Jesse Hutch thanks Jesus for his survival in a drowning accident and says: “It is a miracle that I am alive”

He had been working as a tour guide for five years when he nearly drowned on the job. The incident began when the raft hit a rapid and two guests fell overboard. One of them grabbed Hutch’s jacket and pulled him overboard as well.

“I hit the water, head first, left, right, all over the place,” he said. “And suddenly my ears pop and I’m like, ‘Wow, that hurts. That was new.’ I must have sunk deeper than I expected. And then I open my eyes, look around and think, yes, that must be the green room. OK, I’ve heard of this place. Don’t panic. Stay calm. Just remember your training, OK?”

Hutch had been thrown overboard many times at work. But this time was different.

“I try to swim again, but the current is just… it’s too strong, it pushes me further. I know that at this point I To Only Drive it out because you can’t beat the river. So I just go limp, and by that I mean I stop using energy for anything. I let go of my arms, I let go of my legs, and I don’t use energy to try to keep control or anything. I just float along. And that way, hopefully, the oxygen stays in my bloodstream. … I knew I had to hold on to everything I had.”

Finally, Hutch felt the uncontrollable urge to breathe.

“You reach a point where your body starts doing what it’s made to do, which is breathe,” he said on the podcast. “Logically, at that point, you still have control of your muscles. And you’re like, ‘No, you can’t breathe underwater.’ And you could feel your body arguing with you, saying, ‘Okay, we need oxygen now.’ You’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, but I don’t have any. We’re underwater.’ And your body was like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, but we’re going to breathe now.’ You’re like, ‘No, we’re not.’ And I don’t know how long that battle went on in my head, to be honest. But it felt like quite a while.

“And then I eventually lost the battle. And when you drink water, it doesn’t feel like you’re breathing water. If you’ve ever seen wet concrete, it feels like it was poured into your nose and mouth in a flash and filled your entire body. And so you immediately feel full, you feel heavy, and you feel like you weigh 2,000 pounds. That was the scariest point so far on this journey, where I thought, ‘Wow, I’m done. I have nothing left.'”

Hutch knew his life was in God’s hands.

“At that point I just thought, ‘Okay, God, you knowAnd now? That is the pointt wsI just need to lean on You and have the greatest peace I I am in your hands. I am completely under your control.’ At some point I swam to the surface.”

Observers said he was underwater for “between 11 and 22 minutes,” Hutch said. He was resuscitated.

“And somehow I remember people hitting my chest,” he told Jesus Calling Podcast. “And then I remembersuch aI somehowf vehicle. And then I remember waking up in a decompression chamber in a hospital. They’re slowly getting the pressure in my head back to the right level because I was basically going down too fast and going up too fast. I still had some problems, so just the fact that I’m alive is a miracle. The fact that I can talk and walk and think, I mean, I’m an actor. My job depends entirely on me being able to talk and think and listen and work. And so it really is a miracle that I’m alive, and I owe it all to God.”

God carried him then, and Hutch says God continues to carry him. carry him today. He is married and has three children.

“We know the story in the Bible where the big storm comes and everyone freaks out. They look at Jesus sleeping in the boat,” Hutch said. “When you look at Jesus, you know he’s sleeping in the boat, and you know he’s sleeping because he’s at peace. When you look at the storm, of course you panic because the peace is gone. So I look at my marriage through that lens. How do we raise our children? How do we handle finances? How do we handle our community, friends, strangers, our jobs? I mean, the list goes on, basically everything in life.”

Photo credit: ©Facebook/Jesse Hutch

Michael Foust has been covering the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.