Hellobee

My brother shared his experience with my story over the last year. He’s a great writer and he’s also a pastor so his story is the same one as mine, but from a different perspective. He uses different words than I might but it’s all there, just looking at it from another angle. I also thought it was worth sharing.

This is a story with a happy ending, even though it’s not over yet. But there were a lot of rough spots in the middle. Honestly, there still are. My part in this chapter began about 10pm on a Tuesday night in mid-March one year ago. Winter had begrudgingly released its hold on Western Colorado and we had been watching signs of spring all around us. I was sitting in my dining room playing a D&D-style game with several friends. And we were winning!

My phone vibrated in my pocket. My dad was calling me, which was odd. The nerdy gaming, reading, and everything else you might expect to go along with that is a regular part of my life, but my parents never call. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are wonderful people who love me well. But they live in Canada and while free international calls are included on my phone plan, they have to pay to call me. So the most I ever get is a text saying, “Call us!”

I excused myself from the table and stepped out of the room. “Hello?” As I picked up, I heard words I never expected: “You need to get online now for a video call with the family. Something happened. Your sister is probably going to die.”

The next five days were a haze that ended with my wife and I leaving after our church’s morning service to get on a plane and fly to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where my pregnant sister had been living. She had suffered a severe brain bleed as a result of a rare genetic condition called brain arteriovenous malformation or AVM. A tangle of blood vessels in her head had burst and put pressure on her brain; her heart had nearly crushed her brain inside her skull with the pressure of the blood it kept pumping.

As my wife and I prepared to go to Thailand, we didn’t know what to expect. Despite several emergency surgeries she had undergone, we still didn’t know if my sister would be alive when we landed. But we both felt strongly that we needed to share the news and share our grief and fear with our extended spiritual family.

As I shared that morning with our church what had happened in our lives and that the sermon was going to be a bit shorter than normal, one dear lady got up and walked right out of the church. A few months earlier, her husband had been diagnosed with vascular dementia. At the time, I was too distraught to think about what she was doing or why. But after the service, she pressed a thousand dollars in 20-dollar-bills into my hand. She had left church to drive to an ATM to get us the gift. I still tear up thinking about the love of God’s people for my wife and I in that moment. Others too crowded around us after the service and pressed us with cash, prayers, hugs and tears of love.

We live in Western Colorado. And that Sunday morning, before we had begun our drive west to the Salt Lake City International Airport, about four hours from our home, the last winter storm of the season had begun to pound our area. As we neared the Interstate, sleet was pounding the vehicles and roads all around us. But when we crossed into Utah and left the Interstate to take the State Highway northwest to Salt Lake, my wife and I looked to our left and right and we couldn’t believe what we saw: on both sides, we could see a discernible wall of rain-snow mix pouring down from dark clouds that seemed to fill the sky. But our road was dry. We could even feel the sun on our backs as we drove. When we neared a steep hill in front of us, she turned to me and asked, “Do you think this is what the Israelites felt like when they crossed the Red Sea?” I nodded. God was going before us.

Traversing the mountains between Grand Junction and Salt Lake City, my mind spun back to reflect on shards of the previous week. That Tuesday after I got off the phone with my dad, there was nothing to do but wait. And so I walked back into our dining room where my friends were still waiting around the D&D table. For some reason they had not played or cut me out.

They just sat waiting, wondering, and caring for me. When I got back, looking (I imagine) rather pale, my buddy asked, “Are you okay?” The honest response was, “No.” And I briefly explained to them what had happened: my sister, who lives in Thailand with her husband had a brain bleed. Totally unexpected. Maybe connected to her pregnancy? Maybe not. She’s five months along. I don’t know what to do or what to think. She’s probably going to die.

After a pause, my friend gently asked, “Can we pray for you?”

