Who was that white-haired man? Stranger’s touch and prayer heal grieving father

by Pringle Franklin

YEMASSEE, S.C. — It was Friday the 13th when Jerry Blewer fell 10 feet from an elevated bucket on a farm tractor. Lying beneath the tractor’s front wheels, dazed and feeling throbs of pain, Jerry knew he had seriously damaged something.

“It all happened so fast,” Jerry recalls of the accident in July, 2018. Sadly, Jerry’s painful injuries from fractured ribs were part of a pattern of grave misfortunes involving him and his family.

Four months earlier, on Saturday, March 10, 2018, Jerry and Mia Blewer’s eldest son died from a gunshot wound.  Jeremy, 19, accidentally shot himself with a handgun while hanging out in his bedroom with a female friend. The girl had been looking at her mobile phone when the gun suddenly fired. Jeremy was not supposed to have the .25 pistol, but sometime earlier he had snuck it out of his parents’ bedroom.

Fishing rods and firearms are a routine part of life here in rural Colleton County. The Blewers work and live on a large hunting property teeming with wild turkey, deer, duck, bass, and even snakes. Naturally gun safety had been taught, stressed, and practiced. Despite the precautions, teenagers often feel invincible, and the unthinkable had happened.

According to friends, the night before Jeremy died, he had been outside shooting at the dirt. The next day, he toyed with the handgun shortly before going to grab lunch with friends. The gun’s clip was empty. Presumably Jeremy thought the pistol was unloaded. But a single bullet remained in the chamber.

Jeremy was taken by helicopter to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where he was pronounced brain dead. There was time to donate his organs. Jeremy’s heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver gave life to others through Sharing Hope S.C.

“I think his heart was on a flight out before I left MUSC,” Mia says. “I feel bad for those people who are not able to get the opportunity for their loved one to be an organ donor. That has really helped me along, to feel like Jeremy lives on, so to speak.”

That ray of light didn’t lift the dark clouds of intense grief. Thankfully, they still had Jared, 14 months younger. Their family of four had been reduced to a family of three, and there was nothing anyone could do to fix it. Not a single hour passed without the agony of missing their oldest child. As if that wasn’t enough, the physical aches and pains from Jerry’s accidental fall left him barely able to move. It was almost too much to bear.

A mysterious stranger literally stepped out of the woods, touched his chest, and prayed away Jerry’s pain.

Yet some weeks after Jerry fractured his ribs, a mysterious stranger literally stepped out of the woods, touched his chest, and prayed away Jerry’s pain. Now Jerry and Mia ask themselves: was this white-haired healer a holy man or — had Jerry been touched by an angel?  

Either way, the timing was synchronistic. Jerry regained the use of his body, stabilizing their struggling household, one week before another close family member would die unexpectedly. Even now, at times their loss can feel staggering.

“We don’t know how we can ever get through it,” Jerry says. “We couldn’t do it without God.”

***

On that unfortunate Friday, Jerry had almost finished a day’s work trimming trees on Big Survey, the plantation he manages near Walterboro. As Jerry sat high up in the bucket, his friend drove the tractor. They had completed this job many years without any hiccups — until now. Freakishly, one of the cut limbs fell and hit the driver on his knee, causing his foot to slip off the clutch. The vehicle jerked. In the commotion, Jerry spilled out of the bucket, fell, and fractured four ribs.

Jerry was left in constant pain, pain so intense that he could not drive, lie flat, bend down, or extend his reach in any direction. He had to sleep sitting up in a hard-backed chair. The pain of movement tortured him.

“I couldn’t do anything,” Jerry says.

“He couldn’t even make one little small step down from our kitchen into our den,” Mia recalls.

Things had gone from bad to worse. In the past three years, Jerry’s father had died of pancreatic cancer; a close friend crashed his motorcycle and died. And then came Jeremy’s tragic death.
“

Who knew that this ordinary act of leaving a colorful signature on a chalkboard would take on such significance.

The day of Jeremy’s memorial service, Mia, Jerry, and five or six others each had a signature tattoo etched on his or her left wrist. The tattoo artist styled the design after a memo-board where Jeremy and some of his buddies had each signed their names with a flourish. Who knew that this ordinary act of leaving a colorful signature on a chalkboard would take on such significance. Jeremy had wanted a tattoo, but his parents would not allow it.

