The 700 Club with Pat Robertson


"Angels Catched Me"

By Daniel Reany
The 700 Club Ethan Payne was a typical two year old.

His mother, Tammy Payne, said Ethan was happy, bouncing, and jumping around.

"Before he was even born, we knew his life was going to be special," Tammy said.

One day Ethan was playing with his sister in an upstairs bedroom. He fell against the window, pushed the screen out, and fell from the second story to the ground.

Tammy's daughter, Annie, ran downstairs yelling, "Mommy, Mommy!"

"We had bunkbeds in the room, so we thought – we assumed he had fallen off the top bunk," Tammy said.

Her daughter Annie said, “No he fell out of the window.”

"And I can remember running to the front door," Tammy said. "And I vividly still remember seeing my hand being on the doorknob crying out, 'Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!' because I knew this was going to be bad."

Ethan fell 12 feet onto the concrete driveway. They found him barely conscious and squirming around, and knew they had to keep him still.

"And we just held him and immediately he just started going to sleep," Tammy said.

Then Tammy remembered that just a few weeks earlier she had prayed over Ethan.

She "prayed the blood of Jesus over him," and prayed that he would fulfill the call on his life, and that the "angels of God would protect him throughout his whole life."

"So when I saw him laying in the driveway I believe that the Holy Spirit brought those things back to my remembrance," Tammy said.

They rushed Ethan to the hospital.

" Even in the hospital," Tammy said, "the enemy was telling me, 'He’ll never walk again. He’ll have brain damage. If his neck isn’t broken, or his back isn’t broken, he’ll be paralyzed for life, and you’ll be pushing him around in a wheelchair.'

"All those scenarios played out in your mind," Tammy said. "And then seeing everything happening at the hospital you start to realize how bad this really can be."

"He’d look at you but you knew he wasn’t home," his father, Monty Payne said.

"They ran CAT scans, x-rays, MRIs," Tammy said. "They had the c-collar, IVs, heart monitor, the full gamut, from head to toe he was covered in wires. And what they were doing is they were preparing for him to crash. They had everything in place waiting for him to redline, because that’s what they were expecting him to do."

"The doctors, they don’t give you very much hope when you’re talking to them," Monty said. "They’ll tell you the facts and what to expect next. We as believers need to declare what we’re going to see next."

Ethan had a life threatening concussion, and his brain was swelling. Doctors thought Ethan would either have brain damage or not survive at all. But his parents held on to their faith.

"We just declared that he would be healed and that the swelling would go down," Monty said.

"All those tests came back," Tammy said, "no brain damage, no broken bones, no spinal injury, and all those things got picked off one by one that the enemy was telling me, 'He’s going to be paralyzed. He’s going to have a broken neck. He’s going to be brain damaged.' And they (the doctors) just started ruling those out one by one."

Eventually Ethan's eyes refocused, and he was up talking, running around, laughing, and asking for Crayons.

"It was 3 o’clock in the morning and he was tearing the room up," Monty said. "He was a two-year-old. It looked like he had 12 cups of coffee in him."

"And the nurses were coming in saying, 'Where’s that little boy that fell out of the window?' And we said, 'This is Ethan. This is him.' And they said, 'No, no, no. The little boy that fell out of the window, the 12 foot.' And we said, 'This is him.' And they were amazed. Other doctors who were on staff there were coming in and they were saying, 'This is the little boy that fell out of the window.' So it was clear to them that this is something that just doesn’t happen. This was a miracle even in their eyes."

Today Ethan is a bouncing and jumping four year old. After falling from that second story window, he didn’t even spend a full night in the hospital.

"We know Jesus still does miracles today, because our son is still here with us," Tammy said.

Ethan doesn’t have any memory of the accident or the time he spent at the hospital. But he does have a simple explanation of what happened to him after he fell from the window.

"The angels catched me," Ethan said.

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