“As soon as the branch hit the wire, there was a quite large fireball from the electricity. I never saw what happened coming. I do remember thinking, ‘Am I dying?’”
Tim Williams has run his own tree service business for over 20 years. What happened on June 15, 2009, nearly changed life as he knew it.
“It was like any other Monday should have been, and I had everything lined up. We got situated, got started, everything was going as planned.”
Tim was trimming branches from a tall tree, something he’d done hundreds of times. But then the branch hit an electrical wire.
“And immediately I felt the sensation of electricity without even touching the branch because the current was going through the branch into the rope. The only thing that was going through my mind was try to figure out how to make it stop. So I thought that if I could just reach out and grab the branch and pull it off the wire, that would do the trick. But that’s when things went from bad to worse.”
As Tim took hold of the branch, 13,000 volts of electricity shot through his arm.
“I just repeatedly said, ‘Help me, Jesus! Help me, Jesus!’ over and over I don’t know how many times because I knew at that point it was really bad. I got myself turned around in a position where I was going to try to grab this arm like this to try to help pull. If I had touched this arm with my other hand it would have gone through my heart and that would have been the end. My eyes started rolling back into my head. This is the image I had just before I blacked out. I was this close to touching this hand. I just think that was God saying, ‘No, not yet.’”
His assistant immediately called 911. Tim lay there waiting for help, wondering if he would ever see his wife and eight children again.
"I remember thinking, 'This is it.’ I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing my family again.”
The amount of electricity that passed through Tim’s body, 13,000 volts, was enough to kill him instantly or at the very least shatter his bones. Tim suffered second and third degree burns and was rushed to the burn unit. Doctors grafted skin from his leg to cover his burns. After eight days, he was released to go home.
“When I saw my older kids come in for the first time, I absolutely lost complete control of my emotions. At that moment, I went back to the point in the accident where I was losing consciousness and thinking, ‘Is this it?’ It was too much. I couldn’t handle it. You know, I was so grateful to be able to hold them.”
As grateful as he was, new challenges arose: Tim was the sole breadwinner, and now the Williams family had no source of income.
“I was out of work for three months, where I wasn’t able to do anything. It was a heavy blow to our finances, and we’re still dealing with that. But the Christian community, people in our church, even outside of our church, we were so blown away at how the Body of Christ came to our aid.”
Eventually Tim was strong enough to return to work, but he chooses to stay out of the trees and keep his feet firmly planted on the ground.
“I’m basically a subcontractor. So I basically am in the sales end of things now. I know in my heart that when I said, ‘Help me, Jesus,’ as it was happening, He really did. Even though the injuries were fairly severe, it should have been a lot worse. I just hope through this whole process that somebody can understand that God’s real. And that God has our best interest at heart.”
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