The Kiwanis Club of Durant hosted its 44th annual Durant Community Prayer Breakfast May 7 at the Baptist Collegiate Ministry building on the Southeastern campus and Dr. Todd Fisher, executive director and treasurer of Oklahoma Baptists, spoke of the challenges he has faced after losing part of his right leg in a car accident.
Fisher shared what was the hardest and most difficult season of his life when his life changed on July 28, 2024.
He was on the way to Falls Creek to be the camp pastor for one of the weeks of camp.
He was on a small two-lane highway on a curve when a vehicle crossed the center line and hit him almost head-on. Fisher said that only by the grace of God is he alive and that if anyone saw his truck, they would ask, “How is that guy alive?”
Fisher suffered extensive injuries throughout his body and particularly in the lower extremities.
“I lost my lower right leg and I usually like to get this out of the way sometimes when I’m speaking because I’ll go speak at a church and I’ll have somebody come up to me sometimes and kind of look at me and go, ‘Dude, I was looking at your right ankle the whole time going what’s wrong with that guy’s ankle?’ I’m like, ‘I have a prosthesis and thanks for listening to what I was preaching,”’ Fisher said.
“I do have a prosthesis here and all of this is to say, if at any point this morning it looks like I’m up here on my last leg, it’s because I am.”
Fisher endured about 45 days in the hospital, and he has had about 10 surgeries.
He said the question everyone has is what the Lord taught him through this, and he recalled having a dream while in the hospital.
“I’m in the truck that I had the car wreck and I’m driving towards this really large city and there’s no lights, it’s super dark and I get closer to the city,” Fisher said. “I’m in the city and I keep going deeper in the city until finally, I get to like this alleyway, and the truck cannot go any further.
“When the truck comes to a stop, these dark creatures just start descending out of the buildings all over the place and they descend onto my truck and they’re trying to rip me under the truck and they’re saying things to me, ‘You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be alive. We’re gonna finish what we started.’ Right as they got their hands on me about to pull me out of the truck, I woke up.”
He went back to sleep and began having the same dream again only this time it ended differently.
“This time when the creatures come, I ball up my fist and I’m not going down without a fight and they’re coming down and this time, I don’t hear the creatures speaking,” Fisher said. “But this time it’s almost like it all kind of gets muffled out and I don’t see him but I know Jesus is there and Jesus is speaking and very clearly in the dream, Jesus said, ‘All of that talk you’ve been giving to the preachers about how I would fight for them, it’s time for you to believe that now,’ and Jesus said to me in this dream, he said, ‘I am about to put you on the most difficult journey you’ve ever been on in your life and you are supposed to be alive and in this journey, I’m going to fight for you every step of the way and all these things that will attack you, all these things that are coming after you, I’m going to fight for you and you can have confidence in that.’ That really spoke to me.
“If you’re a follower of Christ, he will fight for you. God is always working for his glory and your good even when you cannot see or understand what he’s doing.”
Fisher later learned how God was at work on that worst day of his life. Two Hispanic men and their wives were behind Fisher when the crash happened. One of the men later told Fisher that he prayed to God for guidance on how to help him. The man said that very clearly, God said to put pressure on Fisher’s hip that
was bleeding severely.
“This guy hadn’t had a minute of medical training his whole life,” Fisher said.
Multiple surgeons have told Fisher that the man’s actions saved his life.
“Had he not done that, I would have bled out,” Fisher said.
Fisher said the men had left visiting their family and decided to turn around and go back to the family to pray with them for a few minutes. The family were members of Immanuel Baptist Church in Shawnee where Fisher was a pastor for 19 years.
“Here’s the amazing thing: They’d been their visiting their family and they get up to leave, they get in the car,” Fisher said. “They get a couple of miles down the road and this gentleman looks at his cousin and says, ‘You know, I really think God’s telling us to go back and pray with our family,’ and his cousin’s like, ‘We prayed before we left. We’re already on the road. Can we just keep going?’ He goes, ‘No, I think God really wants us to go back and pray with our family.’ So, they turn the car around, they go back, and they pray for about 15 minutes, and they get back on the road and go again.
“Had they not turned the car around and gone back and prayed the exact amount of time that they did, they would not have been on the trajectory to be right behind me when the wreck occurred. Now, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I don’t think anything that I’ve just told you is coincidence.”
Fisher said none of this has been easy.
“If I could go back and just tap the brake or hit the gas and miss that car by a second, I’d do it,”Fisher said. “But in God’s providence, he allowed this to happen in my life.”
Fisher said that God allowed these things to happen to his body and one of the things that God reminded him in a loving and gentle way was that he gave his life to God and it was God’s right to use his life in any way that he wanted. That was God’s right, so Fisher said he surrendered all of that to God.
“So, I learned to surrender and I’m going to tell you, it hasn’t been easy,” Fisher said. “It’s been hard. There’s been a lot of tears shed. Every single day I miss my leg. Every single day, I miss what I can no longer do but you know what, I have seen God give glory through this in ways I couldn’t even imagine.”
