In October of the year 2000, a young Artie Jacob Alexander walked the mountain behind his father’s house in Berea, Kentucky, looking for a cave. He carried a borrowed rope and a young man’s certainty. He thought he was going to find gold.
The cave dropped straight down into the ground. The locals had a name for it. Artie’s father had a warning for it. Artie didn’t listen.
What happened in the dark down there became the testimony he has been telling for twenty-five years. This is that testimony, told as he tells it — in his own voice, lightly stitched together from the recording.
The Warning
Before he ever reached the cave, something stopped him on a flat rock on the way around the mountain. A weight, a pressing, what he calls the spirit of the Lord.
I felt to fall down on the rock that was there. Flat rock. And I felt like I had to bow my knees. And I couldn’t say. Lord, I don’t know what this is. But Lord, please shield me — both spiritually and mentally — please shield me.
A voice answered him. He didn’t recognize it then for what it was.
The Spirit of the Lord spoke to me, and He told me that I would find God.
He took it naturally. Some God. Maybe the kind a man could carry out in his pocket. He went on toward his father’s house to borrow another length of rope. His father was crying.
Don’t go to that cave. He said, I had a dream last night that you got hurt. You wasn’t there — but you was hurt.
Artie went anyway.
The Fall
He and his brother-in-law tied the rope to a tree at the mouth of the cave and started the descent. The first fifteen feet they could manage by walking the wall. Then the wall rolled away, and the rope swung free in the middle of nothing.
His companion went first to scout. He came back up shaking his head. The bottom is farther than it looks. There’s no wall to brace against. The rope is in the middle of the room. Artie went anyway.
I was slipping. I could tell. But I had a real good grip on the rope.
Realizing he wouldn’t make the bottom safely, he tried to climb back up. His arms gave out before his hands did. He called up through the dark to his brother:
I don’t think I’m gonna make it.
He doesn’t remember the rest. He passed out before he hit the ground. His brother — watching from above — saw him slip into a dive.
That’s when I hit ground. He said when I hit the ground, he heard me gasp a couple of times where the breath went out of me. And he said — he just knew that was dead.
His brother climbed back out of the cave and ran across the mountain trying to find help. He heard a chainsaw working in the woods, ran for it, found another brother of theirs cutting fence-line. Word went out. Rescue was called. Nobody knew where the cave was.
It took four and a half hours before a cousin who knew the location could lead them in.
The Voice
Artie was face-down in the dirt at the bottom of the cave. He didn’t know that his right lung had been punctured. He didn’t know that his right shoulder was fractured. He didn’t know that his right leg was broken open with bone bared. He didn’t know anything. He was unconscious.
And then the Voice came.
He says to me — He says, stand up.
I didn’t move.
Third time He says it again. Stand up.
Artie’s words about that voice:
It was a loud voice. It was just calm and peaceful, but yet so powerful. I felt the Spirit all through me when He was speaking to me.
He pulled himself onto his feet. He was spitting up dirt and blood and what he later learned was lung fluid. He kept clearing his mouth. He looked up. Way up above him — way, way up — he saw the small bright opening of the hole he had fallen through.
He understood then what had happened. He understood how close he was to dying.
And I began to make bargains. I said, Lord, please don’t let me die down here. Please, Lord, don’t let me die down here.
The Voice answered with a single sentence that has shaped the rest of Artie’s life:
I got a work for you to do.
The Wall
Sunlight had threaded down through the trees and through the mouth of the cave and was lighting one section of wall. The Voice spoke again.
Walk over there. Lean your back against it.
He walked — on a leg that should not have carried him. His heart was racing. His breathing was coming hard and shallow. He was bleeding to death and didn’t know it. The Voice came one more time:
Just take a deep breath, and be calm.
He took the breath.
It’s like I went off into — I guess, a cold asleep. Still no pain. Still didn’t know what kind of damage was done.
The Rescue
By the time the rescuers reached the lip of the cave, four and a half hours had passed. Artie’s cousin Keith — a nurse practitioner — was lowered down on the same rope Artie had used. He came across Artie standing against the wall.
Keith reached for the side of his neck to feel for a pulse.
I said, Lord, You’re going to let a dead man talk to me.
Keith couldn’t feel a pulse. He spoke anyway.
Look — are you okay?
They strapped Artie to a stretcher and pulled him out of the hole. They carried him across muddy mountain to a waiting helicopter and flew him to the trauma unit at the University of Kentucky.
The Verdict
Punctured lung. Bruised ribs. Fractured right shoulder. Right leg broken open at the bone. Surgery to put the leg back together. Screws in his femur he can still feel today. The doctors gave the family a number when the family asked when he might walk again.
Four to six months.
He was in his second month, on crutches at home, learning how to use them with a fractured shoulder. Walking through the living room one morning, he heard the Voice from the cave for the third time.
Let them crutches go. And walk.
He set the crutches down. His daughter was sitting on the chair across the room. He took a step. And another. He walked.
When he finally went back to the doctor for the standard range-of-motion test, the doctor lifted his leg expecting to see maybe a few inches of return. Artie reached up and pulled his own knee back to his chest.
The Calling
Two years later, sitting in church one night and thinking about the cave — about the Voice that had said I got a work for you to do — Artie finally asked the question he had been avoiding.
Lord — what’s my purpose?
The answer:
I want you to preach my gospel.
He pushed back. He hadn’t finished his schooling. He couldn’t hardly read.
Me, Lord? You sure You don’t mean somebody else?
The Voice did not change its mind. The Lord taught him to read.
He would preach through me — words I didn’t even know was in the Bible.
That was twenty-three years ago. He has been preaching ever since.
The Gold
He had gone into the cave looking for gold. He came out with a different kind.
There’s one gold I found. It’s not gold that you’d hold in your hand — it holds in your heart. The riches of glory. The riches of the power of God.
The gold I have for Jesus Christ will last forever.
A live caveman. God cleaned this caveman up.
That night at Pony Express Holiness Church, after Artie sat down, the pastor closed the service with the verse Artie’s life had become:
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony.
— Revelation 12:11
Then, gentle, as if explaining to a child what kind of man this was:
You remember when I told you to stand up. You remember when I told you to be over there against the wall. You remember when I told you to breathe and be calm. He’s reminded to overcome that devil by the word of his testimony — because he found God down in that cave.