T.D. Jakes Reacts to Daughter's Near-Fatal Neck Injury I NXT Chapter with T.D. Jakes

But we were going way faster than we needed to go, about a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty miles an hour.

And he had the pedal to the metal and I had it too.

And he decided to break off because he said he knew I wasn't going to quit.

And if I hit that turn that fast, I wouldn't have made it.

So he backed off because sometimes it's, it's better to be alive than to win the race and the other person be dead.

That quick thinking, that momentary decision has a lot to do in our lives.

But there are times that it's not a matter of decision or choice, it's happenstance.

It's fanciful.

It's almost like a, a fairy tale.

It's almost like a spell by the wicked witch and you find yourself in a situation and you, you can't find anything in what you did that made it happen.

It just simply happened.

Every year, every year in this country, emergency departments in the United States treat over two hundred thousand injuries, unexpected injuries related to trampolines, as simple as that, with a significant portion involving severe spinal cord traumas, fractures, dislocations, and yes, sometimes even death.

A toy, a tool that was made for family enjoyment and exercise and movement and vitality and laughter and bouncing the ball back and forth and leaping up in the air and telling jokes and having fun can turn into an instrument, uh, an instrument of cruelty in a moment's notice if you're not careful.

For families navigating these sudden crises, the psychological toll of near-miss tragedies often trigger acute stress and a profound reevaluation of mortality and faith.

You don't really realize how close you live every day to death until it comes near you, around you, or around someone you love, and then you stop complaining about the rain outside or the skies are gloomy or I don't feel like getting out in all this traffic when you recognize that you are blessed to be alive, to be here.

I want to share, uh, uh, a story that happened to my youngest daughter.

Uh, she and her husband are succeeding me in pastoring the church and liberating me to be able to do some of the things I'm doing with you and some of the things that I'm doing to build our communities and some of the things that we're doing in other areas to start more businesses to prepare us for the days ahead because there is a thin line in the days ahead between life and death.

There's a thin line between the people who hear the warning bell and keep on doing what they're doing and the group of people who hear the warning bells and make the changes that are necessary to escape.In New Orleans, there was a thin line between the people who left and got away and the people who couldn't leave and the people who just didn't leave because they thought they'd seen it before and it would happen like it happened before.

But none of us knows that once a thing is started, how it's going to finish is an uncertainty that only heaven knows for sure.

This particular day, I was going in one direction, my wife was going in another.

The kids are all grown.

They all live their own lives and have their children and, and they're enjoying their lives just the way they're supposed to at their age.

And we got that dreadful phone call that no parent wants to get, that my youngest daughter, Pastor Sarah Jakes Roberts, was out there on a trampoline playing with her kids, trying to make sure that she balances her life, her work life and her rest life and her family life and trying to be everything and cover everything and have a good time so that the kids don't grow up and resent a parent who's a workaholic or a preacher-holic or a business-aholic or whatever it is.

It's so easy to get the parenting quotient wrong.

She works so hard to balance all of that out so that they get mommy time and not just pastor time, so that they get daddy time and not just preacher time and she was busy doing that.