It was the morning of his seventeenth birthday, and Lester Sumrall was dying. After months of lying in a sickbed with tuberculosis, he had reached his end. Everyone agreed that his life was ending. The coughing that racked his lungs was out of control. His pillow, splattered with blood from his spasms throughout the long night, was a witness to his shattered life.
Roberts Liardon tells us that this fateful day, February 15, 1930, was a day of days. The ninetythree-pound, emaciated young man began to cough up blobs of tissue that the doctor declared were part of his lungs. Shaking his head in defeat, the doctor entered Lester’s room for the last time.
“In two hours, your boy will be dead,” he said gravely to George and Betty Sumrall. “That’s the death rattle in his throat right now, and that bluishness in his face means he’s not getting enough blood to his brain for his body to live. He’s going to die tonight.”
The doctor left the Sumrall house and went back to his office to write out Lester’s death certificate. He left the exact time of death blank, knowing it was just an administrative detail easy to attend to. George Sumrall would need to pick up the death certificate first thing in the morning so that he could go and buy a burial plot for his son.
George Sumrall was a rough man who hardly believed in God and definitely didn’t believe in the power of prayer. He left his son’s deathbed with a mixture of grief and anger. Betty Sumrall was the opposite. A firm believer in the power of Jesus Christ to save and heal, she was not ready to give up her son. She stayed by Lester’s bedside, crying and praying for God to intervene and save her boy’s life.
