Month: March 2025

God Stories 3 – March 26, 2025

Let’s jump ahead about eleven years from last week’s Vietnam Story to something that happened to me and my friend John on the Rio Cobre Road between Kingston and Linstead Jamaica.

Jean and I had sold our business in 1975 after serving at Bible Way, the Jesus People Church in Richland, WA as volunteer staff for a couple of years. Our ministry supported a group of churches led by a Canadian missionary and based in Ewarton, St Catherine, Jamaica. Each year we sent teams from Bible Way to teach and serve in the Jamaican churches and to assist the missionaries.

Jean and I had made a two-week ministry visit to Jamaica in early 1977 to minister at an annual denominational convention and assist in several of the churches. Early the next year, the missionaries needed to make an extended trip back to Canada to take care of business and rest a bit, so Bible Way sent Jean and me to oversee the ministry in Jamaica for a month. Another couple from the church and the pastor and wife from one of our outreach churches accompanied us.

The second day after we arrived in Ewarton, after receiving some orientation and instruction on the work we would be doing for the next month, my friend John and I drove the missionaries to the airport in Kingston for their flight to Calgary and then headed back to the village.

We drove through downtown Kingston, an adventure in itself, then through Spanish Town and began making our way into the hills. For a few miles, we drove along the Rio Cobre, with a rock cliff on our left and the drop-off to the river on our right. Once we crossed Flat Bridge, the cliff would be on our right and the river on our left.

As we came around a blind curve (driving on the left in a left-hand drive car – always best to have a navigator to see what’s coming in the other lane), I saw a stalled country bus in the right hand lane right at the edge of the drop-off to the river. People were milling around the bus. Straight in front of me, in my lane, an overloaded dump truck was heading directly toward my car. We were trapped! The rock cliff on my left, the stalled bus on my right, and the front bumper and grill of the dump truck filling the view through the windshield, roaring toward me at full speed.

I think I yelled “Jesus!” (what else are you going to say?) and swerved the wheel toward the rocks on my left. Then suddenly, in my rearview mirror, I saw the rear of the dump truck roaring away from me in a cloud of diesel smoke, open road in front of me, and the stalled country bus with its crowd of passengers milling around several car lengths behind me. I quickly slowed for the sharp right turn onto Flat Bridge, crossed the river, and we made the remaining miles to Ewarton, mostly in silence, without incident.

For a tiny fraction of a second, a country bus, a dump truck, and the 1965 Plymouth Valiant I was driving all occupied the same piece of road between the cliff on one side and the river on the other side and there was no crash! One moment there was a loaded dump truck coming straight at me in my lane, with a stalled bus on one side and rock cliff on the other. The next instant I was seeing the back of the dump truck in my rear view mirror!

We finished our month of service to this group of churches in rural Jamaica, a month that included teaching and preaching, dedications and funerals, learning about a culture other than our own, and forming deep relationships that have lasted a lifetime. Then we traveled back home to the USA, to our ministry of service as part of the staff of Bible Way. But the time of serving the people of Jamaica had planted something in our hearts. We were beginning a new season of change and transition that would open up nearly two decades of overseas missionary service and lead to involvements and experiences we had not expected or imagined.

In 1984 we moved from Medford Oregon to Linstead, St Catherine, Jamaica and for the two-plus years we lived in Linstead before moving to Kingston, I drove that Flat Bridge Road dozens of times. I was 34 years old when this incident took place. I’m 82 now and I can still see the front bumper and grille of that roaring dump truck headed straight at us and I can still see in the rearview mirror the back of the truck trailing a cloud of diesel smoke as it roared away from us toward Kingston!

You know, there’s no natural explanation for what happened in that fraction of a second that afternoon on the Flat Bridge road in St Catherine, Jamaica. God saved me and my passenger and the people standing around the stalled bus and the guy in the dump truck! I believe this to be the reality we experienced!

That was the Miracle on the Rio Cobre at Flat Bridge!

Thanks for reading my story! Grace to you today!

Jim Stephens

 

It was monsoon season in South Vietnam and we had just had one of our early evening monsoon rains (what my friends from the southern US called “gully washers”) rumble through.

The rain had stopped, evening dark had settled in, and I was standing in the mud just outside our company area, watching the towering storm clouds and flashing lightning move northward away from us. I saw a group of three attack helicopters to the north of my position executing a fire mission on an area of jungle less than a mile away just outside our base camp perimeter. It was loud and colorful as the noise of distant thunder mixed with the sound of the mini-guns on the helicopters, and the lines of red fire from the tracers mixed with the flashes of distant lightning. Then the attack Hueys swung around and made another pass launching rockets into the darkness and the white streaks of the rockets blossomed into red and orange mushrooms as they hit. The assault continued for several minutes until the Hueys had run out of ammunition or completed the fire mission and swung away turning back toward the airfield. It was just like a scene from a war movie, except that it was real war, not a movie!

The scene still comes to my mind vividly fifty-eight years later! The massive monsoon thunderheads rising into the sky, lightning flashing back and forth between the towering clouds, and the streaming gunfire and streaking rockets from the Hueys pounding a suspected VC outpost. For some reason it made me think of the greatness and majesty of God’s power to create and the comparatively puny but deadly power of man to destroy.

