Featured Story

"The Lord is my Rock"
by Bola Ige
May 16, 2025

As a little boy in Nigeria, I always wanted to be close to  God, but I didn’t know how. My parents taught me how to pray in the Islamic way. We prayed five times a day, every day, together at home or in the mosque. I had to memorize Arabic to communicate with Him. I couldn’t even understand what I was saying in Arabic, let alone enjoy an intimate relationship with Him. I was not personally experiencing God’s presence at all as a Muslim.

I was the type of person who was always getting in trouble. As a teenager, I went to school in the big city of Ibadan, but because of my misbehavior, my dad sent me to school in the village as punishment. He knew no one enjoying city life would want to go to school in the village. There was no fun there. It was all about schooling, farming, and hunting.

My dad had a friend who was a teacher and lived not too far away from us. Every Sunday afternoon, we left the city and took a truck to the nearby village, about an hour’s drive away. Every Friday, immediately after school, we returned to Ibadan to spend the weekend with our families. On Sunday, it started all over again.

One sunny Wednesday, right after school hours, I decided to run away. I walked through the bushes behind my school to the main street, where I caught a ride back to the city. I was congratulating myself on my escape when an oncoming truck swerved into our lane and slammed into our vehicle. The impact sent our vehicle airborne, over the bridge and into the deep water below.

I was the only survivor.

I swam toward a rock jutting out of the river. I managed to climb onto it and sat there, waiting until paramedics came to rescue me. They took me to the hospital, but I did not have a single cut, nor was I in any way injured.

I would have died had I not held on to that rock. God was present with me even though I didn’t genuinely know Him.

Fifteen years later, as I was reading my Bible, the Lord suddenly seized me with the fullness of His power. I heard His voice and saw myself in the deep water, struggling to reach the rock.

When He released me, I didn’t understand what had happened, but He spoke to me through scripture. He showed me Psalm 18.2. “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”

That scripture revealed to me that God was at work in that accident. He reached out to me in the form of a rock in the middle of the water and saved me. Jesus was my Rock.

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