The “troubles” that one patient experienced was not a “worry” to the staff at the Department of Corrections until the inmate showed up late for meals and roll call. Months later, he wended his way through the medical system and got a neurosurgery referral to Jacksonville.
As this white-haired, stoop-shouldered African-American shuffled along in leg irons, his shuffle looked little different from other men in leg irons. But when the guard removed the shackles, the inmate clearly had the spastic gait of a man with spinal cord compression. Further testing confirmed a narrowed spinal canal and degenerative disk disease in his neck as the cause.
This patient, whom I will call Daniel, needed a decompressive cervical laminectomy. But in truth, few operations worry me more. The operation is necessary–without surgery he would be wheelchair confined within several weeks, and lose hand function shortly thereafter. And though the results of surgery are usually good–90% of patients improve, and another 9% will stabilize–another 1% will be paralyzed as a complication of the surgery.
It’s that remaining 1% that worries me. If Daniel gets worse, the fact that ninety-nine strangers got better after the same operation will give him, and me, little comfort.
We talked for a long time about the costs of surgery–not the financial costs, but the costs in terms of pain, suffering, recovery time and, especially, risk. Daniel had vague fears about why he couldn’t walk easily anymore and what the future held. I needed to share my medically-based fear about his future without surgery. Then I needed to share the hope that surgery would make him better, and my fear that it could make him worse. This is a melding of purpose: his hopes become my hopes, his fears become my fears. His troubles become my worries.
I scheduled the surgery.
Then we waited. The Department of Corrections, due to security concerns, budgetary constraints, and logistics, decides when the surgery will take place. Literally months passed. Calls to the D.O.C. went unheeded. I became increasingly worried that by the time the surgery was done, it would be too late; the spinal cord would already have been permanently damaged.
Finally, the surgery was scheduled and Daniel showed up at the hospital with barely enough time to complete his pre-op checklist. He looked inexplicably content, shackled to a stretcher, a complacent guard at his side. It had been so long since we talked that I wasn’t sure he remembered anything about his condition or the surgery.
I wanted to give him the whole pre-op talk again with time for questions and answers, give him a day to think about it, and return for more questions if necessary; it was that serious.
But I didn’t really have that option. If I cancelled this operation, I didn’t know if the surgery could be re-scheduled before he was wheelchair bound. I had only a few minutes.
“The operation could kill you or paralyze you,” I said. “But it’s your only chance to walk normal again.” I skipped all the information about expected recovery times, percentage chances, pain, or even where the incision was going to be.
Daniel smiled. He still did not appear to be nearly as concerned as I thought he should, and it worried me. I wondered if he was intellectually impaired.
I started again. “You understand the risks–”
“I heard you, Doctor,” he interrupted, still with that inexplicable smile. “And I remember what you tol’ me before.”
I must have looked unconvinced because then he reached out with a shackled arm and patted my hand. “I got troubles,” he said. He reached over and touched the crucifix tattoo on his forearm. “But I ain’t got no worries.”
Worries filled me, but by comparison to Daniel, I had no troubles. I didn’t have decades to serve a prison sentence, a crippling illness, nor did I face a painful and life-threatening operation. At the end of the day I was going home to a comfortable house and a loving family; if things went well, he would go back to prison.
The operation did go well, and Daniel walked again, normally now, able to get to meals and roll call on time. He still had troubles, of course. But spinal cord damage wasn’t one of them.
Days of trouble have come to me before, and they will come again. But when they come again, I remind myself: like, Daniel, I ain’t got no worries.
The seminary taught me the joy of daily prayer and Bible study, and prepared me for a mystery.
For a good portion of the seminary experience I was in a covenant with one of the professors to read four chapters of the Bible and pray for ten minutes every day. In truth, I just about wore out the chairs in the prayer room. It became a very warm and welcoming place for me.
I learned to feel the often small but steady flow of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis. I tried all sorts of prayers, but one of my favorites became blank prayer, the process of emptying my mind, my heart, and my spirit of all distractions and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come. I made sure that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were very specifically invited. This type of prayer is waiting and listening for God’s presence. The prayer room would go from being a dimly lit room to a raging waterfall of the Holy Spirit. In this way I prepared myself for unusual things to happen.
It was the spring of 2006, my last semester of seminary. God had blessed me with a stunningly beautiful wife and a six-month old son. They gave me great joy, and I thoroughly enjoyed the seminary experience and community. I was, however, taking five classes, caring for my son, and did not have enough time to do the work. Four hours of sleep each night was not enough. I was in over my head and often fought off sleep as I sat in class.
One morning in preaching class as I listened to one of my fellow students preach, the Holy Spirit came upon me. I started seeing clouds of fire above his head. It wasn’t a little cloud, but clouds that spread out all across the front of the classroom. There was tension and for some reason I remember praying to God, saying, “Strike Lord, Strike Lord.” In my mind I saw the fires coming down and touching the preacher. It wasn’t malicious or intended to harm him, but more to inaugurate something, something important. After the sermon I told him what I’d seen.
None of the other students had seen what I had. I know they talked about my vision, and wondered about me. Since then I have lost track of the speaker and I can’t say if the vision ever had significance to him or his ministry.
A couple weeks later I was listening to another student preach. My eyes were drawn to a cloth that was hanging from the podium. It had depictions of children from all over the world. The Spirit came upon me, and I started to see them move and even dance. When the sermon ended, the other students filed out for a break.
