Imagine waking up from a coma and realizing you’ve been handed a second chance at life. A chance to fix what you broke. A chance to rethink what really matters. A chance to tell the world something you never thought you’d experience. That’s the story of Jim Woodford, better known as “Diamond Jim.” He built his life on ambition and success. Money shaped him. Wealth defined him. But everything was about to change in a way he never saw coming.
“Diamond Jim,” his wife Lorraine said, was the kind of man who believed, “Nothing was too big of a problem. He could fix it.” That was who he was. Strong. Confident. Certain. But Lorraine, a devoted Christian, quietly hoped for something deeper in him.
She prayed often. “God please change his heart. Bring him to know Jesus Christ and just make a change in him and deal with this materialistic way.”
Time went on. His wealth increased. So did the distance between him and the people who loved him. At night, when everything was quiet, he would lie awake and think, “Is this all there is?”
The question wouldn’t leave him alone. Then at 61 years old, everything shifted. He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome. Rare. Incurable. The pain that followed was relentless. He described it as “unremitting, electrical current pain in every part of my body, accompanied with paralyzing inability to move.”
The pain changed him. Lorraine said, “He was just getting to be a very angry person. The pain was just consuming him.”
Yet even then, he never reached for God. He later admitted it himself. “Never once, and this speaks to the arrogance, did I reach inside or look up to the sky and say, ‘God, if you exist, help me out here.’ Not me, not Diamond Jim.”
In April 2014, Lorraine prayed something different. She was tired. Worn down. Still believing. “God, I’ve been praying, but I haven’t seen any change. Maybe you just have to break him to remake him.”
Later that month, everything unraveled. Jim took more than four times his dosage. Soon a burning sensation spread through his legs. Breathing became hard. Panic set in. With what little strength he had left, he cried out, “God! Forgive me! Forgive me!”
When he didn’t come home, Lorraine called the police. They found him unconscious in his truck. He was rushed to the hospital. Doctors told her the worst. Severe brain damage. No signs of brain activity. Organ failure.
But while machines hummed and people whispered in hospital hallways, Jim says something else was happening. “I look to the right and there’s this incredible vista of beautiful flowers and meadows. And I turned my vision to the left and that beautiful green grass went from green to brown to scorched to black and dropped off in a crevasse. I saw the most hideous creature you could ever imagine. And I fell back in abject terror. But at this point, I turned toward the light and I cried out, ‘God, help me. Help me!’”
He says three angels came. They carried him through heaven. Then he saw Jesus Christ. “I realized I was looking at none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of God…I had no answer…But as I looked into His eyes and He smiled at me. He knew me. I saw such intense love and forgiveness for me, for me who deserved nothing. And that was the moment…I was His forever. Whatever was about to become of me, I was His. I-I-I loved Him and He loved me.”
He didn’t want to leave. But he says Jesus told him, “’Go back and tell your brothers and sisters of the wonders we have shown you.’ Suddenly I’m in a cold hospital room on a gurney, screaming at the top of my lungs. Scared the daylights out of some of the nurses!”
Lorraine knew immediately something had changed. “He was focused on Jesus. And he became much gentler,” she said. Jim still lives with the markers of Guillain-Barre syndrome. But the pain is gone. And now he tells anyone who will listen about salvation in Jesus Christ. He says it plainly: “You have to open the door of your heart to let Him in, and the door of my heart has now been opened.”
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