Pastor Rick Savage | The Boy Who Blinked Twice

We sat three rows back this morning, listening to a preacher who has known me since I was two years old. Partway through the service, he told us about a trauma room in Memphis, a boy who could not say a single word, and a system worked out with nothing but blinking eyes.

That preacher is Pastor Rick Savage, of Bethel Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee. He and my dad went through Bible college together from 1979 to 1981, and he has pastored Bethel for almost 38 years now. Getting to sit under his preaching after all these years, and to introduce my own family to him, is not something we take for granted.

God has used this ministry to see people saved all over the world, and days like today remind us why we love connecting with pastors and churches doing this kind of work. If you ever want to connect with what we are doing on the field, you can do that here: https://consfords.com/connect.

Blink Twice If You’re Going to Heaven

Pastor Rick Savage walked into a hospital trauma room in Memphis, Tennessee, and found a teenage boy strapped to a board, wires running everywhere, a breathing tube in his throat, and no way left to speak. The television was blaring in the background. The boy’s name was Robert, and he had less than a day left to live.

He would answer the biggest question of his life with nothing but his eyes.

A Promise Made Over the Phone

It started with a phone call Pastor Savage almost put off. He was a young youth pastor at the time, running a full bus ministry, and his office phone rang in the middle of a busy afternoon. It was one of his bus teenagers, a girl named Sophia.

Her voice was urgent. A friend of hers had wrecked a motorcycle out toward White Haven, hit a tree so hard the young people had a name for the spot: Dead Man’s Curve. She asked Pastor Savage to go to the hospital and visit him.

He meant to. He really did. But the day was full, and he told her he would go, then hung up the phone and turned back to his desk. Sophia was not having it. She called back before he ever got up from his chair.

“Promise me you’ll go,” she said. “Promise me when you hang up the phone, you’ll go.”

So he did. He walked into his pastor’s office, explained the situation, and drove straight to the hospital.

The Room With No Words

The family in the waiting room was shaken, and understandably so. Robert’s father let Pastor Savage back to see his son, but only on one condition.

“You won’t mention death,” he said, “and you won’t mention hell.”

Pastor Savage agreed and walked into a narrow room where Robert lay broken and wired to machines, unable to speak a single word. His friends explained the only system they had worked out with him. One blink for no. Two blinks for yes.

That was enough.

Pastor Savage never mentioned death or hell, not once. He simply told Robert that he himself was going to heaven one day, and asked if Robert wanted to go too. He asked if Robert believed Jesus Christ died on the cross for his sins. Two blinks. He asked if Robert wanted to ask the Lord to forgive him and take him to heaven. Two blinks.

He watched Robert’s eyes close, then move under the lids, as if he were praying with everything he had left. When Robert opened them again, a tear ran down the side of his face.

Sixteen hours later, Robert was gone.

A Funeral That Became an Altar Call

Sophia called again the next day, her voice breaking. She had one more request. Robert’s family had no church home and no pastor. Would Pastor Savage preach the funeral?

He expected a small crowd. What he got was every seat in a small funeral chapel filled, students standing along the walls, more sitting on the floor of the center aisle, and a foyer packed past capacity. Robert’s entire high school had shown up.

Pastor Savage looked out at all those young faces and preached the same gospel he had shared in that hospital room hours before Robert died. Then he asked a simple question. How many of them wanted to know, the way Robert had known, that they were going to heaven?

Twenty-one hands went up.

Sixteen Hours Was Enough

Robert never spoke a word to Pastor Savage. He couldn’t. But he heard the gospel clearly enough to answer it, and he answered it the only way he had left. It is a small reminder that the size of someone’s window does not determine the size of what God can do inside it.

Years later, long after Pastor Savage had moved on to pastor Bethel Baptist Church, two women visited on a Sunday morning. One introduced herself as Mary, and Pastor Savage noticed right away that she shared Robert’s last name. He asked if she had lost a relative in a motorcycle crash, and she said yes, her brother.

“You’re looking at a man that led him to Jesus sixteen hours before he died,” Pastor Savage told her. “You’ll see Robert again. He’s in heaven.”

Mary hadn’t known any of it. Now she did.

The thief on the cross never got a chance to walk an aisle or shake a pastor’s hand either. He just believed, and Jesus told him plainly, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Robert’s story is not so different. A promise kept over the phone, a short window in a hospital room, and a boy who blinked his way into eternity.

So let me ask you what Pastor Savage asked that morning. If you know, the way Robert knew, that heaven is settled for you, that is worth being thankful for today. But if there is any doubt in your mind right now, any part of you that is not sure, do not wait on a hospital room or a phone call from someone else to get it settled. Robert had sixteen hours. Most of us are not promised even that.