I sat still, trying to process what had just happened. One other student stayed behind, someone I’d known for the past four years. She was often more emotional than rational, a characteristic that had placed her on the fringe of the seminary community. She knew I had seen something and asked what it was. I told her, and we prayed together. Then the break was over, everyone came back in, and we never spoke of it again.
I have had no visions before or since, and I have no idea how they may be important to others. Some will think they were a product of my sleep deprivation or scar tissue from my tumor. But for me, they were important spiritual experiences. I learned visions are real, and I learned to value the emotional faithful friend who stay in the room with me more that the rational one who leaves.
Sometimes God does strange things, things that remain a mystery to us, things that may change us in ways we do not understand.
Patient Number One was seven years-old and alone. The numbered tickets had been distributed in advance of the clinic day to two hundred patients in this town in southern Haiti. The tickets were a tool to avoid a riot at the door to the church/school, because there had been no doctor in town for years and the needs were great. Pews and school desks had been rearranged to form a registration area, an area to measure height, weight and visual acuity, a makeshift pharmacy, and four examination stations with providers and interpreters.
Number One wended his way through the matrix and arrived at a chair in front of me, a skinny black kid in a sky-blue shirt and navy blue slacks–his school clothes. He spoke only Creole; I spoke only English. Benson, a Haitian interpreter, sat next to me.
I was filled with a kind of altruistic excitement. I was prepared; I had studied the diseases of Haiti that were unfamiliar to me–malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, AIDS, cholera. I had knowledge, skills, and tools to do some good. I was ready to alleviate pain and suffering.
Number One was under-sized for his age and underweight for his height, at least according to the American height and weight charts we had brought with us. But he looked healthy. I asked if there was anything special he was concerned about.
Benson interpreted his reply, “Sometimes he doesn’t feel like eating.”
I asked a string of questions about nausea or vomiting or abdominal pain, then examined him, looking into his ears and his eyes, gently touching his neck and his abdomen, and then listening through the stethoscope, his breath and heartbeats sounding so close.
A pretty healthy kid, I thought to myself. I wrote a prescription for our pharmacy to give him an anti-parasite medicine and a supply of vitamins. As a last question, I asked how long it had been since he didn’t feel like eating.
A minute or two passed as Benson and Number One exchanged words several times. Then Benson turned to me and said with a voice and expression that indicated the story was a common one, “His parents had a very successful little grocery store here. Their neighbors thought they should share more of their good fortune, and when they didn’t, the neighbors killed them.”
Benson shrugged. Number One continued to fix his eyes on me with no change of expression.
And I’m giving this kid vitamin pills.
I get a patient like Number One and I am smacked out of my complacent belief that I am making a difference simply because I am practicing medicine. I wonder if all the children got their vitamins and grew to be strong and bright, would they still kill each other? They’ve been doing it in Haiti for a couple of hundred years; there’s no reason to think it will change now. Why bother with the vitamin pills?
I am tempted to despair, to go home and take care of my own, and let the world take care of itself or go to hell, whatever it chooses to do. But now I’ve heard the boy’s heartbeat, I’ve listened to him breathe, I’ve looked into his deep brown eyes, and he’s no longer an abstraction, no longer Number One but a real boy; he’s flesh and he’s blood and he’s somehow connected to me.
“Jesus told them another parable: “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which a man planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and nest in its branches.” (Matt. 13:31-32. NIV)
Everyone holds a mustard seed. It’s that thought that maybe you should make a phone call, make a visit, or make some cookies for someone who needs to hear that someone else cares. Maybe you need to enroll in that course, the one that has no practical value but gives you skills the Kingdom needs. Maybe you have the opportunity to change from the job that pays more to the job that cares more. It’s all a question of how we handle our mustard seed. Do we brush it off and let it float away in the wind, because it’s a little thing and doesn’t really matter? Or do we plant it and water it and wait years for it to grow?
So I give him the vitamins and I give him the anti-parasite medicine, and I see the next patient. And the one after that, and the one after that. And keep going all day long. Because I believe that we are all children of God and we should care for each other, one mustard seed at a time. And I find that belief easier than despair.
I was nineteen. I’d finished my first year of college and came home to find that my church was in turmoil, an old wineskin being filled with new wine.
The church I attended since I was six had always discouraged words like Holy Spirt, saved and born again. The church put a premium on making the congregation feel comfortable, not spiritually challenged.
From where I sit today, it seems like a travesty and an utter waste of God’s resources. But there is a place for such gateway churches, places where people can come and learn about God and the Bible before they receive the Holy Spirit. The trick is not to get so stuck in that spiritual comfort zone that we never get out.
The new minister challenged that spiritual comfort zone, using words like Holy Spirit, saved and born again. The agitated congregation pushed back with words like he doesn’t understand us, he doesn’t know who we are and we want him moved to a different church.
In the midst of this storm, the pastor’s wife took over running the youth group. As soon as she did so, all the high school youth and experienced youth counselors stopped showing up. She was left with a handful of middle schoolers.
During her first summer as youth director she decided to take the kids to a Bible Camp. It had been a blessing to her when she was teenager and she wanted the kids to have the same benefit. But she could only get one chaperon, a mother of one of the kids, and she felt that she needed a male chaperon as well. At nineteen I was barely qualified to chaperon a dog, and certainly not 7th graders, but I went anyway.
