The Floyd’s always plan an annual getaway around the 4th of July at the beach, but this time they almost lost their 12-year-old son who was found floating lifeless in the water.
“In a second, I planned the whole rest of my life without him. I’ve never known a second could last that long,” says Lindsey Floyd.
Every year, Lindsey and Jarrett Floyd and their beautiful family head to Holden Beach, North Carolina to celebrate the Fourth of July with their cousin Leah Snyder and her family.
Jarrett Floyd says, “It was something we always looked forward to, something that we almost worked around for the year, looking forward to getting there every year.”
“For as long as I can remember, we’ve always done the 4th of July with my cousin and her husband. It’s our Snyder-Floyd beach trip.” Says Lindsey.
12-year-old Levi Floyd was playing in the shallow water with his cousin on the last day of their 2019 vacation as their parents watched them. Suddenly they saw Levi’s body floating motionless on the water.
His dad Jarrett says, “I grabbed him, and when I – when I grabbed him, he just – he just went under. And-and I immediately pulled him up and flipped him over, and uh whenever I flipped him, he was just – he was blue, purple. He was lifeless.”
“His eyes were bulging, and bloodshot, and his pupils were fixed. And in maybe a minute’s time, maybe if that long, he looked like he had been in that water for a week,” says Lindsey.
Thankfully, Leah, a nursing student, rushed and began CPR immediately as the family and others on the beach prayed. She says, “You can tell instantly that it’s – that it’s bad. You can see that he’s – there’s no life whatsoever, what I saw looked like something that wasn’t – that there was no hope.”
Lindsey says, “He was gone, there was no pulse, and I just start rubbing Levi’s feet and uh praying, harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life.”
“I just started begging God,” says Jarrett. “And-and I remember – I remember in that moment, it-it wasn’t – when I looked back, it wasn’t – it wasn’t pretty, it was, ‘Jesus.’ I just started speaking and-and praying the name of Jesus over him. ‘Jesus, please, have mercy on him.'”
Lindsey says, “To look at him laying there, dead, all I’m thinking was ‘God don’t you remember making promises to me, please in this moment, I’ve never needed you more. You give and take away. And there’s nothing that I can do other than ask you, please, to change your mind.’”
We worship a living God who listens to every prayer that we make in His name and miraculously within just a few minutes two nurses who happened to be on the beach rushed to the scene. They along with Leah administered CPR, but still, there was no sign of life in Levi’s lifeless body.
Leah says, “He’s never coming back. That is absolutely what I thought. I thought that he was gone. We were going, we were going nonstop. We were alternating between pushing his chest, and I would give breaths.”
Suddenly Levi’s sister Lily began singing and worshipping the Lord God of hosts. Lindsey remembers the moment, “She started flooding the beach with that chorus. Singing, ‘I’m gonna sing in the middle of the storm,’ louder and louder, and I heard, ‘The king is alive,’ from a shaky, loud voice. I mean, it was like an electric current from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head. I’ll never, ever forget it and I said, ‘Worship louder, babies, sing louder. Worship Him as loud as you can.’ And they just lifted up this chorus and sang with everything that they had.”
As others joined her in worship, everything changed and Jarrett says, “And all of a sudden you hear, ‘He has a pulse. He has a pulse.’ ‘Okay, okay.’ In that moment, the thing that came to my mind was, ‘He’s yours. He’s yours, God. We’re yours, God, forever, for always, he’s yours.’”
Levi was still unconscious as paramedics arrived and rushed him to the hospital, forty-five minutes away. The doctor met with Lindsey and Jarrett. “He told us, he said, ‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’ He said, ‘This-this thing can get a lot worse before it gets better.’
Because of the saltwater and because of everything that was going on, Lindsay and he were standing there. And she laid her hands on him, and started to pray and then the doctor at a hospital in New Hanover, stood up and prayed and began pleading the blood of Jesus over Levi in the hospital.
There was still a chance Levi may have suffered brain damage from so much time without oxygen. Lindsey says, “When they lifted him to move him from the transport bed into the PICU bed, he woke up, and he was my Levi. As articulate and precious as he’d always been. And he just sat up and said, ‘Hey, mama.’ And I come – I come unglued. And we looked at him and we said, ‘Buddy, you didn’t make it. Like you were – you were gone.’”
With the full sense of humor from his favorite T.V. show, he says, “I quoted something from the Andy Griffith Show. and I said, ‘You just got to have more faith in me, Andy?’ Gomer Pyle said it, and I thought it was pretty funny. And she-she lost it.”
“He’s still in the resurrection business,” says Jarrett. “He-He brought my son back from the dead. And it – and it doesn’t always work that way, but that day, this boy was dead on the beach without a pulse, he was gone, and the resurrection power of God brought Him back.”
He adds, “Prayer and worship were everything in that time. God put the right people in the right place, and that was the nurses, and that was the people praying, and that was the-the worship, that was it-it all. It all played into the plan that God had for us that day.”
“What we witnessed there was, it was absolutely the hand of God,” says Leah. “It really was, it was definitely a miracle. He shouldn’t have been as okay as he was, especially as soon as he was. It was unbelievable.”
“When all hope looked like it was lost. I’m very thankful that God spared my life that day,” says Levi.
“He is faithful. He is so faithful,” says Lindsey. “More than I ever could have ever dreamt. He’s faithful. There is absolutely nothing, nothing in this world that is impossible for Him. Absolutely nothing.”
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