When 5-year-old Charlie Guisinger was found on the bottom of a swimming pool Aug. 4, no one knew how long he’d been there.
Later, though, they saw it on the security video — it was around 40 seconds. Forty seconds followed by panic, CPR and a helicopter ride to Birmingham.
“To see this happen, it was just unreal,” said Charlie’s grandfather, Donny Richards, a member of Ariton Baptist Church.
Just a year and a half before, Richards had lost his daughter, Jane — Charlie’s mom — after her lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis.
And then Charlie came out of the pool with no pulse.
‘Just like Lazarus’
“He was officially dead, just like Lazarus was dead,” Richards said.
At Children’s of Alabama, the doctor told him that if his grandson made it through the night, it would take two months to see how much damage had been done or for him to show any signs of healing. The X-rays showed that the saltwater pool had done extensive damage to Charlie’s lungs, and the doctor felt like brain damage was inevitable.
At that point, Richards said, “All I had was my God — and that’s enough.” He prayed for a miracle, for God to heal Charlie completely.
The next morning when the doctor came in, Charlie was breathing on his own. An MRI of his brain came back perfectly normal.
‘Just praising God’
Later that day, alarms started going off, and nurses rushed in to find that Charlie had used his foot to pull the tube from his nose — the nurses had restrained his arms just in case he moved.
The doctor told Richards he had never seen anything like this before. After they left the room, Richards walked over to his grandson, put his hands on his head and prayed.
Seconds later, Charlie started moving his legs in the air like he was riding a bicycle, Richards said. It set off more alarms, and the team came rushing in again.
“And there Paw Paw is, just praising God,” Richards said.
He said he finally realized that God had answered his prayer — He had healed Charlie completely. As they lifted the sedation, Charlie began speaking, then got up and walked with no problems.
‘Miracles every day’
“God was showing all these doctors and nurses what He could do,” Richards said.
On Aug. 9, Charlie was moved from ICU to a step-down room, and the next day he went home. Two days later, he went back to kindergarten.
“God does miracles every day,” Richards said. “By any indication, this should not have happened.”
He said the medical team was amazed by how Charlie recovered, and he prays what they saw pushes them closer to God.
“We have no way of knowing how this has affected the lives of people — we’ll never know,” he said.
‘Giving You the glory’
But he does know it’s impacted one of the nurses, a woman named Faith. She and Richards had many conversations around Charlie’s bed, and she told Richards that the things he said to her and the way she saw God at work would strengthen her for years to come.
Richards said he hopes Charlie’s story will spark revival.
His pastor, Dave Walsh, prayed during the Sunday morning service Aug. 11 that Ariton Baptist “would not forget, would not stop talking about this, would not stop giving You the glory.”
“We did indeed see a miracle this week,” Walsh told the church, pointing to the preschool where Charlie was playing.
Richards said he looks forward to the day when Charlie will understand the full story of what happened to him and be able to share that with others.
“One day I’m going to sit him down and tell him everything, because he is a miracle child,” Richards said.
To hear Richards’ testimony at Ariton Baptist on Aug. 11, click here.
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