Take suburban youth from a marginally spiritual congregation and throw them into a charismatic Bible camp in rural Georgia and you get culture shock. I was certainly in culture shock. People were raising their hands, shouting amen and the charismatic pastors were very different than anyone I’d ever heard. I don’t know if previous years had been as intense, but during that week we were getting up at seven and going to bed after midnight.
I believed then, and still believe, that the vast majority of the counselors and staff were born-again Christians doing their very best to introduce the kids to Jesus Christ. But their keynote speaker, the man who preached twice a day and sometimes exceeded his scheduled time by more than two hours, struck me as wrong from the get-go. He was intense, unrelenting, and definitely violating my spiritual comfort zone.
At first I tried to dismiss my misgivings by reminding myself that it was just a difference in styles of our preaching and worship. By Tuesday I was uncomfortable enough that I wanted to pack up, take all of our kids and go home. I felt like something was pushing me to leave, to flee from danger. On Wednesday he started saying weird things like, “stop reading your Bibles, stop talking to your counselors and just focus on me and what I’m saying.”
I talked to our youth director immediately after the morning sermon and shared my discomfort. She listened to me and agreed that what he was saying was a little disturbing, but she dismissed my discomfort by saying that it was just a different culture of Christianity. There was no way that she could have taken our kids home early. If our church members heard even a whiff of a rumor that she took the kids to a camp where the preacher was “talking crazy,” her tenure as youth director would be over and her husband’s position as pastor would be threatened.
Wednesday evening and Thursday morning were epic struggles. I didn’t want to make a scene, but the Holy Spirit was pushing me harder and harder to leave. My level of discomfort was very intense.
Thursday night I got up and walked out of the sermon. The counselors, the grown-up ones from Georgia, were alarmed. They thought I was one of the youth; there was only a year’s difference between me and the oldest youth. They told me that I had to go back in. I said I wasn’t going to. They said I could either go back in immediately or go home immediately. I picked up the phone and called my mom in Florida. I was explaining that I needed the impossible, to be home that very night, when our youth director walked in, took the phone and told my mom that I was having trouble with the sermon, and that she would talk to me.
We went to the church van and started talking. Explaining the promptings of Holy Spirit seemed impossible. I talked about doctrine, words and feelings. I couldn’t explain how endangered I felt by that preacher. The youth director was unconvinced, and I felt that everything would keep going on as it was. I was only a chaperon, powerless to change anything.
Then another camp counselor came by, sobbing uncontrollably. The preacher had opened spiritual wounds from her childhood and made her feel like she didn’t belong in God’s kingdom. She joined us; we talked and prayed. What was unconvincing from me alone became very convincing when there were two of us. Our youth director, the sobbing counselor and I decided we needed to talk to the camp’s directors.
As can be expected, the directors were less than enthused to hear from us at midnight. They talked about how the preacher was “breaking new ground” in his church and how we owed them more than to just pack up and leave. In the end they insisted that we talk to the preacher face to face.
The pastor, his wife and the camp directors met with the three of us in a small room. The sobbing counselor talked about how the sermons made her feel and the sorrow they caused. Next, our youth director spoke about how she had the gift of discernment and how she was convinced that there was something wrong. The preacher never blinked through their comments.
Then it was me, the nineteen-year-old “chaperon.” The preacher stared at me with intense eyes. I returned his gaze as I spoke. I tried to defend myself from the inference that I was only upset because of the cultural gulf between charismatic rural Georgia and stuffy suburban Jacksonville.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s charismatic or not. What is important is that it is of God,” I said.
I was completely unprepared for what came next. The preacher kept his gaze on me and asked point blank, “Can you forgive me?”
A more seasoned Christian would have said Yes because we are quick to say we forgive. But I didn’t know, and still don’t know, what I was supposed to forgive.
I said, “I have nothing to forgive. It is a matter of trust. We need to trust that you are giving the message God sent you to deliver.”
We left, and I went to sleep uncertain if the preacher with the intense eyes had heard me or changed. I only know that I said the words the Holy Spirit had given me.
The next morning the preacher abandoned his theme of “Being Desperate for God.” He talked about God’s grace and love, and how blessed he was that God had given him his wife and her love. After that final sermon the preacher and his wife sought me out and thanked me–again for something I didn’t completely understand.
God did something there, something good, and he used me to do part of it. The Holy Spirit may call us in our distress, even while we feel powerless against the might, wisdom and conventions of our world. When I was powerless, the Holy Spirit filled another counselor with her pain and sent her to me at just the right moment. Together we could confirm and reinforce what the Holy Spirt had been telling us, and we could change our world.
Is there a time when the Holy Spirit filled you with distress, urged you to cry out, and you felt powerless?
Is there a time when you cried out, and He sent you a brother or sister to cry with you?
And when two or more of you are gathered together, maybe crying together, isn’t He with you, and can’t you change the world?
During the time I was in medical school in Minneapolis, the renown faith healer, Kathryn Kuhlman, held a healing crusade at the Minneapolis Auditorium. At the time I was merely puzzled; what she did seemed to have nothing to do with what I was trying to learn. Six months later a journalist for the Star and Tribune published follow-up interviews with those who had claimed to be healed at the crusade. Less than two percent had any lasting physical benefit. To be fair, the journalist also reported that even those who did not have measurable improvements in their physical maladies somehow felt better. I concluded that the faith healing experience was a placebo effect, harmless but ineffectual.
