Richard Kidd, staff pastor at Kempsville Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, tells this story:

When I was in college, a group of us met together regularly to pray in our dorm room. We bonded. We knew everything about each other. And so, when we came back to school after spring break, we were shocked to find out that John, my roommate, had had a terrible skiing accident and was in a coma in Maine.

We began to pray. We prayed with all of our might, and we received a call from his neurologist. He said, "We feel like John's brain stem injury, which has caused this coma, may be helped if he could hear some of the sounds he ordinarily hears. Could you put together a tape of all of John's favorite sounds?"

So we gathered together and put John's favorite music together. We told all of the bad jokes we ordinarily told, and we did all the crazy things college guys do together. We put it all on the tape. And at the end, we prayed and we wept.

When they played that tape for John on the sixth day of his coma, while people were praying across the state and across the nation, John came out of his coma.

And though the doctor said he would never walk correctly or go back to school, John Swanson proved him wrong. He even began to run again. He ran 60 miles a week. He graduated from William and Mary and became a personal research assistant for Al Greenspan.

We were in community, and community did John's body good.