Last year, Pastor T.D. Jakes says he “almost died” after experiencing an unexpected health scare mid-sermon last November.
If anyone knows anything about miracles, it’s pastor T.D. Jakes. In a new interview with the Today Show, the megachurch pastor reflected on his recent onstage health scare and revealed the cause of the medical emergency.
“I didn’t really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance,” Jakes told the outlet. “And [I] fussing that it happened onstage, by the way, because I didn’t want it to happen, and the doctor leaned over my ear and said, ‘You had a massive heart attack.’”
On Nov. 23, 2024, the Potter’s House Church leader experienced an unexpected heart attack in the middle of giving a sermon onstage. Reportedly pausing and beginning to shake in the middle of his message, many began to speculate about what happened to Jakes and the state of his health.
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say,” he continued. “No numbness, no sharp pain, no anything. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I almost died.”
And he’s not being dramatic. The megachurch pastor recalls doctors telling him that if he had arrived “five minutes later,” he would have been “dead on arrival” as the right side of his body had completely stopped getting blood. At the time of the incident, Jakes had been standing while preaching and eventually sat down while delivering his message. It was at that moment that Jakes remembers starting to feel like something was off physically.
“As long as I was up preaching, I felt fine,” he said, reflecting on the life-threatening moment. “But when I sat down, the adrenaline dropped, and it exposed the fact that I was preaching with half of my heart closed through a clot. And they had to go get it.”
“It’s hard for me to look at that video. They had to claw the microphone out of my hand. But in my mind, I was in a quiet, peaceful, serene, white-enveloped, cloud-enveloped space,” he added.
Days after the incident, Jakes released a statement to his fans on X, in which he described the incident as an event that “could’ve been fatal if it weren’t for God’s intervention.” He followed that written statement with a video posted to Instagram on December 1.
“Many of you don’t realize that you’re looking at a miracle,” he told his Instagram followers. “I faced a life-threatening calamity. (I) was rushed to the ICU unit. I had emergency surgery. (I) survived this surgery. Yeah, I’m back.”
Jakes eventually returned to preaching on New Year’s Eve, during which he admitted to having anxiety, “standing in the same spot [he] almost died in.”
“Frankly, I think I did, but God, in his infinite wisdom and great grace, brought me back to the same spot,” he said during his New Year’s Eve sermon. “I was in the emergency room and said, ‘Lord, what are you doing? If you’d have waited five minutes, it would have happened, and nobody would have seen it, but you did it on an open stage where everybody could see.’”
Just as he thanked God for his recovery then, Jakes continues to share that same gratitude for the incident today.
“I was on my way out,” he continued. “Afterwards in retrospect, it was such a privilege to stand on the other side, to get a little glimpse of what it might be like, or at least what it was like in that moment for me. I think it was absolutely amazing.”
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