A few years later I became more hostile.
A patient I’ll call Debbie, a twenty-seven year-old dental hygienist, came to see me because she was quite sure that she must have a slipped disk–her left leg wasn’t working right. Bright and cheery with a perfect smile, she told me she had friends who had gotten weak legs from slipped disks. She needed it fixed quickly because between her job and two small children she couldn’t be slowed by a clumsy leg.
Some things–the lack of pain and the progressive weakness–nagged at me even before I examined her. Then, on her examination, although what she had noted about her left leg was true–loss of coordination–she had ignored or not noticed the loss of coordination in her left arm as well. Her reflex pattern pointed to a problem in her brain, not her spine.
“We need to rule out another problem,” I said. “I’ll arrange a scan of your head today.” I suspected a tumor, but hoped I was wrong.
A few days later Debbie had surgery for a tumor called a glioblastoma. The surgery went as well as it could go for a malignant tumor–no worsening of her weakness, no dangerous brain swelling, no infections. Everything was good except the prognosis: roughly a year with radiation and chemotherapy, about four months with surgery alone.
She had small children; she chose radiation and chemotherapy.
The day after I gave her the prognosis and told her about radiation and chemotherapy options, I entered her hospital room as a minister was leaving. His card and a New Testament lay on the tray-table. Good for her, I thought. Time to be prepared for heaven. And perhaps a community of good-hearted people would surround her family in their time of need.
As the months went by Debbie lost her hair and her cheery disposition. Although always polite, she became a stoic warrior. Complications due to her treatments led to hospitalizations for bone marrow suppression and consequent infections. Her left-sided coordination problems progressed to disabling hemiplegia.
As medical miracles failed her, she turned to religion. A new Bible and Christian books appeared on her bedside table. Gospel music played from the radio. The television broadcast evangelists’ sermons. More cards from more clergymen appeared at her bedside.
She lost the ability to speak. I would come by to see her each day she was on the oncology ward and, lacking any material skills to help, hold her hand for a few moments before moving on. Sometimes she would meet my eyes, sometimes not.
One day near the end, I held her hand and let my emotions wash over me: sadness, anger at her disease, the frustration at my own ability to make such little difference, and helplessness. Her eyes were closed, her expression pained. I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. I asked if she needed pain medicine; she shook her head. The radio, tuned to a Christian station, played this message:
“The doctors told her she had cancer,” the voice said in a Texas accent. “They told her she couldn’t be cured. But if she wanted to live a little longer she had to go to a big hospital in Houston.
“Well, I tell you, my friends, she got in that car and they started driving to Houston. But she didn’t make it. No, sir. She had a message from God just as clear as if she had a telephone call. She heard this radio station. She heard me talking to folks like I’m talking to you all now. And she knew she could go home.
“Because, if you have enough faith in the Lord Jesus, if you turn your heart to him in earnest prayer, you will be healed. Yes, I said, ‘Will,’ not might. No maybe about this folks. It’s there in the Bible. It’s your blessing to be claimed.
“She called me up and we started praying. Two months later she went in to see her doctor. Well, you can believe he was mighty surprised. He thought she would be dead by then, I suppose.
” ‘Did you go to Houston?,’ he said to her.
” ‘Why no,’ she said, ‘I started praying.’
“I know I don’t have to tell you folks this. You already know the end of the story, don’t you? When she did go to that big hospital in Houston those doctors never could find a single sign of cancer.
“She was cured and you could be, too. If you only have enough trust in the Lord Jesus. Call me, write to me, send your donations to…”
Debbie could’t tell me what she was thinking about herself in relation to this story; I could only imagine. Debbie had fought valiantly for her life, for her children as much as for herself, and now lay dying while someone who didn’t know her told that her the only reason for her death was her lack of faith.
I released her hand, brushed the hair from her face and turned off the radio, certain God didn’t work that way. Jesus wouldn’t tell her she wasn’t good enough.
So for fifteen years I didn’t pray for patients to be healed. I didn’t believe it worked. And, if they didn’t get better, I didn’t want them to feel like they died for lack of faith.
Then I found myself in the Philippines on my first mission trip. I carried a backpack with first-aid supplies and felt totally alien. Evangelism classes for the local church were the focus of the week, but a “healing crusade” was the climax on Friday night.
In the largest building (a basketball gym with bleachers) in this village outside Davao City, hundreds of people packed in to hear preaching and praise music. One man came in carried in a chair by his children. I recognized the signs of a major right hemisphere stroke and, by his obvious contractures, it must have occurred at least six weeks previously. No way, I thought to myself, no way is this guy getting healed. That brain is damaged beyond repair. I’ve seen it hundreds of times.
Ministers spoke in tongues. People “fell out” in the Spirit. Then people came forward for healing. They lined up in front other members of the mission team and local pastors. Then some lined up in front of me. I felt inadequate; I felt like a fraud. But I put my hands on people’s heads and hearts and feet, wherever they were in pain, listening but not understanding them, and prayed as well as I could.
Then I looked up and two men set down the chair holding the man with the stroke. They expected a miracle; I did not. But I laid my hands on his head and prayed that I was wrong and this unfortunate man would get up and walk. As I expected, nothing happened.
Then my friend, Jerry Winkler, too ignorant of medical signs to be timid, also came, laid his hands on the stroke victim and cried out to God for healing. Crazy, I thought.
