Carlos Idun-Tawiah
And this happened a few years ago..
The emotional soccer star, 24, was speaking for the first time since he collapsed and died on the pitch in front of millions of TV viewers.
Fabrice Muamba, a devout Christian, said: “I am walking proof of the power of prayer. For 78 minutes I was dead and even if I lived was expected to have suffered brain damage...But I’m very much alive and sitting here talking now. Someone up there was watching over me. On the morning of the game I prayed with my father and asked God to protect me — and he didn’t let me down"
Hear his story and be inspired:
“On Saturday my dad called me at the team hotel and we prayed together like we always do before games.
Hear his story and be inspired:
“On Saturday my dad called me at the team hotel and we prayed together like we always do before games.
“We weren’t saying prayers as such but I remember asking for God’s protection — it’s something that we often do on the phone.” Muamba’s father Marcel, a 45-year-old Tesco shop worker from Walthamstow, East London, was at the fateful cup tie.
Marcel, who fled political oppression in the Congo in 1994, told how he begged God to spare his son. He said: “I was taken to the intensive care unit straight from White Hart Lane in a police van.
“I was obviously very concerned that Fabrice would not make it but our faith is very strong and I really believed God would answer my prayer to save him. Inside the van I remember calmly turning to the Bolton chairman Phil Gartside and saying, ‘Fabrice will be fine’. He probably thought I was crazy.
“But somehow I just knew Fabrice would be safe in God’s hands.”
Once inside the hospital, Marcel locked himself inside a toilet cubicle for five minutes praying intensely. He said: “I told God, please take care of everything.
Then he went into Fabrice’s room with the star’s heartbroken younger half-brother Daniel, 12 — who had also been at the match. Marcel held Muamba’s cold, limp hand and whispered in his ear.
He recalled: “I told Fabrice, ‘I know you are listening to me. I am telling you that you will come out of this hospital through the front door not the back door.
“Then I said to God, ‘You are the one who resurrected Lazarus from the dead. Now in this moment glorify yourself.’
“People around me at the time were amazed by how calm I was after I prayed and how sure I was that Fabrice would be OK. They thought I was blocking things out and just refusing to let myself believe my son was going to die because I couldn’t accept what was happening.
“At that stage many people believed even if he survived he would end up brain damaged and could never be his old self.
“But I was calm because I had put my trust in God. And God did not let me down.”
Believe. Goodnight.
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