“I told him the only tattoo he could have would be one that said Mom,”  Mia jokes. Instead, his family and friends wear his name now. Mia had the artist incorporate Jared’s name, and a fishing hook as well, because Jeremy was happiest being outdoors.

Once he and a buddy caught a small alligator, taped its mouth shut, and carried the unhappy gator into the house to show his mom. She sent them straight back to the watering hole with that creature. No one lost any fingers in releasing him. Jeremy’s sense of humor, adventurous streak, and handsome smile won him many friends.

“He was very sociable,” Mia says. “He had dated just about every girl in his high school.”

Instead of a dour funeral, Mia, Jerry, and Jared held a celebration of Jeremy’s life, complete with videos, home cooked barbecue, and a live band, in the large tractor shed behind their home. Jeremy and his friends had been known to sneak into the shed’s loft for grins. It was hard to believe that, instead of their vivacious boy with his big brown eyes, Mia and Jerry were left with Jeremy’s ashes. The ashes were nestled in a wooden box which Jeremy had built in shop class. He’d also built an altar-style cross which stood nearby like a guardian.

SAfter graduating from Colleton County High School in 2017, Jeremy enjoyed the hard, physical work on the plantation. He often helped his mom and especially enjoyed taking care of the horses. “Jeremy was definitely my helper. He did a lot.”

It didn’t feel right without Jeremy, but his family searched for the courage to carry on. Mia gave Jared his older brother’s fishing tackle box after she felt Jeremy telling her that he wanted Jared to have it. Yearning to stay connected, believing Jeremy could hear her, Mia continued to talk to her late son as if he were in the room.

“Jeremy was my best friend,” Mia says.

They shared an open, affectionate relationship, often punctuated with belly-splitting laughter at some antic or another. Mia had been able to tell Jeremy anything. She still needed to talk to him, particularly about Jerry’s difficult convalescence. He was dependent on his wife, but Mia felt she lacked the right temperament to be a proper nursemaid.

“Whenever I get sick, Jerry takes very good care of me. He waits on me hand and foot,” Mia says. “He’s great about that kind of thing. I am not, and I felt so, so bad.”

Mia prayed to God and asked Jeremy to please send help for his dad. Because Jerry was in terrible shape.

***

After his fall, Jerry was sent home from the local hospital in Walterboro with a large supply of narcotics. Normally Jerry avoided taking such medication. This time the painkillers didn’t seem strong enough; Jerry was barely able to move. He called on Mia to help him with even the routine tasks of everyday living.

“I never saw Jerry in this much pain,” Mia says. “We couldn’t get him comfortable anywhere.”

As plantation manager, Jerry’s work required active movement, from feeding five frisky bird dogs in the morning to managing fields to guiding hunting parties around the property. Suddenly Jerry was limited to office work. Mia was working three times as hard to cover for the loss of Jeremy and for Jerry’s disability. Despite the extra load, she still had to complete her own chores.

Now her day began with Jerry’s normal task: feeding the energetic pointers used on the property to hunt quail: “I was scared the bird dogs were going to knock him down.”

Mia never slowed, raking out flower beds, spreading fertilizer, picking up fallen branches, washing out kennels, feeding and watering the horses, putting them out to pasture. By evening, Mia would have built up quite an appetite, but couldn’t get a good meal. “I was starving.”

The family chef was Jerry. “The pain was so bad, I couldn’t pick up anything. I couldn’t reach up into a cabinet,” Jerry says. “I couldn’t fix dinner.”

Mia cried in despair when Jerry wasn’t watching.

“It was overwhelming. I was grieving terribly, and I felt so helpless for Jerry,” Mia recalls.

If Mia was too exhausted to prepare a meal, then she would drive half an hour into Walterboro to buy some take-out food for the family. After driving back and eating, she would return outside to the plantation chores, winding up her work after midnight. Mia cried in despair when Jerry wasn’t watching.

One day she was driving her husband home from a doctor’s appointment in Beaufort. As their pick-up truck rattled along the road, Jerry shouted out in pain, startling Mia.  “If he hollers, it kind of goes right through you,” Mia says. In her thoughts, Mia turned to her late son for aid and comfort.

“Oh gosh, Jeremy, we need to find your Dad a healer,” she silently requested, half joking, half serious. She would repeat that request many times.