Then the guy got up out of his chair and limped to the stage to thank Jesus and the lead pastors.
Okay. He wasn’t completely whole. But he got carried in and he walked out. A couple years later, the pastor who had organized the healing crusade visited the U.S. I asked him about this man with the stroke. He’s driving a bus now, he told me.
Did neurons regenerate and form new synaptic connections? Would a follow-up CT scan post prayer showed resolved stroke areas? Or was it a placebo effect and the guy got enough hope to rehabilitate his disability?
I don’t know. All I know is a guy with a stroke was carried in, got a prayer, walked out, and now he drives a bus.
And now I had a decision. Should I hang on to what I thought I knew? Or should I open my heart and believe my eyes?
In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college I volunteered at a missionary training camp in northeast Alabama. If I mentioned the nearest town, people would ask, “Where is that?” And I would have to say, “In the middle of nowhere.”
My main job was to work with the various youth groups who would come on mission trips for a week. Most of that work took place in the Third World garden, where we practiced growing food in a Third World setting, without pesticides, machinery or store-bought fertilizer. We made a lot of fertilizer through composting, mixing dung with soy leaves and letting it cook. Weeding was also at the top of our list. Sometimes we rounded up chickens, picked plums, or dodged geese determined to drive us off. It was hard work but it only lasted for a couple hours between breakfast and lunch.
The highlight of the week was Thursday evenings when we brought youth groups down to the model Third World village. It had no electricity and no running water. The only sleeping accommodations were hammocks. We cooked rice and beans over an open fire and rewarmed it for breakfast.
I never figured out how to sleep in a hammock. After dinner I would stake out one of the wooden benches, put my sleeping bag on it and doze on and off until morning. It was a stark lesson on how most of the world lives, and we taught it every Thursday night.
The camp was never short of interesting people. Former communist revolutionaries from Bolivia, couples who’d spent their lives as missionaries in Nepal, French-speaking missionaries from Mali and, of course, Ken and Sarah Carson, the directors, who spent more than ten years as missionaries in the Bolivian jungles. One of their most vivid stories was of how they’d been living on mildewed rice for so long that their children started eating cockroaches in protest. Every week there would be someone else from a different part of the world with a different story.
During the week I had little free time. The other volunteer and I got up before five to help cook breakfast. Then we would work in the garden until lunchtime. Then there was a bit of program after lunch, and we’d be back for dinner. Sometimes, maybe a lot of times, we’d be with the youth group in the evenings for Bible Studies or whatever they were doing.
From what I understand, we had it easy. Every previous summer they’d worked the kids and the volunteers in the afternoon as well. The problem was that it was so hot that they needed to buy Gatorade so the kids wouldn’t get sick. In the end they decided that the work the kids did in the afternoon wasn’t worth the cost of Gatorade.
Once the kids left on Saturday mornings the camp became a ghost town. The kitchen was closed, and the fulltime staff was gone until Sunday night. I lived in what we called the glass bottle house made of mortar with glass bottles stuck in the walls so light could get into it during the day. It had no electricity, no running water, and was closer to the Third World village than the main buildings. But watching a lightning storm through those bottles was worth whatever inconvenience. On the rare occasions when I did drive my car out to the ridge above the house, I could literally roll down my window and pick blackberries without getting out of my car.
That summer was a time of incredible spiritual growth for me. I experienced the Holy Spirit on a regular basis. During the week I was surrounded by mature Christians who had given, were giving, or were expected to give their lives for Christ. During the weekends I took up the disciplines of prayer, Bible study and fasting. The fasting was more a matter of convenience. To get food I would have had to walk out of the woods, get in my car and drive for half an hour to get the food and another half-hour to get back. I usually made a foray on Saturdays, but I would fast from sundown on Saturday nights until the evening meal on Sunday when the next youth group came in.
One Sunday morning I woke up absolutely convinced that the Holy Spirit was telling me to be baptized again. In human terms that was a somewhat difficult proposition. I couldn’t remember my home church ever baptizing an adult and certainly not baptizing someone who’d already been baptized as an infant. But I made my way to the side of the river and started upstream. I was praying the whole way, seeking an inspiration on how I could baptize myself. After a twenty-five minute walk I was sure that I couldn’t do it alone. I started back.
Five minutes later I found myself in the middle of the river with no idea how I’d gotten there.
I guess I could have slipped, or “accidently on purpose” slipped, and forgotten the moment. But that day I felt that God said, “So you want to be baptized?” and shoved me into the middle of the river.
Since then, I’ve never worried about being baptized. If I am willing to trust my Christian community and accept the urging of the Holy Spirit, I am born again. Every day, God shoves me into the river.
I raced to the hospital, crossing the Buckman bridge after midnight well over the speed limit while making arrangements with the operating room on my cell. I was afraid of being too late, of another exercise in futility, of another sleepless and fruitless night. I was afraid of the need to give another end-of-life speech to a family.
The case was not hopeless. That would not have required speed. Or fear. I already knew the patient’s diagnosis: an epidural hematoma. If his head could be opened, the clot removed and the bleeding stopped within four hours of injury, he would live. With any delay, he would die.
As I raced to the hospital, I sought to calm my frayed nerves and slow my pounding heart. As a person of faith, I should be able to have peace. So I prayed.
