Lying in a hospital bed, past ninety, face peaceful, eyes failing, J. I. Packer could hear his nurse’s footsteps but her face was a blur.

Staring down at his hollow cheeks, rail-thin legs, the patch of skin stretched across the awkward dent on the side of his forehead, she asked a question, he didn’t answer, she asked again, Packer mumbled, I’m thinking but I’m also dying so it’s taking longer.

Six days later he slid into a coma.

Raised in a small town in England during the Great Depression, when he was seven years old, waking up in a strange bed in a hospital, staring into the semidarkness, Packer thought he was in Grand Central Railroad Station in New York. He wasn’t. He’d never set foot in New York City. Turning his head he saw his mother sitting beside his bed – only it wasn’t his mother. It was a nurse wearing a blue uniform.

Being chased by a bully, fleeing out of a schoolyard, running across a street, he got hit head-on by a truck – at the hospital a surgeon, staring down at his fractured skull, the hole in his forehead, picked pieces of bone out of his brain.

The next time he woke up he felt no pain. At all. Felt healed. Unable to tell if his brain was damaged the doctor handed him an aluminum plate to strap across his head to cover the hole. He had to wear the plate every day – boys at his school mocked him.

A railroad clerk’s son, not having the money to go to college, during World War II fate handed Packer a scholarship; working as a librarian he sorted books by Puritans, listened to C. S. Lewis lectures, graduated. For a year taught at a small school in London – attended All Souls Church, listened to John Stott preach. Two strangers became friends.

Packer went back to Oxford, studied theology, was ordained, but being a pastor wasn’t his calling. He took a job at another school. Met a nurse, fell in love, married.

Watching his church roll downhill, faith waning in the modern era, digging in his heels, Packer joined arms with Stott, landed in fights with bishops and archbishops.

An awkward speaker – saying the word Chris-ti-an in three syllables – but a rare thinker, rising before dawn each morning, sitting in front of an old-fashioned manual typewriter he started writing books. Found his calling. Packer’s book Knowing God sailed off bookshelves not just in England – in America.

Tom Ellis – we went to the same church – gave me the book years ago; I gave it to my children years later.

An old-fashioned Christian, J. I. Packer believed sin was more powerful than he was. He couldn’t escape it. Or overcome it. Only God had the power to do that.

When he was eighty-five years old, rewriting his book Rediscovering Holiness Packer told a story: How his 200-year-old grandfather clock, a musical clock with a built-in carillon played tunes, two known, the other two – that sounded like country dances – unknown. Forgotten over the years.

Like those tunes, he wrote, the old Christian teaching of holiness has been forgotten – he added rebuilding the road to holiness would be a blessing.

How’d he see that happening?

He started by telling the story of a nun, Teresa of Avila, on her way to a convent during a thunder storm, falling down in the road, struggling back to her feet covered in mud.

To be continued…

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Telling stories, in his memoir Carter Wrenn follows The Trail of the Serpent twisting and turning through politics from Reagan to Trump. Order his book from Amazon.