"Jim Ford"
Lori and I took a trip to New York City to celebrate our eighteenth wedding anniversary in February 2001. We stayed at the Algonquin Hotel and planned to see the play Les Misérables on Broadway. One of the ShareValue partners wanted me to meet up with a friend of his who was a third tier Wall Street guy known for helping companies acquire capital. I agreed to meet him at the hotel in between outings with Lori.
Jim Ford was a total New Yorker type guy who loved the city. We talked for a while in the lobby as I explained the essence of ShareValue. By the end of the meeting Jim agreed to help us raise capital.
On my first morning back in Kansas City I got a call at five o’clock in the morning from Jim explaining how he had been waiting for two hours before calling me. He gave me his Bible verse for the day along with a mini sermon. He loved sharing Jesus, and he would call me every morning to share his inspiration or thoughts of the day.
Jim started introducing me to venture capital firms and angel investors. Our plan was well liked, and some key potential investors were lined up promising to keep an eye on us as we grew. We just needed to finish development and launch sales.
On one trip I took to New York, Jim and I had a very productive couple of days. I was to leave the next day to go back to Kansas City when Jim came to me and very soberly asked if I would pray for him. All he said was that he wasn’t feeling very well. We sat down to pray, and Jim took the lead. As I followed along, I had two visions. Jim paused and looked at me, handing the prayer time off to me. p>
Letting him know that I sometime get visions and that I had two while he was praying, I asked him if he minded if I share them. He agreed, seeming to be eager to hear me out.
The first vision showed on his voice box in a three-dimensional color what looked like the community chest from the Monopoly Game. The second vision was of a bone that had a crack in it. A shark was sticking its nose into the crack attempting to widen it, going backwards then taking a run at it again and again. Jim asked me if I could draw it and when I did, he started to tear up.
Jim exclaimed, “That is my neck bone!” He went on to explain how he had wrecked his truck a couple of years ago, got thrown from the windshield and broken his neck. He had walked out of the hospital within 90-days after refusing surgery due to the risk that he would be paralyzed for life. What had been otherwise a miraculous recovery had left him with a debilitating condition. He had been warned of the risk that it wouldn’t take much to do further damage his condition and he was suffering increasingly very harsh headaches. Sometimes spending days in bed.
Jim explained that he was to the point where he needed to have surgery, or the pain was such he wanted to kill himself. He said he had prayed repeatedly but he felt no release from God to have the surgery. He thought he might not be hearing right, and so asked me to ask the Lord about what he is to do.
The pain he was in showed but I was taken aback by his request. He pleaded and I agreed to ask the Lord on his behalf. In an almost immediate response, the Lord told me to “Tell him this, ‘I have preserved him for a day, and in that day, he will know it.”
My first thought was, “I can’t tell him this.”
I inquired again and the Holy Spirit repeated, “Tell him this, ‘I have preserved him for a day, and in that day, he will know it.’”
Jim looked at me and exclaimed, “You’ve heard something, tell me.”
I prefaced by asking him to not use me as his only source and he agreed. When I told him what I had heard, it was like a million pounds melted away. He smiled and said, “I can live with this.”