Author: Dean Lohse

Darkness covered everything except the small halo created by my headlights as we sped along mountain roads well before dawn.  The roads got narrower, rougher and curvier as we neared the Smoky Mountain National Park.  My destination was the Big Creek Ranger station where I was to meet a man named Mark driving a brown Subaru and give him $75.

I had talked to Mark ten days before and arranged for him to pick up me, Adam, and Greg  Stritch at the ranger station at six AM and drive us to where we would start our Appalachian Trail section hike.  As I sped through the darkness hoping to reach the rendezvous in time I worried about the fragility of the relationship.  I didn’t know Mark’s last name; he may not know mine.  No credit card number had been given, no confirmation received.  All I had was his phone number and all he had was my promise.

In the first miracle of our day, I found the ranger station at exactly six, and as I turned into the parking lot headlights appeared in my rear-view mirror.  Mark had been as true to his word as I had been to mine.

He had silver hair tied back in a ponytail–the aging hippie look–and was gently friendly in his questions and advice about hiking conditions.  He had been raised in southern California near one of the places Greg had lived as a boy.  They had surfed the same beaches.  Mark restored old guitars, as did Greg.  He biked and swam as I did.  Common ground expanded, and we seemed to bond in our hour-and-a-half journey to Newfound Gap.

As we neared Gatlinburg, he talked about the fires last winter and the drought that proceeded it.  For ninety days the area was without rain–unheard of in that area–then the forest around the ironically named Chimneys section of the park exploded in flame.  The fire raced down the mountainside, through the valley and into Gatlinburg where homes and businesses were destroyed by the hundreds.

Literally as the smoke cleared, Mark and his wife reassessed the water supply to their own home a few miles away and came to the conclusion that they needed a new well.  Yet, they had no idea where to dig.  Neighbors had dug wells four hundred feet or more in depth, some of them still dry.  His wife had heard of a “water witch.”  They called her, and she told them she would be glad to help.

She was an elderly woman living alone in the mountains.  They picked her up and started to drive back to their property.  She rather suddenly made Mark stop the car when she saw a peach tree.  “Onliest thing to work would be a peach branch,” she said.

Thus armed she made short work of finding the optimum spot for a well on Mark’s property.  Mark’s wife, fascinated, tried the peach wand, too, and felt its power.  Mark, still skeptical, tried, felt nothing, and wondered if this was a group-think con job like a Ouija board.

“I see you need a little help,” the water witch said, and she walked behind him, reached up, and touched both earlobes.

Mark’s hands began to tingle with a sensation he could only describe as electrical and the peach wand pulled him toward the same unseen water source with a force that he was unable to resist.  Convinced, he decided to dig the well on that spot.

The woman chuckled.  Mark offered to pay her.  She refused.  “If I took money for what I did, the water would be no good,” she said.

They dug the well and found plentiful water at forty feet.

Whenever I hear a story like this one I want to jump to one of two conclusions: the story is untrue, or the story is true but the powers are satanic.  But I couldn’t make the jump with this one.

I believe Mark’s story.  He is the kind of man who loves the outdoors and music.  He makes things with his hands and he keeps his word to a stranger to make a rendezvous in the dark based on a single phone call.  He is not a teller of tall tales.

And if his story is true, what could possibly be satanic about an elderly mountain woman carrying a peach branch as she volunteers to help her neighbor find water?

I choose to think that God has imbued this woman with a special gift, given her a special tool–the branch of a peach tree–and a willingness to share her gift.

Though unique, she is not alone.  God gives each of us a special gift to use to bring the Kingdom to the Earth, here and now.  Then He gives us a tool to use that gift.  And He gives us an opportunity to share our gift and encourage others to use it.

For a long time I had a gift–or a calling–to heal.  My tools were sometimes a pen and a prescription pad, sometimes a scalpel, sometimes a drill or a microscope, and sometimes exotic instruments that are beyond description.  The lame walked, the blind received their sight, those on death’s doorstep lived–in a sense, magic every bit as powerful and amazing as the ability to find water with a peach branch.  And every time I consulted with a colleague we learned from each other, commiserated with each other, and encouraged each other–though I don’t remember taking hold of anyone’s earlobes.

