John Smith surrounded by family

Doctors fighting to resuscitate a 14 year-old drowning victim say the boy’s heart mysteriously started beating again just seconds after his mother invoked the Holy Spirit.

FoxNews.com is reporting that a teen named John Smith walked out onto what he thought was a frozen Lake Sainte Louise in Missouri when he heard the ice crack and suddenly plunged into the frigid water. Thankfully, he was with friends who were able to get help but by the time rescuers arrived, John had already been under water for 15 minutes and no longer had a pulse when he was pulled out of the water.

Doctors at SSM St. Joseph Hospital West tried to restart the boy’s heart and worked on him for 27 minutes without success. In total, he was dead for 45 minutes.

Dr. Kent Sutterer, the attending physician, said he called for the boy’s mother, Joyce Smith, to deliver the heartbreaking news that her son had not survived.

However, the minute Joyce entered the room, she burst into prayer.

"I don't remember what all I said," she later recalled. "But I remember, 'Holy God, please send your Holy Spirit to save my son. I want my son, please save him.' And they hadn't been getting a pulse at that time, so all of a sudden I heard them saying, 'We got a pulse, we got a pulse.'"

Sure enough, as Dr. Sutterer later explained, "Within a matter of a minute or two, his heart started again."

Everyone in the emergency room was shaken by what they had experienced, including Dr. Sutterer, who wrote a letter about the event as a way to help himself cope with what he believed was an inexplicable event.

"His heart was jump started by the Holy Spirit listening to the request of his praying mother," reads Dr. Sutterer, from the letter he wrote.

However, Dr. Jeremy Garrett, who is in charge of John’s recovery, takes it a step further. "It's a bonafide miracle," he said.

As Dr. Garrett explained to KSDK, he knew within the first 16 hours after the boy was airlifted to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center that his body would definitely survive the ordeal, but what about his brain function?

Within 48 hours, John had not only opened his eyes but was responding to questions about his favorite basketball players.

"So I did a very interesting neurologic exam," says Dr. Garrett. "We said, well John, pretend your left hand is Lebron James and your right hand is Michael Jordan, then asked him a series of questions and he got them all right. It's truly amazing."

The teen’s recovery has been steady ever since.

"To watch your son sit up and amaze the doctors, the neurologist comes in and says, we don't know what to do next because we've never seen this before," says Joyce.

"I know it doesn't fit into our neat little box of today," says John's father, Brian Smith of this miracle, "but again, you can't refute the clinical evidence."

As for John, he knows exactly what happened – and Who to thank.

"I'm surprised I'm alive but it's a real miracle that I'm alive, and I thank God I'm alive, and there's a reason I'm alive,” he said. “So I'm just going to kind of follow what God has in store for me throughout my life."

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