This is Jenny Allen and you are listening to the Made for This podcast.

Well guys you are in for a treat Johnny Eric Santata is here and I am so

excited to have you Johnny and to hear your story so let's start in the

beginning in case somebody has not ever heard you before or

gotten to be a part of your ministry before. Talk just a little bit about your life and ministry.

Well for our listeners who haven't heard my story. I was a 17 year old back in the late 60s and

just fresh out of high school graduation and ready to go off to college

and decided to take a trip to the Chesapeake Bay with my sister Kathy for a swim.

Went to the beach, put down our towels and jumped into the water and swam out to this raft and took a deep dive and what I thought was shallow water.

Immediately my head hit the bottom, a sandy bottom that snapped my head back and it crunched my spinal cord at the fourth cervical level.

Immediately, having severed my spinal cord, I became a quadriplegic, unable to use my hands, my legs, I could not write myself,

I could not surface from my dive, I was face down on the water, ready to drown.

But thankfully, my sister who was also in the water her back

was turned to me she did not see that I had taken that dive but a crap bit or toe And at that instant she quickly turned around in the water to scream to me to watch out for the crabs.

And of course when she did, she saw that I was in trouble.

She quickly came swimming and reached under my chest, dragged me up from under the water. I was spitting and sputtering, breathing and gasping and having just been a candidate for drowning I was never so happy to breathe oxygen but

when I saw my arm slung over my sister's shoulder and yet I could not feel it I knew something

awful it just happened and that plummeted me into a journey of deep, dark

depression when they told me I would never walk again, never have use of my legs,, never ever be able to use my hands. I would be totally

paralyzed for the rest of my life. It was a terrible, difficult day.

Were you walking with Jesus at that point? I was I was at some

point I was but you know what Jenny Jesus was kind of like tucked in my back hip

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