SID: Hello, Sid Roth, your investigative reporter here with Bill Kent. And Bill, is it true that you ran your motorcycle into a train? Or the train – no, the train couldn’t run into your motorcycle.
BILL: Yes it did. Yes it did.
SID: It did.
BILL: Monday, the 13th of May 1985 at 8:05 in the morning.
SID: Listen, I don’t ride motorcycles but that looks like a dangerous thing to be doing if you were to fall; but to run into a train? What happened to you?
BILL: Well, it was Monday morning as I said 8:05. The intersection was blocked so I couldn’t see the train coming. And I don’t remember the accident at all, nor do I remember anything for like three weeks before the accident or up to three and one half months after the accident. But what I’ve been told is that, you know, there was tractor-trailer trucks parked on both sides of the intersection. The intersection was obscured, and I couldn’t see the train coming. And it came out of nowhere and hit me broadside.
SID: At least you had a helmet on?
BILL: Yes.
SID: Good. I mean I don’t know how much good that did you but, medically speaking, what was wrong with you?
BILL: I had a closed head injury that left me either in a coma or comatose for a period of time. I had a vicareal hemorrhage in the right eye, with optic nerve damage in the right eye, and also spinal injuries.
SID: Spinal injuries, that’s an understatement because he became a paraplegic. Did you ever in your wildest imagination think you would become a paraplegic?
BILL: Well, no I didn’t. I never thought this could happen to me. I mean, I saw it happening to all kinds of other people, I was an emergency medical technician for years, and I had been on rescue scenes you know, and you know seeing many other people go through this but I never thought for one minute it could happen to me.
SID: But you made the best of it and actually you won a number of medals in the, is it called the Paraplegic Olympics, or…
BILL: The Parolympic Games. It’s the sports for the disabled includes anybody that has a physical disability, and there are competitions all over the world.
SID: How far did you go, as far as in your competitions? Did you win championships?
BILL: Well, I started off, Sid, on my very first competition with a borrowed gun from the ROTC department at Salisbury State University in Maryland, and I shot it for twenty minutes the night before my very first competition. I went into the competition the next morning and the Lord blessed me with five gold medals and five national records.
SID: My goodness, so you had a real gift for this.
BILL: He gave it to me.
SID: And how many gold medals have you won?
BILL: Thirty-nine gold medals, fourteen silvers, and three bronzes. I’ve never been in a competition that he didn’t bless me with a victory and a medal.
SID: Now there was a time in your life where it all hit you, not only the fact that you were confined to a wheelchair, but everything was going bad in your life and you found yourself in, would you call it a backslidden state?
BILL: Absolutely, positively. That started on January 31st of 1994. I left my apartment, I was going to school at Prince Georges Community College for my degree in paralegal studies, and I left my apartment that morning and I was of course in a wheel chair at that point and there was cooking oil that had been spilled on the floor and the chair kicked out from under me, nailing me back against the wall, and I broke my neck.
SID: Oh no.
BILL: Yes. And at that point I mean it’s like, just, I had called for prayer, and the calls were ignored, and I said to, in myself, I said to God, you know, if this is who I’m serving, and this is all that you can do, you know, I don’t want to have anything to do with you. And so I separated myself for a time, for a season. And you know that was from 1994 until 2000.
SID: You found yourself with a broken down van at a friends house and I guess you hit, as they say, you hit bottom.
BILL: Yes.
SID: What happened?
BILL: Yes. Well, I had hit bottom, my van had broken down in front of a friend’s house. That friend was the same friend that took me to this church in Laurel, Maryland, the Tabernacle Church. It had changed leadership and everything, she took me back to the church that was under the direction of Pastor Girly; and you know Pastor Girly is an awesome, awesome, awesome man of God and I was given an opportunity by God to come back into his church and to serve him once again. And I started to do that. And it was during that time that God spoke to me very clearly in almost, almost an audible voice, a spiritual voice, but it was so clear and so powerful that one would almost say that it was audible. That he told me to go to Columbus, Ohio on November 5th, of 2000.
SID: For what purpose?
BILL: Well, this was unclear for like two weeks, for two weeks I kept getting the same message and I, brother, I’m telling you, I thought I was loosing my mind.
SID: You had never heard such a clear voice from God before.
BILL: Never. Never.
SID: And he wants you to go to Columbus, Ohio. Did you have friends in Columbus?
BILL: No. I didn’t know anybody in Columbus, Ohio, I had never been to Columbus, Ohio, I never knew anything about Columbus, Ohio.
SID: You must have been very frustrated.
BILL: I was. I was about to pull my hair out.
SID: You don’t want to do that.
BILL: Right. I have little left. But then God spoke to me at the end of these two weeks. He says go to Columbus, Ohio and I’ll heal you. And on that very day, I was sitting there watching the Trinity Broadcast Network, TBN, and there was a program on there from Pastor Rod Parsley and World Harvest Church, it was an infomercial, about a debt burning service that he was going to have on October 31st. And I said well you know that’s a debt burning service, well that’s a pastor from Columbus, but it’s for October 31st, that’s not November 5th. The Lord had directed me to go to Columbus on November 5th. The program ended and the power of God came over me, and it was all I could do that I had to call the church.
SID: When you say the power of God came over you, how, how strong was this?
BILL: It was an urge that I could not deny. I could not deny it. Now, the Lord had spoken to me before, twice before this, and told me to go to different services and I believe that if I had gone, he would have healed me.
SID: Now Bill has missed it twice he thinks. This time he is not going to miss it. I mean he has been a paraplegic, technically a quadriplegic for fifteen and a half years. He doesn’t want to miss this time to be healed. Don’t go away, we’ll be right back.
