July 3, 2025 Show with Marc Grimaldi on “Lessons Learned from a Recent Close Call with Death”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this Independence Day Eve, Thursday, July 3rd, 2025.

I'm thrilled to have a returning guest who also happens to be one of my former pastors. His name is Mark Grimaldi. He's an author and currently the pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Whitehouse, Tennessee, which is in the Greenbrier, Tennessee area.

And we are going to be addressing the theme, Lessons Learned from a Recent Close Call with Death. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Mark Grimaldi.

Thank you so much, Brother Chris. It is always a pleasure to be on here with you. I really appreciate you and what you do.

I appreciate you saying that. And tell us more about Sovereign Grace Church of Whitehouse, Tennessee.

Yes. So Sovereign Grace Church, we're a small church, a Reformed Baptist church in Whitehouse, Tennessee. We currently meet in a storefront on Stearman Drive in Whitehouse. We have a website, too. You can look us up, which is www .sovereigngracechurch .org.

And you could see a little bit about us there. We also have our sermons that you can access there as well. But we are a 1689 London Baptist Confessional faith following church. And we would love to see anybody who is in the middle Tennessee area come and visit with us.

Great.

And I hope that they do. And tell us about some of the books that you have written.

Yes, I've written a few books. One is, interestingly enough, on OCD. We've actually done a program on that. I've struggled with OCD throughout the course of my life and ministry. And by God's grace, I've made great strides.

And so I wrote a book called OCD, Finding Hope on the Edge of Insanity. I've also written a book called Gossip, the Church Killer, which is dealing with the severity of gossip. Another book called The Christ, the Whole Christ, and Nothing But the Christ, a very gospel-oriented book just explaining the significance and importance of Christ being the center of our faith and contrasting that with Roman Catholicism and the cults and those that would deny faith in Christ alone.

And then finally, I had written a book called Evil and Suffering in a Sovereign God's World that's kind of like my theodicy. It deals with just the deep questions and difficult questions about the sovereignty of God and how that relates to the reality of the existence of evil and some of the very difficult things that we experience in this world.

And I'm assuming that the folks can get these books from Amazon?

Yeah, all those are available on Amazon. The Gossip one is presently out of print. I have a few copies on hand, but the other three can be accessed on Amazon .com.

By the way, I just want to say that when I just checked SovereignGraceChurch .org, it says website expired, but when I tried SovereignGraceChurch .net, it worked.

It's .net, brother. Thank you. Oh, okay. Yes, I got mixed up on that. Yes, it's .net. Yeah.

Thanks, brother. I'm glad that I checked that. And since you have OCD, you should have checked it 50 times.

I checked it several times, I know.

And so tell us about this near-death experience that you had. I can recall, you'll have to remind me of the exact day it happened, but I recall getting an email or a Facebook post, some kind of contact from your mother, Dale.

Pray for Mark. He's been in a head-on collision so far, thank God he survived, and he's just in a lot of pain, and that's all we knew at the time. But tell us about this terrifying experience that you had just recently.

Yeah, yeah. So what happened was, and let me say this too, that there are many folks, some that I know and some that you know, Chris, as well, who have perished or died in car accidents or motorcycle accidents, or some who have been severely injured.

And so with respect to the injuries that I've sustained, by the grace of God, it turned out to be very mild. But the accident itself was frightening, and some of the things that the police officer and the doctors had said would at least give me encouragement to see how God had spared me from much of a worse situation.

What happened was, I was driving home from work. I'm also a bus driver for a school district, and I do some driving on the side to help supplement my income with ministry. And I was driving home on a two-lane street.

One lane goes north, the other lane goes south, coming toward me. And at least in middle Tennessee, what you have on a lot of these roads are these, on the edges of the roads, like the side where the shoulder is, it's almost like they drop off into these steep hills and things like that.

It's something that I wasn't familiar with in New York. But here, you've got to stay on the road. If you go off the road, it can be a real serious problem because of the way you go off the side. Well, as I'm driving, I'm heading north, and there's a woman who was driving a minivan coming south toward me.

And I noticed as I was driving, we're about 40, 45 miles an hour on this road, so we're both going about that speed, I would assume. She had somehow lost control of her vehicle. I don't know exactly why, but she went off the road and into that gully on the side and went all the way up on the side of the hill there very fast.

And then she had tried to, so I noticed that as she's coming back, trying to get back on the road. But as she tried to get back on the road, she overcompensated, I think she got nervous and turned the steering wheel a little too hard and wound up going not only on the road, but came right into my lane and hit me head on.

So we had a head-on collision at that point. And then what happened was, the immediate sense for me was when it happened, because the airbag goes off and there's smoke in the air, and that's like a big punch in the face from the airbag.