Today I have a gift–or at least a calling–to be a witness.  My tool is a computer.  I don’t often get to see the magic, but I trust it happens out there somewhere when somebody reads a story and recognizes something familiar, or sees a new truth, or opens their heart and mind to the larger reality of God.

You have a gift, too; I am sure of it.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe you haven’t called it a gift or recognized a calling, but if you stop and think about it for a moment, you will know what I mean.  You have a toolbox, too.  A stove if you’re a cook, a car if you’re a driver, a voice if you’re a preacher or a singer.  That’s your peach branch.  You can find living water for seekers in a way that is beyond your power or their power to resist, and you have a passion to share it.

Mark dropped us off at the trailhead about 7:30 AM, the place where the Appalachian Trail crosses the crest of the Newfound Gap road.  Darkness had given way to the flat, gray light of dawn.  Wisps of clouds and mists drifted through the mountaintop forest, lending a mystical quality to the morning.  Anything could happen; Brigadoon could appear.

We bade Mark good-bye and I shouldered my pack.  Before I walked away I screwed together the two parts of my aluminum hiking stick.  It has a strap and a foam handle and, on the very top, a knob of some kind of wood.  On that morning, I chose to believe it was peach.  As I started walking, I began to think about earlobes and tingling hands.

 

In the third year of medical school, on the second day on neurosurgery, I am assigned to shadow the resident Dr. Fernando Diaz and follow him to the University Hospital Emergency Room at about nine PM.  An old man lies unconscious on the stretcher.  He had taken out his garbage, slipped on the icy sidewalk, struck his head and didn’t wake up.  Despite an operation–the first craniotomy I ever saw–he would die the next day.

I learned a lot from his case–how to  evaluate the unconscious trauma patient, the steps of emergency brain surgery, quick evaluation and treatment of bleeding disorders.  Yet, the big question, the Why, remained unanswerable.  Why this time, after taking out his garbage thousands of times, walking on icy sidewalks every winter of his long life, why is this the last thing he does?

A couple of years later, a young woman walks across the New Haven green on a blustery Spring day.  A limb breaks in the wind and falls, striking her on the head and knocking her to the ground.  Rescue is called and she is brought to the ER but it is too late.  She is dead on arrival.

Two years later, an eight-year-old boy is playing on the sidewalk waiting for his school bus on the busy Whitney Avenue.  He trips and falls into the street in front of a garbage truck. Brakes screech, horns blow, but still there is a sickening thump.  Traffic stops.  An ambulance arrives and the boy is transported to the ER on a respirator.  He was only a couple of years older than my oldest son and got hit in front of the preschool my son attended.

An act of God, according to the Wordbook dictionary, is a natural and unavoidable catastrophe.  Most ER trauma cases are not acts of God.  Someone pulls the trigger, someone gets drunk, someone drives too fast–and someone suffers an avoidable catastrophe.

But sometimes a guy just takes out the garbage.  Or a woman walks across downtown green space.  Or a kid plays while waiting for the school bus.

The hospital staff has a funny reaction to the acts of God.  Everyone does their job, but I hear the murmurs and the whispers.  He should have put salt and sand on his sidewalk.  She should have waited out the storm before going for a walk.  Kids shouldn’t play so close to the street.  We blame the victim.

It is a defense mechanism.  We want to believe that a catastrophe is someone’s fault.  If we behave and others behave, we will be protected.  Otherwise the world is unpredictable and dangerous.

But sometimes there is no one to blame except God.

I learned from the first case, I watched the second case, but on the third case, the kid hit by the truck, I was the senior neurosurgery resident directing his care.  I saw him in the ER as the original resuscitation took place at nine AM.  Even after oxygen and blood pressure were restored his exam looked grim.  A CT scan showed no blood clots to evacuate, only a diffusely injured and swollen brain.

I called our director of pediatric neurosurgery and described the case.  He asked me my assessment, and I told him it looked hopeless.

Well, almost hopeless.

We believed that young children shouldn’t die.  We believed that maximum effort and state-of-the-art skill and knowledge would be rewarded.  So we gambled with the almost and ignored the hopeless.

I placed an intracranial pressure (ICP) monitor to guide treatment, optimized the respirator rate and administered various medications to control brain swelling.  By two PM, these measures had failed.  Another CT again showed diffuse brain swelling.  At three PM we took him to surgery to remove a large part of his skull so that even as the swelling increased his brain would not be compressed and the damage would be limited.  But even as the skin sutures were placed, his brain continued to swell.  The ICP went up again to dangerous levels, and then to levels incompatible with life.  By six PM, the battle was clearly lost.  The child would die.  A catastrophe.  An act of God.

