hello there.: He's never far from us....

Stomach churning, Dan Scott rushed down to the emergency room to meet his wife, Trish.
She had a really bad headache, so bad that she’d fallen onto the floor earlier that day in 2004 while doing volunteer work at an Arizona Salvation Army. An ambulance took her to the hospital.
Moments after he arrived, his wife stopped breathing. Brain aneurysm. She ended up in the intensive care unit in a coma.
After speaking with doctors, Scott thought she was going to die. But a chance encounter with someone who cleaned hospital toilets convinced him otherwise — and changed the way he viewed how God works.
Scott, now chief pastor at Christ Church Nashville, spent all day and most of the night next to his wife at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. On the third day, doctors said she’d had another stroke that left her partially paralyzed.
The next day, the pastor, who had done mission work in South America, passed a Mexican member of the cleaning staff. He greeted her in Spanish.
“Come back a minute,” she said in Spanish. “Why did you speak to me?”
“I’m just trying to be polite,” Scott said, heading toward the ICU.
“Why are you going in there?” she said.
“My wife’s in there.”
“Why do you look so sad?”
“She’s dying! My wife’s dying!”
The woman paused. She looked at Scott and said, “No she’s not.”
“How would you know?”
“I know,” the woman said. “Stop grieving. She’s going to walk out of there. She’s going to be OK.”
This time, Scott paused. Her words resonated with him, deeply.
“Something in me just believed that,” he said. “That’s the voice I needed that day.”

Scott came to find out the woman, Genevieve Ruiz, had been working there for more than 35 years, and she had given similar comfort, when so moved, to other family members, too.
“I know there are a lot of false claims and insanity in religion,” Scott said. “But something in her made me think she’s right.”
Trish Scott came out of the coma six days later.
“When I got in the room, she couldn’t talk but she reached out her hand. And I knew she knew who I was,” the pastor said.
After a while, Scott went to find Ruiz and tell her the good news. Trish Scott made a full recovery after a year or so.
After that, the Scotts stayed in touch with Ruiz every year or so until Ruiz died, at age 80, just a few weeks ago.

Dan Scott is convinced that God spoke through Ruiz, who changed the way the pastor looked at how God operates.
“Mostly God’s work happens away from church. Genevieve helped me with that. She pushes a mop. She’s not even a doctor, but she was a gracious human being who wasn’t just working the clock,” he said.
“She was every bit the servant of God that I was.”