I thought about how easy it seemed to have been for Jesus. He never rushed, he never appeared anxious. Lay on hands, command the demons, maybe a little mud in the eyes, and poof! Cured. All without time constraints. Your servant is in the next village a day’s travel away? No problem; go on home, he’s fine. He’s been dead for three days? No problem; show me the grave. Never racing through the middle of the night uncertain of the outcome.
To be fair, I will never know what it cost Jesus to heal and give hope. But still, even if Jesus bestowed upon me His powers at that moment, I remained certain that an epidural hematoma would need an operation.
So I prayed I would not be too late. Because I trust neurosurgery and I don’t trust faith. Not for this, not tonight. I finished with something like, So, show me how a prayer for this guy does any good.
The case went well–at least for an emergency in the middle of the night. Two hours later, the hematoma had been removed and the major bleeding stopped. Another hour or more of surgery remained, taking care of the important but less urgent tasks: preventing re-bleeding, replacing the skull flap and closing the scalp. This is the time when I can stop working by reflex and start thinking about what I’m doing. And why, and to whom.
The back story filtered into the operating room. The patient, whom I will call Zach, was a thirty-year-old cook at local restaurant who had come in by ambulance after an epileptic seizure. Over the previous several months Zach had been in the ER three times for seizures. Each time his anticonvulsant levels were low and his toxicology screen was positive for cocaine. Each time, the ER staff treated him with anticonvulsants, gave him a new prescription, cautioned him against recreational drug use and sent him home. Tonight was no different. His labs confirmed what the staff expected: a toxicology screen positive for cocaine and low anticonvulsant levels. A CT scan was normal.
They treated him with anti-convulsant drugs, cautioned him to re-start his prescription, avoid drugs, then sent him home with a friend. Getting only as far as his friend’s car, Zach had another seizure, this time striking his head on the pavement. He was carried back to the ER, but this time a CT scan showed an acute epidural hematoma.
One of the great disillusionments in medicine comes with the realization that guys like Zach care less about their life than the people charged with taking care of them. It is easy to become bitter at two AM. I want to ask him why the whole health care team is working, resources are being poured out, and he doesn’t care enough to take his medications and stay clean. I want to shake him and point out to him other people who are suffering with incurable diseases while doing their best to stay alive, and would give anything to have what he is so willing to give up.
But duty and diligence take over. We treat because we believe in the right to second chances. And third and fourth and fifth chances–as many chances as it takes when they come in on your shift. And I know, when I get past the bitterness, that there is a reason for the self-destruction.
Addiction.
I’ve seen lots of patients like Zach over the years. A life-threatening illness or injury as a consequence to addictions to drugs, alcohol, nicotine, would bring them to the hospital. A complex and expensive treatment would “save” their life, and they would be discharged only to return a few days, a few weeks, or a few months later, still addicted and now dying all over again.
Zach was dying not simply because he had bled in his head, but because his actions were beyond his control. One mother called her son’s addiction a terminal illness. In religious terms, he was possessed by a demon, dying of sin.
The operation saved Zach’s life.
Or did it? Preventing death and healing are not the same thing. If he was going to really live again, his healing needed to go way beyond the sutures in his scalp or the screws in his skull; it needed to reach all the way to his heart.
Zach went home from the hospital a few days after his operation. I waited to see if he would show up for his post op visit in three weeks. Surprisingly, he did. His wound had healed nicely. He had no more seizures while taking his anticonvulsants. He was drug free. We talked about addiction as the root cause of his near-death experience. He made another appointment, and I waited. Six weeks later, he remained seizure free, drug free, active in rehabilitation.
That night I raced to the ER, he needed an operation that I could do. But he needed something more, something that only God could do. Maybe He gave Zach a new heart. I hope so.
But I know He showed me some things. I could do an operation, but I couldn’t save Zach. Only Jesus could do that.
And how many operations for epidural hematoma had I done by then? Fifty? A hundred, maybe? How many of those patients had I prayed for? Only one. Jesus kept coming back to give me a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, as many as it took. Because it’s always His shift.
In June 2000, my wife, Ann, suffered a massive heart attack. Two respected cardiologists and our family doctor all confirmed that the human heart does not regenerate its tissue once it dies due to a heart attack. In Ann’s case, 50% of her heart muscle died and she was told that if she lived, she would be an invalid the rest of her life.
Additionally, the attending cardiologist said she was so weak that she could not survive an open heart surgery, so he placed 3 stents her arteries and told me she had a 25% chance to live.
A good personal friend, Rev. Len Showalter, came to her ICU room where she lay with tubes in her body. Many folks, myself included, prepared for the worst. Then Len prayed this prayer:
“Jesus, if you raised Lazarus from the dead after 4 days, You can regenerate Ann Young’s heart muscle!”
This prayer by Len was so outrageous that I remember that my legs became weak and I could hardly stand, so utterly amazed was I that Len had that much faith, and my faith was so weak.
Fast forward 3 years. After 13 visits to the hospital, with 12 heart cath procedures and open heart surgery, her cardiologist gave this amazing report to us:
“Mrs. Young, your heart has regenerated its muscle from 50% to 75%. This is the first known case in medical history as we know it. I have written a full report and sent it to various medical journals as an “unexplainable phenomenon.”
Ann is now 73 years old and doing very well. She is not an invalid and does most things she wants to.
Having cancer is fear: like having a gun put to one’s head. The day before the diagnosis, one could go where he or she wanted. When the diagnosis comes down, the patient’s autonomy boils down to a single question. Will I accept or refuse treatment?