***

The miracle happened during the first week of August. Jerry needed to go to the bank in Walterboro, and that meant he had to take his pick-up over three miles of bumps and ruts on the plantation’s dirt road. After that, he had to drive another 20 minutes or so on a weathered country blacktop to reach town.  “It was only the second time I had driven the truck since the accident, and the first time I had been off the plantation on my own,” Jerry recalls.

As his truck hit pits along the unpaved road, Jerry winced in pain. But he kept going. Not long after he reached the black top, a man dressed in hunting clothes stepped out of the woods, into the center of the road, and flagged him down. “At first I thought, is someone going to rob me?” Jerry says. “I didn’t know what was happening.”

When Jerry stopped, the man walked over to his window. He appeared to be a hunter of about 70 years old, wearing an orange cap, an orange vest, and camouflage pants. He was clean-shaven, with glasses and a head of white hair.

The hunter told Jerry he was from Florida. He had been helping friends install deer stands on their property. “He said he’d locked his keys in his pick-up truck. He said he didn’t even own a spare key, and his phone was in there.”

Behind the man, Jerry could see the antenna of a parked vehicle sticking out of the brush near the woods. The hunter drove a Chevy, so Jerry suggested he take the man over to the local dealership. Perhaps the Chevy folks could cut him a key if he brought his VIN number.

Before long, Jerry and the white-haired man were headed toward town. As two men chatted, Jerry noticed that the stranger spoke in an unusually calm manner. He was soothing.

“Then we hit a bump, and I grabbed my side and hollered.”

“What’s wrong with you?” the hunter asked.

Jerry told him about the accident. “I can’t stand it, it hurts so bad.” Jerry winced.

“Do you mind if I try praying your pain away by putting my hands on you?” the man asked.

Jerry had grown up in a Christian family, but after moving to the plantation in January 1999, the Blewers had given up the church habit. Despite his recent sufferings, Jerry believed in God’s power to perform miracles. “I’ve always felt that He could heal or do anything,” Jerry said. “But we just got so busy with everything else.”

Jerry agreed to receive prayer. The hunter reached out, touched Jerry’s chest, and began speaking aloud to God. Jerry was in too much pain to focus on the exact words being said. He silently prayed along in his own way, lowering his head and partially closing his eyes.

“Not you! You’re driving,” the man spoke up.

“I’m peeking at the road,” Jerry reassured him. Soon the prayer ended.

“I hope you feel better.” The hunter seemed sincere.

Jerry thanked him, but he did not feel any different.

Jerry left the stranger at the Chevy dealership, took care of his business at the bank, and then circled around again. Coming out of the dealership, the man shook his head. The Chevy guys had not been able to cut a key. Jerry offered to take the man someplace else, but he simply wanted a ride back to his truck.

“I didn’t see how that would help anything, but he said he’d be fine.” Nothing unexpected occured when he dropped off the stranger. Jerry had no clue that anything extraordinary had taken place in his body until he turned back onto the dirt road of Big Survey Plantation.

Jerry could move without pain.

“Soon I was hitting those bumps, and I thought, hey! My ribs don’t hurt no more.”

When he parked and climbed down from the truck, Jerry realized: he could move without pain. The man’s prayers for healing must have worked! Jerry burst into the house and found his wife.

“Mia, look at this!” Jerry squatted low and stretched out his arms. “I don’t have any pain! Look at this!”

Mia laughed in wonder. How had this happened? After hearing Jerry’s story, she began to weep with relief. She confessed to her husband that she had been praying every day to God — and talking to Jeremy.

Jerry was healed. That night, for the first time, he was able to return to his bed to sleep.

“I haven’t taken a pain pill for my ribs since that day,” he says.

Since then, Jerry has asked around to see if anyone in the area has information about the mysterious deer hunter from Florida. “No one knows who he is,” Jerry says.

Whenever he drives past the spot where the man’s truck was parked, Jerry looks over in the brush. “But I’ve never seen anyone else in that area,” he says.

The healer remains a mystery. But the timing of the unexplained event is clearly divine.

About a week later, on Aug. 13, 2018, Mia’s mother died unexpectedly. Mia was very close to her mom and relied on her as a confidant. She wonders if she could have handled that loss without the balm of the miracle healing.

“I felt that Jeremy…or God was listening and probably knew,” Mia says, “that I was about to face another blow with my mom and thought, somebody better do something quick.”

Mia would like to find the man who healed her husband. “I’d like to know if he can heal a broken heart,” she says.