BACK FROM THE DEAD

Early Friday morning, May 21st, 2021, when Guto Grings woke up with a stomach ache, he had no idea that he was about to die that day from a fatal heart attack.

His wife, Maria, gave him some medicine, but it didn’t help. Two hours later, he said he was “feeling worse and worse.” So, she thought of her next-door neighbour, a cardiologist, but he was not home, which ended up being a very good thing.

Guto Grings was at the top of his game, a successful entrepreneur from southern Brazil, whose family’s shoe company, Piccadilly, had been started by his grandfather in 1955, so there was no reason in the world to believe he would be facing his own mortality that fateful Friday morning.

His wife, Maria, became aware of a Divine Hand at work: “Our cardiologist neighbour later said, ‘If I had come in that morning to check on Guto, we wouldn’t have had time to arrive at the hospital.’ I called our other doctor friend, Dr. Daniel, and he said, ‘I’m just finishing my shift at the hospital, so why don’t you bring Guto in?’”

“Dr. Daniel gave me some medications,” Guto explained, “because, in his mind, I was just having a stomach ache. I was there for about 30 or 40 minutes, talking to my manager on the phone, my wife beside me sending messages, and then all of a sudden, I started to feel a bit colder, and I asked Maria: ‘Could you bring me some blankets, please?’”

“I covered him in blankets because it was winter, very cold and rainy—an ugly day.” Maria added, “And he said, ‘I’m feeling very dizzy right now…’ He didn’t finish the sentence.”

“I don’t remember anything else.” Guto admitted, “In that moment my heart stopped for the first time, and my wife tried to help me.”

“I yelled two times for someone to come,” Maria trembled as she recalled the event, “and as soon as Dr. Daniel ran in, he called, and we had 4 or 5 nurses and doctors coming in because of the way he called, everyone knew it was urgent.”

“My mother was giving us a little bit of information that they were still at the hospital, but everything would be okay,” their teenage daughter, Daida, remembered how she and her brother were left at home wondering what was happening. “She didn’t want to scare us, but it sunk in later in the day that my dad was not just at the hospital for a stomach ache.”

“For the next six hours, my heart stopped 13 times in sequence, and the last time my heart stopped, I flatlined. They shocked me 17 times, but it was an asystole (when the heart’s electrical system fails, causing it to stop pumping). Everybody thought that I was dead; they were getting prepared to tell my family—to tell my wife that I passed away. While they gathered around me in the emergency room, all the medical people holding hands, praying and weeping, all of a sudden, they told me I sat up on the bed and tried to talk to them.”

To hear all the heart-stopping details of Guto’s captivating story, you can watch it on It Is Written Canada this month on the dozens of networks where It Is Written Canada is aired across Canada and around the world. Or simply go to iiw.ca or It Is Written Canada’s YouTube videos and click on the program entitled: “Back from the Dead”

Thank you for your ongoing support of It Is Written Canada, and may God continue to bless you with an abundant faith in His faithfulness!

~ Mike Lemon