As they were prepping me for surgery they screwed metal bolts into my skull. It was like something out of a horror movie, and I just lay there acting like it was normal while they tightened the metal halo, and my head felt like a grape being squeezed. A few minutes later they had me lie down on the gurney. I was encased in a metal cubic framework screwed into my skull.
Then, a month later I could actually smell my skin burning during radiation therapy.
During cancer treatment there dozens of atrocities visited upon a patient’s body. I had to have my blood drawn every week. My veins weren’t so good so it took a lot of sticks. I can remember telling myself that if I got better I would never let anyone stick me again.
Then there was morning when I came in for a CT scan. They gave me a “Big Gulp” sized cup of contrast. I drank a little less than half and couldn’t get any more down. My mom urged me to keep drinking; I did my best. Then I started throwing up.
I feared not only dying or discomfort. I also feared of my utter lack of autonomy. They could have told me that they were going to have to cut off my leg or my nose or blind me and I would have had to say yes. In this way being a cancer patient is like being in a concentration camp, except that a concentration camp seeks to kill while cancer treatment seeks to give a long, arduous road to life.
Where is God in the midst of this journey? He carried me when I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to walk. I wasn’t particularly pious or spiritual. I just had a feeling, a spiritual feeling, that I was going to be ok.
During my cancer treatment I suppressed my fears and thoughts of trauma. Later, when God put me down I had to deal with them. God carried me through a horrific wasteland, like a battlefield inundated with explosions, shrapnel, barbed wire and terror. When he put me down I had to look back over that wasteland and examine the scars on my body, my spirit and my soul.
“As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nations they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions”(Gen 15: 12-14).
The Israelites did not come out of Egypt without scars. There were the literal scars from the whips of the Egyptians and the overseers. There were the memories of the babies killed by the soldiers or eaten by crocodiles in the Nile. Bodies were broken by decades of slave labor. More than all of these, they lived with constant anxiety. They had lived for four hundred years in a setting where one simple change, like not gathering enough straw, could bring utter ruin.
My biggest anxiety was the MRI machine. To me, going into an MRI was like being buried alive. Less than six inches separated my eyes from the top of the tunnel. The sides of the tunnel pressed my arms to my side, and it was always cold, around sixty degrees. The mechanical voice on the intercom told me time after time not to move. Even swallowing my saliva worried me. A typical MRI takes about 50 minutes. Of course, in the machine I had no way of sensing of time. All I had was my thin, cotton gown. About halfway through the scan they would move me partially out of the tunnel, stick me, and add contrast to my veins.
Above all the unpleasantness hovered the fact that one MRI in August of 1991 had changed my life forever. One bad MRI took me into the wasteland of cancer. Any MRI after that could return me to the same wasteland.
It was the summer of 1992. I was going for my first annual MRI scan. By that time I’d started to rebuild my life. I was driving again, taking tennis lessons. I had enough hair to brush, and I looked forward to my senior year of high school. I walked into the imaging center determined to put on an optimistic face.
In reality, I was absolutely terrified.
God must have laughed at my phoniness.
When I registered, a new Christian manned the desk. We talked about the cancer and my fear that it would come back, and I received the gift of peace. God knows and ministers to our fears, even the ones we are afraid to admit to ourselves.
Denise was nineteen and had been married for two weeks. Her husband said they had been together that afternoon when she suddenly complained of a headache and lost consciousness. He called rescue who resuscitated and intubated her at the scene and transported her to the hospital. A CT scan demonstrated hemorrhage in an area of the brain that was both critical and inoperable, the brainstem. She was placed on a respirator sent to the ICU.
I saw her there, a tiny black woman, not more than five feet tall, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, beautiful still in spite of the distortion from the endotracheal tube and other lines and monitors. An EEG had just finished, and the technician was leaving. An official reading would take a few hours, but I saw the flat lines consistent with no brain activity. Her neurological exam was also consistent with brain death.
She met all the criteria for a diagnosis of brain death except a repeat confirmatory examination to be performed eight to twenty-four hours later. Once the diagnosis was confirmed she could be removed from the respirator without any further ethical concerns, either before or after her organs were harvested to be donated.
The family entered as I finished my exam. Denise lay between us like a sarcophagus. I replaced the gauze pads that covered her eyes. The cardiac monitor beat out a steady string of slow beeps. Every five seconds the respirator made a clunk-wheeze sound and Denise’s chest rises and falls beneath the thin, white sheet.
Her husband, not much older than she, is so diminished by shock that he stands like a mute child with large, fearful eyes. Her mother, a formidable looking woman flanked by a small army of family and friends, takes charge.
Color separates us: my white coat and white skin, her dark dress and dark skin. Language separates us: my Midwest accent, her Southern drawl. I see in her eyes the sins of generations of white men and know that trust would not be earned easily, and my authority would be recognized only grudgingly.
“Doctor?” she says.
I ask what happened, although I already knew. I ask about her prior health, though it mattered little now. I ask because I want to listen to their voices and I need to earn their trust.
And I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to tell her that her daughter is dead in every sense except that her heart beats on. I listen to the story of her short life, her childhood illnesses, her graduation from high school, her recent marriage. I hear, as she describes Denise’s plans for the future, the hopes and dreams of her whole family.
Finally there is silence, and they look at me. I tell them that she likely had been born with something that now caused bleeding in her head. This is nobody’s fault; it could not have been prevented. An act of God.