But I had trouble breathing at first, just from the hit, I think from the airbag, from the both of us hitting each other and coming to a complete stop. As you know, when you have two forces hitting together head on like that, it knocks the wind out of you.

And so I was really trying to breathe. And in the immediate sense, I didn't even know whether I would live, what was going to happen. I knew I'd sustained some kind of injury in my shoulder, my chest, and could have been from the seatbelt as well, and the impact.

And so my immediate reaction was I wanted to get my phone to call my wife, because I thought that I just didn't know at that point how severe the damage was, or if I would even live. I was in shock. So I picked up the phone as best as I could, and the smoke was in there from the airbag.

This is still while you're in the car?

This is in the car, yeah. Yeah, I'm still in the car at this point. And so I'm sitting there. And by the way, I happened, this would be good news to James White, I was listening to James White. My phone was playing some James White, some of his podcasts on the side.

So he was in the accident with me, in some sense. But my phone flew. I picked it off the floor, and then I tried to get my seatbelt off. And I just had all this pain, difficult, like I said, breathing, this airbag all over the place.

I'm in a CRV, so it's coming, there's airbags coming down from the sides, the front. And then I heard some voices from outside. So some folks must have, I know there were folks driving behind me who had seen the accident.

In fact, the guy behind me, praise the Lord, had a video camera on his windshield that videotapes everything that's going on in front. So he had the whole thing on video, which was helpful. Not that the woman was gonna lie, but it just secured the evidence that I was in my lane.

And so I heard somebody calling out, you okay, this and that. And then they opened the door, and I still couldn't really move too much. Again, I was just, I didn't know what the damage was. And so I called my wife while I was there in the seat, and spoke to her a little bit, and just said I was in an accident.

She was obviously frantic, she didn't know how bad it was, and was asking if everything was okay. And then the guy on the outside of the car says to me, hey, let me help you out of the car. Now, I'm not a doctor, but generally I'm thinking you're not supposed to move unless the car's on fire, when something like that happens, in case there's some injury to your back, or something like that.

But the guy helped me out, and then I just sat on the ground, I couldn't even, I couldn't look at the damage or anything, or see how the other person was. And then when they came, they took me away in an ambulance, and just went to the hospital.

So that was kind of the immediate accident as to what happened, when I didn't know yet as to how severe the damage was or not. But when I was in the hospital, the police officer who came, he was actually a state trooper, because it was just outside of the city limits, so it wasn't the jurisdiction of Portland where I live, it was beyond that.

So the state trooper came into the hospital to ask questions, obviously we couldn't answer them at the scene. And so he had said when he saw the car, which I hadn't seen yet, because I was just on the inside of it, he had just said that he had thought when he saw me that it was going to be a lot worse, when he saw the car, what it looked like.

Yeah, your mother told me that the police were shocked that you survived.

Yeah, I think it was more of, yeah, I think the language is just that he thought that it looked like it could have been a lot worse, like this looked like it really was bad, yeah, in that sense. So, yeah, along those lines.

But easily it could have gone, I guess, in any direction in that sense. When the doctor took my scan of my, you know, my body, he did, the doctor did a scan from my waist to my head, an MRI, and they said it was amazing and you could see the Lord's hand in on it.

The doctor said with that kind of an accident, every little movement that's made, and especially in a head-on accident, is critical. And one tiny move in one wrong direction can really, you know, you can have internal problems, organs collapse or serious broken bones and things like that.

But the doctor had said that it was like the perfect situation. Like when they looked at the MRI, it was like the best case scenario because there wasn't any major internal damage. There was some bruising on the bones, the muscles, obviously, the whiplash and all that and, you know, things like that.

But it turned out to not, it turned out to be a best case scenario for that. So I was thanking the Lord for that. But that's kind of how the general way that the accident had gone.

Facing Death, Regret, and God’s Sovereign Hand

Now, when this woman was coming directly at you head-on in the same lane, did you have even time to think? Was there any kind of terror in your mind of, this is it, I'm coming home to Jesus?

Yeah, well, when she swerved off the road, like I said, I saw her because she was going fast and she kind of went off. I didn't think she was going to, I thought she was going to come back on and kind of or either slow down and stop in the gully, you know, the ditch that she was in, or she would come back on the road and kind of in her own lane and, you know, just keep going.

So it was kind of a last second that I just realized when she came back on the road and I saw her coming, you know, again, we're going about 40, 45 miles an hour. And I saw her actually coming at me. It was really, yeah, it was, there was no time.

I mean, I didn't even have time to even swerve. It was just, it was so unexpected and instant when she hit me. And then, like I said, right after the impact, I was so out of breath. My immediate sense was, man, this, I was just saying, I think I was just saying, oh, like, oh, oh, like in the sense of like, I didn't, like, I just didn't know.

