All Good News

My name is Bruce Van Natta, and I love to work on trucks.

I'm a self-employed diesel mechanic; also a Christian family man living out my power truck dreams and providing for my wife and four children. I never gave a second thought to the danger of working on engines that weigh thousands of pounds, until November 16, 2006.

I was working on a Peterbilt logging truck about an hour from our home. The guy I was working with, who drives the truck, asked me if I would look at one more leak before I left.

So, if you could picture one of these great big Peterbilt trucks, I slid under the front big bumper feet first. The front axle was jacked up and the right front wheel removed.

I said to him, "You jump up inside and see what the temperature of the engine is." The axle is right across my chest at this point, maybe an inch or two above me.

The 20-ton capacity jack holding up the truck, shot out from its position. This 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of weight that's on this axle, came down across my mid-section like a blunt guillotine, and nearly crushed me in half.

I tasted the blood in my throat when it fell on me. I looked down and could see there was less than three inches of space between the bottom of the axle and the cement.

I knew the thickest part of my body was maybe two inches thick.

I begged the man that jacked up the truck to get me out from under it. He didn't want to because he could tell that I might have a broken back and I did.

The vertebrae in my spine were cracked the width of the axle.

I tried to pull myself out from under the truck. It was the most incredible pain you can think of. I got myself to where my head was sticking out from under the front bumper.

The next thing I did was to call out, "Lord, help me."

I called it out again. "Lord, please help me!"

I felt strange and the pain left my body.

At that point, I was unconscious. My spirit left my body and floated to the ceiling, and was looking down at the accident scene. The man I had been working with was on his knees next to my body. I could faintly hear him saying, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' But on each side of him, also on their knees were angels. They might have been about eight feet tall. They didn't have wings, just very broad shoulders.

There was a bright light shining around each one of them. They didn't move, and I never heard them say anything. They just had their arms under the truck, not holding the truck up; but had their arms angled in toward my body. There was no pain, just peace. I can't describe the peace I felt in the garage.

I knew I had a serious choice to make.

I was definitely on the edge of life and death. There were two thoughts in my head. One was, 'Shut your eyes and give up and die. You are just going to go to heaven anyway.' The other voice in my head was much quieter and not much more than a whisper, 'If you want to live, you're going to have to fight, and you are going to have to fight hard.'

The next thing I knew, my spirit went back down into my body.

I was conscious while I was flown on a life flight to the hospital. Doctors there doubted I would survive the next few hours. My ribs were broken, my pancreas and spleen crushed, and several major arteries had been severed.

We found out from doctors later, I had five places that major arteries were completely severed. I found out from the doctors there was a medical study done in 2001. According to that study, by the University of South California, they used my case and compared it against that study. They can't find anyone else in the world that has lived with five major arteries being severed.

I should have bled to death in a few minutes. So my thought is, the angels were there to somehow hold me together. I stayed in the hospital for over two months and survived five major surgeries. I still had overwhelming obstacles to overcome. Almost 75 percent of my small intestine was crushed in the accident and had to be removed. An adult has 18-20 feet of small intestine. I was down to less than 100 cm of small intestine.

Someone came in and told us that he didn't expect me to live much more than a year, that I was going to starve to death. I was losing weight very rapidly: and they were feeding me intravenously. My once 180 lb. frame dropped to 126 lbs. My family was praying and my community rallied around me. I also received an unexpected visitor in my hospital room one day.

The Lord woke up a man in New York two days in a row. This was someone that I met one time on vacation. He came and prayed for me in the hospital. He put his palm on my forehead, and he prayed the way Jesus taught us to pray. He spoke to the mountain, in this case my small intestine, 'I command you to grow back in the name of Jesus Christ.' I felt like 220 volts come out of his palm and into my forehead. I could feel my intestines moving around and up and down.

After nine long months of surgeries and hospital stays, I was finally able to feed myself and gained weight, back up to 170 lbs.

When I returned for testing, radiology reports and doctors confirmed that I had almost nine feet of small intestine. They said the small intestines the Lord gave back to me were twice as good as normal. They work just as if I had all of it; absorb the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients I take into my body.

Over and over, the Lord kept confounding the doctors from the point of saying I shouldn't live. I should have bled to death. My intestines miraculously were growing back. God was showing us that miracles were happening. My pancreas rejuvenated by itself. My spleen rejuvenated by itself.

Miracle after miracle, God was just showing up. He is a miracle worker.

Today, through their organization, SweetBread Ministries, Bruce and his family travel together to talk about supernatural healing. Bruce has also written a book called Saved by Angels.