“She’s in a coma,” I say.
Mother’s face steels. “She going to get better?”
The monitor beeps, the respirator wheezes, and Denise’s chest rises and fells. I shake my head.
Mother’s face almost crumbles before it steels again. “We a praying people, Doctor,” she says. Soft voices behind her murmur assent.
“I pray, too,” I say. I pray for forgiveness, I pray for comfort for Denise’s family, I pray I can leave this tragedy and go home to my wife and children.
I tell Mother about coma and brain death, how brain death is not only a diagnosis; it is the end of hope. I speak about transplantation, how life and hope can be salvaged from death and despair. I am met with stony looks.
“We be praying for a miracle, Doctor.”
I nod and look down at Denise, small enough to be a child, then explained about repeating her EEG and exam the following day. We set a time to review the results.
The following day her exam is unchanged. The EEG is still flat. Her vitals signs are normal and her labs are normal. She is brain dead, I tell her family.
“What now?” Mother asks.
I explain how transplantation works, how she can remain on the respirator until her organs are harvested then the body is released to the undertaker.
“No,” she says, “No transplants.”
I want to explain again but the steel has returned to her face, and I am forced to agree. Denise is my patient; I am responsible only to her, and by extension, her family, not the unknown recipient of a transplant. I nod. “Then we can remove the respirator.”
“My son is a preacher up in Georgia. We need him to lay on hands and pray over Denise.”
Technically, Denise is dead. A death certificate could legally be filled out now, but I am in no hurry. Death and grief are hard enough without inflicting more wounds with technicalities. “When?” I ask.
“Tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock.”
Sunday.
I wonder what happens when you pray with such certainty for something that is so impossible. Do you give up God? Do you give up prayer?
And I wonder what happens if you pray for the impossible, and your prayer is answered. Do you give up your faith in the expected? Is the science of medicine so frail? Does reality and experience know no boundary?
The next morning I enter the ICU and feel like I am in the wrong church. Twenty souls are gathered in their Sunday best, including Denise’s brother. Her mother introduces him, and we shake hands over the bed. I examine her, self-conscious of the audience. No change, brain dead, I tell them, and step back into a corner, uncertain what to do with my hands. I cross one over the other and stand with my head slightly bowed but eyes open. Respectful, but I feel like an alien.
Her brother lays a hand on her forehead. He begins murmuring a prayer and the room fills with others praying out loud or saying amen. A babbling hum fills the room and competes with the heart monitor and the respirator. His prayers become louder with the cadence of a practiced orator.
“We love our sister,” he calls out, one hand on her forehead and one raised to the heavens. “Now, in the name of Jesus, rise and walk.”
The room falls silent except for the monitor and respirator. He begins again, the small congregation joining with encouraging words. Again he cries for his sister to rise and walk, and again she does not. A third time he cries out in the name of Jesus for his sister to rise.
I find myself praying with him. I find myself willing to sacrifice all the certainty of the medical science for the life of this young woman.
The monitor beeps, the respirator wheezes, and no one moves, least of all Denise. A tear streaks down her mother’s cheek. Her brother’s hand rests still on her forehead. A minute passes, maybe two, maybe three.
This is the moment, I think. This is when we admit that God doesn’t answer prayers, at least not this one, at least not now. And if not now, when? Surely He must care. But if He cares, does He not act because the power that raised the only son of the widow of Nain was for that time, those people? Not now, not us. Is now the time for bitterness and grief?
Her brother whispers something. Then repeats himself, now loud enough that I can just make out the words. I hear, “Thank you, Jesus.”
But why? For what?
“Thank you, Jesus,” he says again, louder, the words unmistakeable now. And again, even louder. Murmurs of assent and soft amens from the family rise like a chorus to his solo as I stand to the side, puzzled and dumb.
“Thank you, Jesus,” he says one more time. “For we loved our sister.”
I hear the chorus of amens.
“But You loved her more. Thank you, Jesus.”
He lifts his hand from her head and steps away. Family members file by, touching Denise, hugging her mother, shaking the brother’s hand, then leaving one by one until only the brother and his mother remain. He nods to me as he turns to leave, surrendering the ground.
I shook his hand as he passed. “I’m sorry,” I said. Sorry your sister died. Sorry your prayers weren’t answered. Sorry that I, in spite all my scientific knowledge and skill, am completely helpless.
“Thank you,” he said.
Then I am alone with Denise and the ICU nurse. We disconnect the lines and turn off the respirator and the clunk-wheeze stops. The heart monitor beeps on. I secretly hope that she will breathe and we will call back the family and celebrate a miracle. But her chest no longer rises. The beeps slow, then become irregular, then stop.
I sign the death certificate and go to church, joining my wife and children in a quiet Methodist congregation where all the men wear suits, all the women wear dresses, and we all pray for the will of God to be done, but never for the dead to be raised. We are safe from disappointment that way.
But I wonder if we don’t ask for too little. Though Denise did not rise from the dead, at least not in this world, I feel that because her family had prayed for something I wouldn’t have risked, we witnessed some kind of miracle.
Before their prayers, her family was lost in grief. Her family asked God for more time with Denise in this world of suffering and sorrow; God assured them that Denise was living a perfect life now and they would see her again someday. Because they prayed for a miracle in the hear-and-now, they witnessed a miracle in eternity.
