted to do good for people and make the best of my life, but I had no idea how I could form a possible relationship with God. In addition, everyday life quickly caught up with me again. I had lost time due to my hospital stay and had just come home in the phase of semester exams. I really wanted to take these exams and so I was completely absorbed by my studies again sooner than I thought. The worries of everyday life contributed to me forgetting my God-given promise.

But God is faithful and has not forgotten my promise. He waited for me until the next good opportunity arose to work in my life.

I got a wonderful and challenging job at IBM after graduation. With two colleagues we had been able to develop things that were patented. I then travelled all over the world to establish these applications. My life was varied and exciting and I could have described it as ideal, had it not been for the constant nightmares. I could never mentally detach myself from the explosion, it haunted me every night.

As much as I enjoyed my job, the enormous workload I had to cope with came at the price of being close to burn-out after three years. My condition was recognised by management and I was removed from my exhausting job and transferred to another department. In this move, looking back, I see that God was involved. My new boss was a committed Christian and he started praying for me when I joined his department. At that time I knew nothing about his faith.

One day he gave me a tape cassette with a sober-sounding title: "Being a Christian - a cost / benefit consideration" and asked me to listen to it once.

At first I left this cassette unheeded for weeks and only wanted to listen to it briefly when I had to return it, in order to at least have an idea of what it would be about. What I didn't expect at all was that the content was not only compellingly logical to me, but also hit me straight in the heart. I was suddenly able to understand what God had done in my life, realised that I had broken my word to him and was able to understand my life from a whole new perspective. I could only ask God for forgiveness for my transgressions. I suddenly knew with great clarity that God had called to me a second time. I then consciously decided on that day to live with Jesus Christ.

On that day, an unbelievable path began for me together with Jesus, which I want to walk until I am allowed to meet him one day.

By the way, my daily nightmares were gone from that day on and never came back.

 

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