5
Second Life
Stabbed three times with a butcher knife, Bill Purvis should have died. God had another plan.
Bill Purvis wasn’t what you’d call a model teenager. Always on the lookout for a new thrill, he’d tried fighting, drinking, and drugs. He’d thrown cherry bombs into a school window near the principal. He’d driven his motorcycle down the school hallway. All of that and more before he turned eighteen.
Yet Bill hadn’t done it all.
On April 28, 1974, a Saturday night that had turned into early Sunday morning, he got an idea. He’d been cruising the nearly deserted streets of Columbus, Georgia, in his Camaro with a friend. He’d just spotted a young woman with long black hair wearing a tight blouse, short skirt, and high heels.
Bill turned to his friend. “Danny, you ever been with a prostitute?”
“Nope.”
“Me either. Let’s try it.”
Danny protested, but Bill ignored him. He swung the car around and pulled up beside the woman.
“What are you doing by yourself on a street corner?” he asked.
“I’m looking for a guy,” she said.
“Well, you don’t have to look anymore.”
As they talked, a man walked up from behind some nearby hedges. He was a couple inches short of six feet, unshaven, with unruly hair and breath smelling of alcohol. Bill, surprised by this sudden appearance, momentarily wondered if he was as dangerous as the man he resembled: Lee Harvey Oswald. But he quickly decided that this was “how they do this.”
“How much money y’all have?” the man asked.
Bill and Danny had about fifty dollars between them.
“All right,” the man said. “That’ll do.”
The man and the woman got into the backseat and directed Bill to a dark, run-down one-story house in a poor neighborhood. When they stopped in a gravel lot behind it, Bill and the woman—he didn’t know her name—got out. They walked to the back door while Danny and the man remained in the car.
The room they entered was small, about eight by ten, and furnished with only a chifforobe and a bed. A feeble glow emanated from a bare bulb in the ceiling. Across the room was another door that led into the rest of the house.
Bill locked the outside door while the woman appeared to lock the second door. He wondered what would happen next. When the woman began taking off her clothes, Bill did the same. She motioned toward the bed, and he sat down. They had been in the room just a few minutes.
Then she flipped off the light. Bill couldn’t see a thing.
The floor creaked. The sound didn’t seem to come from where the woman had been standing.
Bill quickly stood.
Then he smelled alcohol—close—the very same odor he’d noticed on Lee Harvey’s breath.
Something’s not right.
The bulb switched back on. Though partially blinded by the sudden flash, Bill saw that Lee Harvey was there, holding a butcher knife nearly a foot long.
The man smiled, and it was nowhere near friendly.
“Now,” he said, “you’re gonna die.”
Before Bill could react, the man thrust the knife at his chest. He winced, felt a hot surge in his body, and looked down. The knife was plunged into him to the hilt. He felt as if he’d been clubbed with a bat.
The woman screamed and kept screaming.
Lee Harvey yanked out the knife and slashed again. The blow drove toward Bill’s head but he jerked back. The blade caught him in the neck and severed his jugular vein.
He’s a madman! Bill thought. I’ve got to fight my way out of here.
As the blade was wrenched out once again, he punched with his left hand, hitting the man in the upper chest and throat. Lee Harvey started to fall. With his right arm, Bill hooked his leg and pulled. The man’s head hit the floor with a loud thud.
Bill seized his chance to rush over the attacker’s body, which blocked his way to the outside door.
But Lee Harvey wasn’t done. He flailed up and stabbed a third time. The blade sliced into Bill’s abdomen.
Somehow he shook off the blow, reached the door, and turned the handle. I locked it! Adrenaline pumping, knowing he hadn’t a second to spare, he stepped back, lowered his shoulder, and rammed the door flat.
Half running, half stumbling, half dressed, he raced into the night toward the Camaro, where a horrified Danny sat in the driver’s seat. Bill lurched against the hood, yelled, “Get out of here!” and tried to keep running. He crossed the street, staggered into a parking lot by a deserted theater, and wrapped his arms around a metal light pole. Then, his strength fading, he slowly slid to the ground, smearing the pole with blood.
Bill stared at the stars, gasping for breath, choking on blood.
There was no doubt about it. He was dying.
Just then, unexpectedly, a sentence entered his mind—he’d heard it two weeks before, at home. He’d answered a knock at the front door and there stood a slim fellow in glasses, maybe seventeen years old. “B-B-Bill,” the visitor had stammered, “everything you’re looking for can be found in Jesus.”
Bill stared at him.
“I gotta go,” the boy said. He turned and ran.
Bill hadn’t known what to make of it then. Now the very words from that strange encounter returned to him:
“Everything you’re looking for can be found in Jesus.”