I didn't know if I was going to live at that moment. Like it just, you know, again, because of the impact, the wind being knocked out of me. And, and then I just, at the least I thought I was going to be seriously injured.

Like that's how I felt immediately from it. But that's also from the shock they were saying, and also from the impact of the airbag, the seatbelt, even I had an, when I went to the, to the hospital, if you looked across my chest, you could see like a, a, a, a red, you know, lining, like really pronounced across my whole body from the seatbelt and across my stomach.

From the, from the belt. So the, so the belt and the airbag did their job well. And in fact, probably are the cause of some of the, some of the, obviously the injuries that I have, you know, that I sustained, but, but overall it, it, we found out after that, that it wasn't that bad, thank the Lord, the way it turned out.

But yeah, I thought, I thought for sure, at least if I wasn't dying, I was saying to myself, this is, this is life changing, you know, and that was why the immediate, my immediate response was, I wasn't worried about whether or not I was going to be with the Lord at that moment.

I was more concerned about, you know, just not having time to be able to say goodbye to folks. You know, it was just that kind of an instantaneous leaving the world. And you, you know, you know, my wife, my kids, church, you know, family, loved ones, that was the bigger concern at that moment that I was really, you know, upset about, if anything.

I understand that one of the eyewitnesses heard you scream out moments before impact, why wasn't I nicer to Chris Arnzen?

That's right. I wasn't going to bring that up on the radio program, but, but yeah, that, that was the very last thing I said. I said, you know, all those times that I've said those, those mean things about Chris and made fun of him, and I can't even do anything about it now.

But the, just to let everybody know, to put them at ease, we're not joking. While there are people that are killed by this incident, the other, the woman who was driving the other vehicle is apparently fine, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. My concern too was in the hospital. I didn't know who was in the other vehicle originally. I kept saying he, because I just didn't know if it was a man or a woman or if there was more than one person.

Uh, but when I was in the hospital, um, in fact, I asked the police officer, I said, how was the other person? And he said that they had sustained some, some minor leg injuries. So they seem like they were okay.

And again, I didn't know if that day was singular or plural, but what happened was about two or three days after the accident, I had to contact her insurance company, um, to, you know, to, cause I need another vehicle and just to get, can get things processed as far as a K a case, you know, uh, I, um, you know, get that process with their insurance.

So when I, when I, when I looked on the, um, her form, the forms that were, were, uh, the police report, I had noticed that her insurance company was very vague. It wasn't, something wasn't, wasn't written correctly about it.

So I had her phone number on the document and I, it was her husband's number and his insurance. So I said, I'm going to call him and ask him for the insurance. Cause I needed to file, you know, the, the, um, information, um, with them to file a case.

Um, and so when I called, she picked up her husband's phone. Um, and it was on the, it was until I looked at the police report, by the way, that day that I realized it was a woman. So it was like two, three days later, I realized it was a woman, a Spanish woman.

And, uh, and she was, you know, when I spoke to her on the phone, I said, how are you doing? And she said, she, she was doing okay. How am I? And she said, interestingly enough, Chris, she said that my husband and I have been praying for you.

And I had, well, I want you to know, I said, I want you to know I was praying for you as well. We prayed for her in the heart, for them in the hospital as well. So near this woman seemed like, you know, she could very well be a Christian and, and expressed her desire to make sure that there was nothing broken.

And so thank the Lord. She seemed like a real sweet person.

Oh, praise God. And, uh, obviously the Lord wants you to stick around, uh, at least a little longer on this earth, uh, to use your ministerial gifts and your, uh, gifts as a spouse and parent.

And actually Chris, just real quick, I hate to cut you off, but I think the real reason I still had to stick around is because the grass wasn't mowed yet. No, I'm grateful brother for that. What you're saying that, uh, you know, I, I think I've, I've become more convinced, not just from this, but over, over time that the Lord really doesn't need, doesn't need me at all.

You know, uh, and you know, we all know that, you know, that God doesn't need any of us, we're all expendable in that sense, but because it's in his will to, to do things a certain way, you know, he, he uses us and, and, uh, so yeah, I, from, from that positive standpoint, I would say he's not done with me yet, but, but, uh, but I definitely know that, that if, if he had taken me, you know, he would, he would fill everything up the way he sees best and, and could do even better, you know, if he wanted to, um, as well.

Yeah.

Well, if you notice, I said he wanted you to stick around. I didn't say he needed you to stick around. And, uh, it is interesting that, uh, every Christian, uh, would immediately say after learning of someone's, uh, being spared death after something like this or any other kind of accident or, uh, illness that they recover from, they would, whether they are Calvinist or Minyan, not even, uh, truly regenerate, but have some kind of a belief in God.

Uh, they would typically say, you know, uh, well, God has spared my loved one, et cetera, but if the, uh, if the tragic circumstances were that you had perished in that accident, uh, outside of the Reformed faith, there would be very few Christians who would be so ready, uh, to, to say that God had foreordained that too, God had orchestrated that, God was in that.

