This Christian CEO Reveals How a Tragic Loss Only Strengthened His Faith

10 years earlier, I met my wife on an oil rig. I was a geologist, working on a well, she was an engineer. I had spent 11 years in college, going full time including summers, and never heard the message of the gospel. My parents, sister, and brothers were completely unchurched, and I actually did not know the meaning of Christmas or Easter, and certainly did not know who Jesus Christ was. I can’t say I was an atheist – I simply was a non-theist.

So, when I met Pat, and she told me the gospel, it was like Paul on the road to Damascus. I instantly recognized the truth of the gospel, and accepted it, and Jesus Christ became the Lord of my life.

Pat and I had two wonderful children, Ann and Stephen. Ann was bright and brilliant; I called her “chum” and she was indeed a good friend, even as a young child. Stephen learned checkers at 3, and I could not beat him. He learned chess at 4 and could think 3 moves ahead. He got blacklisted from the church teenagers’ chess club because they couldn’t beat him.

It was a textbook, perfect marriage. All three, even Stephen at 4½, had acknowledged Christ as their Savior and Lord.

Then, at 10 AM on Friday, August 21, 1992, they were stopped on a highway for another accident, and a tanker truck never slowed down, hitting them and killing them instantly. The state police somehow found my pastor and brought him to my office, where he told me of the accident. I fell to the ground when I heard it.

Job 1:20 tells how Job also fell to the ground on learning of his family’s death. Job “fell to the ground and worshipped,” it says. The Hebrew word for worship in that verse is shachah. He fell to the ground and shachah’ed. I would not at the time have called it worship, but it certainly was shachah, the deepest, most profound form of total worship.

In the ensuing days, God drew himself closer to me than ever before or since. My pastor spent days with me, and commented that God’s presence was so real that you could almost see His footprints in the carpet. I had to convince my atheist sister, whom I love and who was a great help to me, to stay, as she was packing to leave because she felt the pressure of conviction by the overwhelming presence of God.

I am thankful to God that I was prepared by His Word, His presence, and 10 years of leading by the Holy Spirit, and that I understood my family passed not from life into death, but from death into life.

I am often asked, “How did you make it through that time?” If we could look back on our lives to find the “best” time of our life, and if we could do that from a divine perspective, I think most Christians would agree that the best time of our lives is the time that God was closest to us, and we were closest to Him. While not perhaps from a human standpoint, the time following my family’s accident were clearly the time God drew himself closer than ever to me.

So, there is a very real sense in which those months were, from a divine standpoint, the best time of my life.

God indeed redeemed the situation by giving me yet another perfect family. My wife Jeanne, and my children have enriched my life beyond words. I wonder where they will be 20 years from now. My one blood-line child, Abigail, has the mantle of centuries of amazing people, not the least of which was my mother, with whom she could be a twin.

Shachah. It is the word used of Job. David, when he learned of his son’s death, tore his clothes and shachah’ed. Abraham went up the mountain to slay his son and shachah. Look what happened.

There was a multi-million-dollar settlement from the trucking company. Every spare penny of that settlement went into the early days of Covenant Eyes, founded in 2000. By 2002, I couldn’t afford a cup of coffee at McDonalds; while I was selling door-to-door, I would ask if I could get a cup of coffee. The deadline for paying the electric bill was the shutoff date.

Now that Covenant Eyes is debt-free and profitable, our mission has grown. Starting out with the mission of “changing people’s lives,” it grew to “measurably changing culture.” We have had some success at that, but now, our mission has grown even further, “to change history.”

Imagine yourself being an apprentice in the 14th century to a man named Gutenberg. Your wages might be 10 cents a day. You go home at night and eat dinner with your wife every night. You come back to work the next day, and continue setting type, inking the press, pulling the lever, putting the pages of the Bible together.

Little do you know that this piece of equipment will change history. It is the invention of the millennium, allowing the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, etc., etc. Until about 2000, there had never been a single more important invention than the Gutenberg press.

But, 4000 years from now, people will look back on this very time – the lifetime of every reader – as the most significant turning point in the history of man, apart from the life of Christ. We are in the midst of the birth of the internet, wireless technology, and explosion of computer technology, and true artificial intelligence.

The amazing thing is that each of us in his own way is the apprentice…each of has the potential opportunity of actually having an effect on the outcome of that history.

So, given the legacy of my family’s life and death, I consider it an honor and burden to take advantage of that opportunity. With Covenant Eyes, we have the opportunity to make pornography and sex trafficking taboo once again.

