Dreadful Accident, Cocaine, and Finally Jesus

“I say, ‘Mommy, I was dead in sin, but Jesus brought me back to life.”

By Andrew McChesney, Adventist Mission

Mervan Jaikaran, a machinery operator at a wood factory in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, was unconscious for four days and hospitalized for three months after a devastating car accident at the age of 7.

Jaikaran had been walking along the side of the road when the car hit him and dragged him for 50 yards (45 meters), ripping off the side of his face and inflicting deep injuries to his back.

On his third day in the coma, the hospital staff started to make arrangements for his death. But then he regained consciousness.

“Mommy says I was dead and brought back to life,” said Jaikaran, now 52, whose left side of the face is badly scarred. “I say, ‘Mommy, I was dead in sin, but Jesus brought me back to life.”

Jaikaran, one of nine siblings, was raised by a single Seventh-day Adventist mother after his father deserted the family. At the age of 11, he quit school and began to do odd jobs, unable to study because of brain damage sustained in the accident. He started smoking and drinking at 14 and eventually expanded to marijuana and cocaine. At 28, he married a woman whom he had met at a bar several months earlier. They had four children.

But Jaikaran kept using drugs, and he was involved in two more serious car accidents that required extensive surgery.

Weary of his drug use, his wife finally left with the children.

Jaikaran said he desperately wanted to change but couldn’t. On day he cried out: “Jesus, I want to change. But I don’t want my wife’s help. I don’t want my Mommy’s help. I want Your help.”

Hours later, he received a call from the director of an Adventist-operated drug rehabilitation center called Love Until Ready Center. He subsequently learned that his sister had contacted an Adventist pastor for help, and the pastor had called the rehab center.

Read also: Trinidad Truck Driver Gets Goose Bumps Over God

Jaikaran eagerly checked himself in for treatment. He was 46.

“The first change was from stopping the drugs and everything else that I was doing wrong,” he said in an interview this week. “Then I started to feel another change, a difference. I realized that Jesus had brought me to the rehab center to teach me about Him, so I could have the life that He had deserved to live.”

Progress was slow, but he claimed biblical promises in prayer daily. His three favorites were: “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You” (Isaiah 26:3, NKJV); “I will not leave you are forsake you” (Joshua 1:5); and “But seek first the kingdom of God and all His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

He also prayed for the Lord to bind together his family and simultaneously bind the family closer to the Lord.

“It’s a process. Nothing happened overnight,” Jaikaran said. “On the day that I came out of the center, I was still struggling — not with drugs but with getting back to my family.”

Jaikaran’s estranged wife came to pick him up and drive him to his mother’s house. But when she saw that he was a new man, she unexpectedly changed her mind and took him home. Both ended up getting baptized into the Adventist Church.

These days Jaikaran readily tells strangers and coworkers at the wood factory about his love for Jesus. In fact, he prays daily, “Lord, give me some more so I can talk about you.”

“I believe that the Lord brought me into this world so I can be a witness for Him,” he said. “Nothing is about me. It is all about Him.”

A portion of the the Thirteenth Sabbath Offering in first quarter 2018 will go toward constructing the first-ever church for the University of the South Caribbean in Trinidad and Tobago, which is part of the Inter-American Division. 2024 Fast Facts