He just looked at me and grinned, kept going. Nothing's gonna happen, Mom...but suddenly, he stopped with a strange look to let me know it really had happened. He couldn't get the coin dislodged from his throat, and I pulled him over my knee and gave him some sharp whacks between the shoulder blades--I saw my mother-in-law do that with my toddler daughter once when she was choking after a meal.
At first, nothing happened, and Keima started to turn blue--I really thought I would lose him--but after awhile and another "whacking try", a wet coin came out of his throat. I realized both Keima and I were breathing after that.
It was several months before that, Keima's Christian cousins in the U.S. had begun praying for his salvation; and it was that Christmas, when my sister Joyce talked with him, Keima made a profession of faith. It's not like he had never heard the Gospel before. He'd heard it many times before but never appropriated it until then. And, I found out at Christmas camp that year, he gave testimony in his cabin before his peers that he had become a Christian.
A few years later, Keima, by then a 7th grader, had an accident that required a CAT scan, an MRI, and stitches--there was bleeding in the head that involved an ambulance and the school calling me to the hospital emergency area. Later on, when Keima was having his stiches removed, and we were sitting in the lobby, we talked.
"Remember that day you were fooling around with that coin?" I asked. He did. "If it hadn't come out, but you had died, where would you have gone?"
"Hell," he said, without hesitation.
"This time, it turned out okay, and with the stitches coming out now, you're going to be as good as new. But if it hadn't, and you had died, where would you have gone?"
"Heaven," he said, again, without the slightest hesitation.
Keima doesn't talk a lot. But he doesn't have to. He knows what he knows, and that's what matters.