In that moment, I found myself saying, “God I believe in you! If you’re real, I pray that you will lead me and guide me and allow me to really know you. I want to serve you. I want to offer my life to live for you and your purpose!” And I knew! In that moment I knew that God was real, that God had heard me, and that when I returned to “The World” at the end of my tour in Vietnam, that somehow I was going to serve God’s purpose. I was twenty-four years old when I experienced this God Encounter.

I did get back to the world and to my wife and daughter, and I did get on with my life. Through Bible studies with friends in our home, through a new awareness of the reality of the Holy Spirit, and through the wonderful opportunity to be involved in the Jesus People Movement, I came to know God more and more. Jean and I found opportunity to serve in practical ways and in spiritual ways we had never imagined.

Since that night 58 years ago, there have been opportunities, challenges, changes, steps of faith, choices large and small, and a lifetime of learning, teaching and walking with God. It’s not a straight line from then to now, but looking back, the path is clear.

In our twenties and early thirties, we moved from owning a business to serving as pastors, assisting outreach churches, then planting a church. In our later thirties and early forties we were serving as missionaries, writing training curricula, and developing Bible Training Centres in Jamaica. Our later forties and early fifties saw us moving from Jamaica to the UK, opening and developing Bible Training Centres in London and other locations, and taking the Training Centres to several countries in Africa. Then in our late fifties and sixties, moving back to the US and serving on the staff of a mega-church in Central Oregon, serving as part of the Superintendent’s team for the Cascade District of the Foursquare denomination, then continuing to mentor younger men and women, and writing. We also continued to make ministry trips to Africa to further develop the Training Centre ministry. In fact, I celebrated my 65^th birthday month ministering in South Africa, Botswana, and Malawi! It’s been a great life all the way along, filled with experiences and challenges we never saw coming!

Still, as I think back to that night standing in the mud in Vietnam, I know 24-year-old Jim had an Encounter with God that set my life on a new course. Something happened in me that night, and there’s a direct link from that God Encounter to who Jean and I have become and what we’ve done from that day forward.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some stories of encounters and experiences with God. These stories kind of sort themselves into three categories: Experiences with God’s Presence, Experiences with God’s Power, and Experiences with God’s Provision. (Please excuse the alliteration! After fifty-plus years of preaching and teaching, sometimes I just can’t help it!)

Thanks for reading my story! I’d love to hear from you! Grace to you today!

Jim Stephens

 

Hey Friends! It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post! Here’s what’s happening with my health and here’s what I’m planning in terms of more consistent communication:

In January of 2021 I made a commitment to myself (and to you) to write a post for Notes From My Journey every week for the year. Little did I know that three months into the year I’d be diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma blood cancer!

I began treatment in March and continued treatment through the year with the hope that I’d make enough progress against the cancer with the oral meds and infusions to be able to have a Stem Cell Transplant (aka Bone Marrow Transplant) at OHSU in September or October. I made good progress and we planned the SCT for October, but as I was undergoing the final preparations for the Stem Cell Harvest everything slid to a halt because there were no beds available due to COVID cases.

Four months of waiting, then in mid-January we spun up the process again and Jean and I moved in with our daughter and her family in Portland to finalize all the tests and get ready for the killer chemo. On February 2, 2022 we did the transplant at OHSU. I stayed in the hospital for about two weeks. Then I was released to stay with our kids in Portland for another month until I finished the almost daily checkups and infusions that would allow me to come back home to Bend and resume treatment by the oncology team at St Charles Medical Center. It was during this process that my resolve to write a blog post every week failed! Sorry!

Because the Stem Cell Transplant destroys the body’s immune system along with the cancer cells, I had to isolate almost completely from that point onward. I had to wear an N95 mask everytime I left the house. I had to get all my childhood vaccines done again and now have to be careful of most any kind of potential viral or bacterial infection. I was hospitalized for a couple of days with an intestinal infection in 2023 but I’m doing well and being careful!

I’m getting stronger! The maintenance treatment I have now consists of an infusion every two weeks, blood draws twice monthly, and monthly visits with my oncologist. I’m in remission right now and most of the physical challenges I face are due to the side-effects of the maintenance treatment. And possibly the fact that I’m an old geezer! I’m only a month away from my 82^nd birthday!

I’m walking in the desert nearly every day with my dog Jake, but still isolating a lot and being infectious-disease conscious. Life is Good!

This is going a little longer than I’d planned, but here’s what I’m going to be doing: I’ve experienced some things through my years of life on the planet and life in relationship with God that I need to tell you about. Some of these experiences are “God Encounters” in which I believe God communicated something very specific to me and some of them are “God Interventions” in which God provided or protected in an unnatural or above-natural way. I hope they are meaningful for you.

I’ll plan to get something posted each week until I get the stories told! They’ll go out by email to the “Notes From My Journey” mailing list and I’ll post them to my blog at https://www.jimastephens.com.

Grace to you!

Jim Stephens