ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) — John Smith was going through a rough patch in his life.
But then he fell through the thin ice on a lake and died. After that, everything got better.
Smith, of St. Charles, was 14 years old in 2015 and out of school on Martin Luther King Day when he and two friends were goofing off on frozen Lake Sainte Louise in Lake Saint Louis.
Then the ice gave way beneath them.
Smith’s two friends fell in but quickly escaped; Smith was underwater for 15 minutes. When rescue workers found him, he had no pulse.
Paramedics and doctors at what was then called St. Joseph Hospital West performed CPR. Smith’s pulse returned 43 minutes later, just after his mother, Joyce Smith, came into the room and began to pray out loud.
The Smiths say that prayer made the difference.
A movie about his experience, “Breakthrough,” opened last week in theaters nationwide, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“It’s just a blessing to be alive and to be able to see it on the big screen,” said Smith, who is now 18. He spoke by phone from an airport in Los Angeles, where he had been doing publicity for the film, on his way to board a plane to New York, where he would do more publicity.
The emergency room doctor who first treated him that day had never seen anyone survive without a pulse for more than 25 minutes. Even when his heartbeat restarted, the doctors thought he would die soon or suffer severe brain damage.
“I don’t know why. I’m 18 years old. I’m glad (God) chose me, but I don’t understand why,” Smith said. “God has a plan for my life just as he has a job for everybody.”
Smith is an accidental celebrity, someone who has become famous for what happened to him rather than for something he specifically set out to do. So much attention at such an early age often leads to an over-inflated ego — especially if one is apparently on the receiving end of a miracle.
So how does he keep from having a swelled head?
“(The movie’s producer) DeVon Franklin put it better than anybody. He said, ‘Stay humble and stay hungry.’ I’m a St. Louis kid,” Smith said.
He added that he plans to “never settle for anything less than what (God) has in mind for me.”
Smith will graduate next month from Living Word Christian School in O’Fallon, Missouri. He wants to go into ministry, and in the fall he will attend North Central University, a Christian college in Minneapolis.
Before what he refers to as his accident, Smith was not religious. A native of Guatemala, he was adopted when he was 5 months old by Brian and Joyce Smith. Middle school can be hard enough without having to deal with the conflicts that come from being adopted, especially when you don’t look like your parents.
“I was struggling with my own issues with the church,” he said. “Even after the accident, I wasn’t feeling good about it.”
But after he thought about what had happened, “I gave my life to (God) again.”
The way he sees it, the movie is a way to share his story with the world. It is based on the book “The Impossible: The Miraculous Story of a Mother’s Faith and Her Child’s Resurrection,” which was co-written by his mother.
“This is simply God giving me a story to share with others,” he said.
In the movie, Smith is played by Marcel Ruiz, who is best known for his role on Netflix’s “One Day at a Time” reboot. The main character is his mother, Joyce, played by Chrissy Metz, who stars on “This Is Us.”
Topher Grace (“That ’70s Show”) plays Jason Noble, the family’s pastor at First Assembly Church in St. Peters (Noble now lives in Oregon). Josh Lucas plays John’s father, Brian, and Dennis Haysbert plays Dr. Jeremy Garrett of SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, who helped oversee Smith’s recovery.
“I couldn’t be more happy with it,” Smith said of “Breakthrough.” ”I couldn’t be more excited. It all works together, every scene works into the next scene.” And he’s especially happy about the way the story adheres to what actually happened.
The filmmakers “really hooked this film — they kept it to the truth. And that was very important to my family,” Smith said.
“Their No. 1 goal was that the world could see the truth and that it would be a true story.”