Editor’s Note: From monies received in a settlement with the trucking company responsible for the accident, Ron DeHaas created the first internet accountability service, Covenant Eyes, in 2000. Covenant Eyes (www.covenanteyes.com) is his family’s legacy, and now provides accountability and filtering to more than a quarter million people in 150 countries, also providing a wealth of free educational resources (see for instance http://www.covenanteyes.com/ebooks).

I have seen several since then.

My Mom in Law had aplastic anemia. He bone marrow shut down and she made no blood of her own. We think she may have been exposed to a Benzene release as some trees in their yard died about the same time this happened. Either way she started with a rash under her skin as her capillaries were bleeding under her skin. Her biggest immediate problem was she made no platelets. She would have to live on transfusions as there is no cure. If she was younger, she might have qualified for a bone marrow transplant. She had a total of 4 bone marrow scans and they found NO bone marrow anywhere each time. The transfusions were the only thing keeping her alive.

Her insurance wouldn't pay for the transfusions so she agreed to take experimental drugs to get a government grant to pay for the blood. She joined a group of 19 in Galveston John Sealy hospital. As time went on she started to reject one donor after another till there were only 2 left she could take. This was an 18 mo. experience in hell for her. Her liver and gall bladder swelled to the point she could only wear a hospital gown as the transfusions were rejected and flowed out of her organs. At one point, her platelet count was down to 2000. Normal count was 100k. You are considered a hemophiliac at 20k and she was 2k. They called us to the hospital to say goodbye to her.

All 18 others in her group had died except her. Her eyes were bleeding, her gums were bleeding. She was bleeding out of her nose and ears. They told us they were going to try to give her one more bag of platelets and then give up. She had stopped the drugs 6 months before as they did nothing to help and in fact made her worse. They gave her the platelets and she went to 70k. They called the blood bank to ask the donor to give more. They said yes. The donor was anonymous. They could have said no way. They have to go downtown Houston and pay for parking and get a needle in one arm to get the blood out, and get another needle in the other arm to put everything back except the platelets. I believe this person to be an angel in human form. They gave and gave but eventually we were told the donor got sick. My Mother in Law had a destroyed hip due to the experimental drugs injected into her hip. The bone had dissolved and the ball fell out of the joint. Now she can't walk and is bedridden and screaming in pain. She even said to let her die.

The hospital decided she could qualify for a hip transplant but I was so cynical, I thought they just wanted another check from the government and would let her bleed out on the table.

The morning of the surgery, her platelets were at 20k. Their plan was to shoot a bag of platelets in, operate, and then shoot in another bag and hope for the best.

My wife heard from the Holy Spirit that she should pray for her specific need. We had been praying for miracle drugs, other doctors, new discoveries, you name it, we prayed for it. As she was being wheeled into the OR, she prayed for one stem cell of Jesus' bone marrow. she felt that was the only thing left we hadn't tried.

She came out of surgery and the doctor said she was fine. We asked how much blood they had to give her. He said none! At the end of the operation, she had 75k platelets! We asked how that could be and he said he didn't know. He had no answer.

I was there, watching and hearing all of this. I was 43 and never had been living for the Lord. I had head knowledge of Jesus, but was not aware these things could really happen. I'm 66 now, teach Sunday school at my church and have home Bible study. I have witnessed diabetes healed and other smaller things healed, from pulled muscles to migraines stopped. I have other testimonies from finding keys in a 2 acre lot covered in leaves, to getting rusted bolts out of lawn mowers I had worked on for hours. If you round off a bolt head and have no tools to get it out, and you pray a simple prayer for help and the next tool you put on it grips it ands turns the bolt, it's a big deal for me. We have had words of knowledge revealed to us and other supernatural things happen all the time. Many of us don't give credit to God when things go our way, but He wants to bless His children. In my home Bible study group, one lady has an aunt with cancer. We pray for her each time we meet and anoint the lady with oil for standing in for her aunt. He tumors are getting smaller and 2 of them have disappeared. Someone might say her treatments are working. I give glory to God either way.

You may have seen several miracles but since it could have happened naturally, you think it wasn't God's hand. God doesn't owe us anything. He gave all on the cross. But He loves His children and wants us to live well in a world that Satan runs. One thing to realize is, what we see all around us is NOT reality. Heaven is reality, it's forever. This place and everything that's in it will burn up. Many pray for money or health and don't get it thinking God has abandoned them. We will leave this planet with nothing from here. If we die at 8 or 80, we all belong to God. We won't even remember this when we are with Jesus in Heaven. Getting to Heaven is the key. There are so many that will hear,"I never knew you" when we cry out to Him to let us in.

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