Though he wasn’t a churchgoing guy, and though he’d never prayed in his life, Bill decided it was now or never. “God,” he said. “Save me. Please forgive me. I’m such a sinner. Help me, God. Please save me.”
Danny roared up in the Camaro. Bill managed to get in and hang on for the ride to the Columbus Medical Center, only a block away. He made it to a tall orderly, who had his back to him, and wrapped his arms around the man as he said, “I need some help, buddy.”
The orderly grabbed him, lifted him onto a gurney, and rushed him into the ER, leaving a trail of blood. Three doctors immediately came in. One was a renowned cardiac surgeon who happened to have stayed three hours past the end of his shift. Another was a trauma specialist with experience in Vietnam.
One doctor put his hand on Bill’s throat. “Get the D.A. up here,” he said. “This boy’s been stabbed to death. His jugular vein’s completely cut. He’s not dead yet but he will be soon.”
Bill heard the words. He knew his time was almost up.
The assistant district attorney was riding for the first time with a police officer that night and showed up minutes later. After being told the patient was about to die, he asked Bill a few questions about what happened.
A doctor interrupted. “I have to start surgery now.” Then the anesthesia kicked in, and Bill was out.
Bill woke up, not sure if he was in heaven or hell.
He was in a bed in a room. Pictures hung on the wall. Policemen were standing outside. Nurses walked by. This didn’t look like heaven or hell. It was the hospital. He should be dead, yet he was alive.
Then he remembered. You prayed and asked God to come into your life and save you.
He was humbled. He began praying again. God, thank you for whatever you did that gave me life again. But you don’t know what you got last night. You got somebody you can’t use or do anything with. If you don’t want to listen to me or touch me again, I understand. I won’t bother you anymore.
To his surprise, he again sensed a spiritual voice.
Bill, you just do what I tell you to do. Let me do the rest.
This was good enough for him. In fact, it was the turning point of his “second life.” He asked a nurse to read Bible verses to him. Soon he was reading them himself.
Six months later “Lee Harvey” was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. He eventually was sentenced to ten years in prison. His plan, forced on his wife, had been to lure an unsuspecting teen to the house. In the car with Danny, he’d said he was going to walk and have a cigarette. Instead he moved quickly to the front of the house, grabbed the butcher knife in the kitchen, and waited for the signal from his wife. When the light went out, he slipped through the still-unlocked door, intending to murder Bill and steal his money.
The would-be killer didn’t count on Bill’s prayer and miraculous recovery.
That night of the attack, a doctor told the assistant D.A. that Bill wouldn’t make it until morning. Later that day doctors said he was still alive but wouldn’t survive. The next morning the D.A. was told the patient might live, but if he did he’d have no mental capacity—he’d been too long without oxygen.
All those predictions were probably accurate according to medical precedent. But they hadn’t factored in Bill’s spiritual encounter.
The first thrust of the knife had missed his heart by a quarter inch. From a completely severed jugular, most people would bleed out in less than four minutes; he’s one of a handful of people in the world who have survived a severed jugular. The blade’s third assault had sliced into his liver. And yet, even with also having lost eight pints of blood, he made a complete recovery.
“The only reason I can give you for Bill Purvis’s being alive right now is that God had a purpose for him,” the D.A. said years later. “He wanted Bill to fulfill that purpose. Even the doctors will tell you that this is one they can chalk up to God, not to anything they did.”
Today Bill Purvis is married, has three sons, and is senior pastor of Cascade Hills Church in Columbus, which has grown under his leadership from a core group of thirty-two into a thriving eight-thousand-member congregation.
“My entire life is different from the one I had before I knew God,” he said. “I should have died, but he changed me physically and spiritually. God did indeed have a purpose for my life, and I am humbly trying to fulfill it.”
He hasn’t forgotten where it all started. Every year, on the anniversary of that fateful night, he has returned to the theater lot and the same pole that was a silent witness to his last hopes. He prays and thanks God for that stuttering young man who planted a spiritual seed on his doorstep, for the skill of the doctors and nurses, and most of all for God’s gift of new life to a sinful man.
This year, though, he didn’t return. Not long ago, a hospital administrator called. It turns out the hospital owned the property where the lot sat. The plan was to demolish the lot for other uses, and knowing Bill’s history, the hospital wanted to donate a certain light pole to him.
He knew just what to do with it: install it in the woods on his church’s property so that others desperate for God would have a place to gather and pray. Today, if you attend Bill’s church, you can wrap your arms around the pole he clung to as he cried out to God to save him.
You could say that pole, like Bill Purvis, has found new meaning in an unexpected chance at a second life.