And I don't understand for the life of me why Christians find comfort in thinking that God is just watching something like that happen and not personally, intimately involved in it.

God’s Sovereignty, Human Responsibility, and the Cross

Yeah, brother, I agree with you a hundred percent. I, they, they're obviously in their own mind. They're trying to, um, to, to vent, to vindicate what they would see as an attack on God's goodness, you know, and fairness or man's free will.

And, but there's no comfort in that. I mean, I, I, we had somebody in our church recently, in fact, we've had a season of death in our church. Different folks have lost loved ones who were so precious to us.

And we had a, a precious young couple who was, um, infant child had gone home to be with the Lord, um, from an, from an illness that was picked up, um, after a few weeks of being born and, um, and boy, you know, I, the, the couple as well, I couldn't imagine telling that couple that that was something that, you know, well, you know, God didn't really plan to happen and it, you know, it happened and, and, um, you know, but God, you know, God, it's, it's not really, you know, it's nothing that has to do with God, it's just, you know, we live in an evil world and, you know, there's no comfort and it's almost purposeless and it gives no sense of hope.

And knowing that even, you know, in every situation, when God brings someone home or whatever happens in the world, um, God has all of that is, is being used by him and ordained by him for a, for a good purpose so that when we get to heaven, um, they'll be able to say, right, and we'll all be able to say that was the best thing.

Um, I mean, we know it in theologically now, we say, we can say that now, but we'll, when we're there, we'll be able to see even in some sense that that was the absolute best thing, um, to happen. Um, John Calvin, when he lost a child, I believe at birth, he had said, um, afterwards, and I'm not saying this was the easiest thing for anyone to say, but he'd say, he said, I'd have it no other way, you know, because, because he knew that it was, it was necessary, um, for God's will to, to unfold in that way, um, I find a lot more comfort in knowing all these things, even the evil ultimately is going to bring glory to God, right?

He's not evil. He doesn't mean it for evil, but even all the evil things done in this world will play a part in bringing about the glorious, you know, um, the glorious reflection of, of God's character and his beauty and what he accomplishes and how he uses even that for good, it will bring him praise, that's a lot more comforting to me than to say, well, you know, this kind of slipped between the cracks or, you know, the devil kind of got a home run here, but God's still up by three runs, you know, I just, there's no comfort in that at all.

Amen.

Lessons from a Near-Death Experience

Well, we're going to our first commercial break and when we come back, I'd like you to go through some areas that, uh, could be considered lessons you've learned or at least powerful reminders. And as a result of this near death experience, obviously, obviously that since you had very minor injuries does not mean that when you consider what happened, this could easily have been, uh, a horrible phone call that your wife received, that she has to come to identify your body because those kinds of, uh, automobile accidents are very often a certain death sentence.

So, um, but, uh, we would love to have your thoughts on how, if in any way at all, this, this changed you or what kind of impact it had on you. And, uh, if you have any questions, those of you who are listening, uh, please call us at, uh, not call us, please email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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We're now back with Pastor Mark Grimaldi of Sovereign Grace Church in White House, Tennessee. And we do have an email from your parents, Mark, from John and Dale in Portland, Tennessee, thanking God that he spared Mark.

He lives right next door to us, and his grass was getting high. Seriously, seriously, when we were driving home from picking Mark's daughter Faith up from work, we received the call about the accident.

We could only pray loudly. So yes, many were praying right then and there, thanking God for saying yes to our prayers. If it had to happen, what better evening than Wednesday night when many churches gather for prayer meeting?

And then she says, or your parents say, I'm not sure who wrote this specifically, but it says Mark's words. I guess that was.

The last sentence. Yeah, yeah. I said, if you're going to get into an accident, a Wednesday's the best time to go through something. You've got the prayer meetings going on. So yeah, there were a lot of people.

As you know, Chris, I mean, the fact that you had reached out to people, I appreciate that. They contacted several people. When I was in the hospital, again, there were a lot of unknowns. I had thought, to be honest, that my clavicle, my left clavicle by my shoulder, I thought it was broken for sure.

While we were waiting and assessing the different aspects of if there's any damage, the doctor was concerned about where the belt mark on my stomach, if there could have been damage to some of the organs or your intestines and things like that.

So while you're waiting there, my father was there. He had come with my wife, and my daughter actually works right near the hospital. She works in a place right over there. So she left work and came there.

But while we were there, there was kind of an unknown for a time period there of trying to assess what the damage was. Also, because my body was still in shock, I didn't know. You just don't know. In fact, real quick, it's interesting because after a day or two where all the pain was on my left upper shoulder and in that area where I thought there was so much damage, a lot of that went away quickly.