This particular case affected me deeply.  I had been part of surgeries that had in one way or another failed, and this was not the first person I had seen die, nor even the first child.  Although always difficult and sad experiences, I had become inured.  But somehow this case cracked my shell.  Maybe because this time the victim looked too much like one of my own children.

So I buried myself in the paperwork; the demands for immediate hands-on action all day had outstripped the time available to document the required medical records.  But mostly I didn’t want to talk to anybody.  I was afraid if I had to talk, I’d cry.

I know what God told Job:  Where were you when I laid the cornerstones of the universe?  You’re just a man, you can’t understand the grand scheme of things.  At the end of the book, God gave Job a new family.  All very comforting and logical.

Until one is holding a dying child.

Then I want to know the Why.

And I if my sons were taken away by an act of God, replacement boys coming along a few years later might carry blessings, but the grief from losing the first two wouldn’t go away.  As a matter of fact, I expect that the love I would feel for the replacement boys would carry a undercurrent of terror–the fear of another loss.

As I hid behind the paperwork in that pediatric ICU, the director of pediatric neurosurgery, the one who had been guiding and encouraging me all day, came and stood across the desk from me.  “There’s someone outside to see you,” he said.

I respected this man for his knowledge and skills but didn’t trust him for emotional sensitivity.  He made too light of difficult situations.  He had been inured.

I shook my head; I was still afraid I would cry.  Besides, no one came to see me; I was just the resident.  Or worse, maybe the parents were waiting.  I couldn’t face them.  Not yet.

“Come on,” he said.

“No.”

He stared me down, long enough that he knew I was in pain, and I knew he wasn’t going away.  “Come on,” he said.

I got up and followed him.  After all, he was my boss.

In the hallway outside the ICU stood a teen-age girl in a cowboy hat.  Long, dark hair spilled out from under the right side of the hat, but no hair on the left, and maybe a hint of a scar in front of her left ear.  She smiled, but it was crooked, and she leaned on one of those aluminum canes.

Then I recognized her.  Six weeks previously, she had bled from something called an AVM, a congenital malformation, into the part of her brain that controlled speech and language.  She needed emergency surgery to save her life, but the cost had likely been the permanent loss of speech and movement on the right side of her body.   Two weeks later she was discharged to a rehab facility, aphasic and hemiplegic.  Another catastrophe.  Another act of God.

Now here she was, only a month later, walking with a cane–but walking already at just six weeks after her injury!  If she could walk with a cane now, she might be able to run in another six months.  Just to see her lifted my spirits.  Could she talk?

The words were slow and overly round like her tongue was too big.  “Thank you,” she said.

I don’t remember what I said.  I remember I had to hide my tears, but now tears that held a measure of relief, hope, possibly joy.

Maybe it was a coincidence that this thoughtful young woman took this particular moment to say thank you.  But maybe God sent a messenger to tell me that I couldn’t know everything He has to know, and I won’t know the outcome of many of the things I do, and the important thing is to trust Him.

I expect that God sent comfort to the parents of the child.  Because God doesn’t just watch our suffering from on high.  He gets down and dirty with us, and gets tortured and killed.  The passion of Christ was a historic event, but I think in some cosmic or mystical sense that the crucifixion and the resurrection is also a continuing experience.  When the kid gets hit by a truck, Jesus gets hit by a truck.  When Jesus rises from the grave, the kid rises from the grave.

We believe God is good all the time until we face catastrophe.  Then we wonder.  But we do not have to wonder if God cares.  In the Old Testament, He promises a time that He will wipe away all of our tears.  In the New Testament, He weeps for the death of his friend, Lazarus, and again for the destruction that will come to Jerusalem. When the parents of a dying child weep, God weeps.

I understand now why the book of Job ends with his fortune and family restored.  Those aren’t really replacement children.  They represent the fact that for every “act of God” there is an act of mercy.  He will dry your tears.  Sometimes He will restore your fortune, sometimes He will send another child.  Sometimes He sends a girl with a cowboy hat and a crooked smile.

 

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?