'Miracle Preacher' Back From the Brink of Death

March 5, 2007 — -- Whether preaching to his flock at Grace Baptist Church in Anderson, Ind., or pursuing his passion, riding the rapids in his kayak, the Rev. Leigh Crockett always lived life to the fullest -- until he had a seizure last summer.

"My wife said I was making these awful sounds, and she looked over and I was just convulsing out of control," Crockett said.

A brain scan revealed a tumor, then doctors found another tumor in his lung. They had seen this kind of thing before. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and stage 4 lung cancer.

"Everyone in the room was sobbing except him, and that's what really gave us hope and gave us strength," said Crockett's son Joshua, an associate pastor at the church.

But this distant relative of American explorer Davy Crockett had more than just hope, he had a congregation back home praying, for faith to overcome what seemed to be a scientific certainty: that he was going to die.

Crockett says he was prepared.

"As a Christian, I've always thought will I be ready. I had a wild teen life. I had some close calls with death, and I would cry because I was so unready to die," Crockett told "Good Morning America's" Chris Cuomo.

"And I thought … that's OK, God can heal me if he wanted to," he said.

He never gave up hope, continuing to preach from his hospital room. When doctors operated on his brain, they discovered good news.

"Much to our amazement, in the surgery, this wasn't a malignant cancer at all. This was a benign brain tumor," said Terry Horner, a neurosurgeon at Methodist Hospital.

Joshua Crockett recalled the reaction about his father. "As the good news came, in we got more and more excited and were just rejoicing that God had done this," Joshua said.

But Crockett still had lung cancer. Doctors were sure of that. In fact they believed the brain tumor had spread to the lungs and metastasized into cancer, a very rare case of a benign brain tumor spreading to the lungs and becoming cancerous.