Todd Morris stepped outside to take a smoke on the front porch of his sister’s house one day in 2000 and wound up in the belly of a whale.

He was 30 years old, pausing to savor a June evening “when it was getting nice” in a small town called State Line, Pa., where some of the houses are built just four or five feet from the road.

Suddenly, a passing minivan with a drunken driver jumped the curb, crashed through the porch and grabbed hold of Morris, dragging him beneath the vehicle some 450 feet along the road.

The driver kept on going “and sort of left me for dead,” Morris said this week.

What happened next is a miracle story – a series of miracles, really – that

hasn’t stopped.

Unlike Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish – the Bible never actually calls it a whale – Todd Morris has spent, as of this week, 1,189 days wrapped in a blanket of prayer, medical technology, Scripture, family support and love.

His father and mother had been contemplating a move to minister at Glad Tidings Church, Bangor’s oldest Pentecostal congregation, when the crash occurred. They did so, yet juggled and rejuggled their lives in the following months to minister to their son.

By 2002, Morris was able to join them in Bangor, where he met his bride and rediscovered music in his life.

Add to this his newfound faith and his own quiet determination, and it becomes clear why Morris is alive.

“Todd’s not going to just sit around at home,” said his wife, Sara Carley Morris, 32.

The crash on June 11, 2000, put Morris in a hospital in nearby Hagerstown, Md., where doctors confronted extraordinary trauma: a fractured skull, most of his right ear sheared off, mangled ribs, a collapsed lung, burns (from friction and the minivan’s engine), a crushed lumbar region, a damaged spleen (which they immediately removed), numerous gouges and unstoppable bleeding.

His parents, the Rev. Ron and Dixie Morris, are convinced one of the first miracles occurred when a procedural struggle broke out over whether their son was stable enough to be flown by helicopter to a shock trauma center in Baltimore. The helicopter nurse insisted, at professional risk, on the transfer.

After nine hours of surgery in Baltimore, doctors induced a coma, which lasted 40 days.

When Ron and Dixie Morris visited their son, he was nearly unrecognizable. “The only thing that told us he was our son was his nose,” his father told the Bangor congregation in his first sermon two months later.

Dixie Morris, who is a licensed practical nurse, and her husband chronicled their son’s hospitalization with photographs that show the devastation to Morris. Doctors at Baltimore opened his abdomen and found an artery that hadn’t been closed properly, “so it was just pumping blood inside, which just swelled me up,” Morris said.

A couple of weeks after the crash, he developed pneumonia in both lungs.

At least three times during Todd’s ordeal, his parents were told: “He’s not going to make it.”

When he awoke from the 40-day coma, Todd had lost much of his sight. “I had no body functions. Blinking my eyes was about as much as I could do.”

Ron Morris, who had been an evangelist the previous 14 years, passed the word to a large circle of churches, whose members began what he calls a covering of prayer. Ron and Dixie focused on Psalm 91 and read it aloud: “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.”

“This became the blanket, the comforter … that we laid across Todd,” Ron Morris told his congregation. “Todd

wasn’t standing for God when this happened.”

Morris puts it simply, too. He had fallen away from the faith of his parents. His experience changed everything.

“There was no reason for me to be alive still. But I knew why: He spared my life. So I gave it back to him.”

Why?

Todd Morris, a soft-spoken man, paused this week when asked if he gets angry about what happened.

“I can’t hardly say that I did. I was just so thankful to be alive. I mean, there’s times, if I sit and think, I swell up with emotion and wonder why.”

His father addressed the same question when he preached to Glad Tidings for the first time:

“In all the spiritual warfare I’ve done in my ministry, God has always taught me one thing: That when something like this happens, never ask why – although we did, we have to, want to, cry to, crave to. But if you ask why, you’re going to spend all your time trying to get an answer that will only bring you to the event anyhow. You already lived that event. … So it taught me to say, ‘what now?'”

After two months in Baltimore, Morris was moved to two rehab centers, then into his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. “I got released with 6 percent body use,” he said.

His mother became a working nurse again, and his dad began a two-year cycle of commuting by plane or car from Maine to Pennsylvania.

“I slept on the couch and he slept on a hospital bed in the living room,” Dixie Morris recalled.

“Anytime they’d get a report on Todd, they would search through the Bible and find some promise, some hope that would combat that and would just cling to that,” said Sara Morris, who had known Morris’ father before meeting her future husband.

Federal health insurance helped pay for some of Morris’ medical bills, his father said, but “we’ve had to bite the bullet on a number of things.”

Also worrisome: potential addiction to painkilling drugs.

“He’s a fighter,” Sara Morris said.

But repeated surgeries, complete with new skin grafts, tend to set back his recovery. And three years later, two surgical attempts to repair his abdomen have failed, and a third attempt is likely later this year.

Sara Carley Morris had grown up in New Hampshire and had taught at Faith School of Theology in Charleston.

She’s a musician, capable on the keyboard, on drums and in songwriting.

At Glad Tidings worship, she was one of the drummers. As Todd recuperated in Bangor, he picked up on the little bit of drumming he had done when he was younger. He began practicing weekdays on the black, steel-rimmed Yamaha trap set in the Glad Tidings sanctuary.

He can walk on his own, and his hearing is fine, but his restricted vision limits his mobility.

He doesn’t regard music as therapy, as such, but he sees it as something he can give back.

He and Sara, who is now the church’s missions director, got acquainted and were married this past Oct. 4.

“When I look at his life, I say, ‘You know it’s a miracle that he is what he is today,’ and I believe that the God who sustained him thus far … and who brought us together is certainly more than capable of finishing the job,” she said.