Many pastors will tell you that in desperate moments like these, people rarely remember the words that you said. Instead, they simply that you were there. With them. That Tuesday was no different. I don’t remember anything particular that John said, but simply that he sat at my table and prayed for me. And his prayer was simple, straight-forward, and powerful. That simple game was, for me, a beautiful foretaste of the joy and laughter that is still to come. There was nothing to be done except trust God. And so we did. And we played.

After my friends went home, we sat down to talk again with my parents. It was midnight for us, but mid-day in Thailand. And there was news. Nothing much, but the doctors had performed emergency surgery and my sister wasn’t dead yet. And her baby was still alive too. Hope was beginning to crystallize in caverns of shock in our hearts. As our family prayed, gathered together on a video call from five different places around the globe, God gave me two words, spoken quietly but clearly into my heart: talitha koum. Those words were for me. The Aramaic recorded in Luke’s gospel when Jesus visited Jairus’ daughter (have I mentioned I’m a nerd?).

“Little girl, get up.”

What those words spoke to my heart, immediately, was Jesus’ promise to another grieving family two thousand years ago, but also to mine: “she is not dead, she is only sleeping.” That, like the little girl so long ago, my sister would not yet enter the sleep of death; but that she too would be taken by the hand and picked up out of the bed where she laid, thousands of miles away, in a coma.

While we were still in transit, my parents and two younger siblings made it to Thailand and joined the near constant vigil around her bed. Before my wife and I arrived late on Monday night, our family received the first signs of life. While she was still unresponsive, my parents had been praying for and talking to my sister as they sat by her bed and my mother held her hand. “If you can hear us,” my mom said, “ just squeeze my hand.”

And the faintest squeeze followed.

The doctors, not wanting to instill a false sense of hope, warned that it could have been involuntary movement, but over the coming days, she squeezed more hands when asked.

Nine days after her life was almost over, my sister opened her eyes.

In the months that followed her accident, thousands of people literally around the world were praying for her. All over the US and Canada, but also in Africa, Europe, and even Australia and South America. There was a global intercession for her health and wholeness. Hundreds of people picked up a practice that my sister and her husband and their friends had begun several years before: lighting a candle in prayer. Only this time, prayer for her health and wholeness. Christians prayed, atheists and agnostics sent best wishes and good vibes. Our family received over thirty thousand dollars in gifts, helping to cover medical and travel costs, often $10 or $20 at a time. The entirety of my family’s stay in Thailand, the owner of a local fusion restaurant took it upon himself to bring a bountiful lunch across town to whoever was at the hospital. He did it personally every day and each day refused payment. Through God’s grace and love, manifested in so many different people and ways, our Father preserved and restored our family.

And then he woke my sister up.

As a family, we heard well over a thousand stories of people who were encouraged, amazed, or affected in some other way by what God did for her. For my brother in law, niece, and for the baby who was born three months after my sister’s coma, healthy, handsome, and whole. And we celebrated and continue to celebrate the miracle God worked for our family.

For my part, I experienced in a powerful way what it means to be a part of a bigger story that affects tens of thousands of people. Maybe more. And I learned powerful and painful things about myself. I learned that I love to be at the center of the story, even if it’s not my story. Whenever my sister hit a new recovery benchmark, someone who was praying seemed to want to take credit: that, somehow, it must have been their prayer(s) that made all the difference. From time to time I imagined the same: that my sister would somehow respond to my prayers or to my wife and my presence with her. That God would wake her up because of us. Because of me.

As she continued to recover, I also battled with feeling of envy—then feelings of shame over my envy. I coveted the attention that she had—even when she wasn’t aware of it. I fought bitterness that my parents each took three month breaks from work to devote their time to her. I asked myself, “What do I need to do to get that kind of love?” And, “What has to happen to me for anyone to notice me or care?” I also battled the shame of having such feelings: how could I be so self-centered as to wish to take attention away from my sister’s life? If, indeed, it was God who healed her, then taking people’s attention away from her was tantamount to asking them not to pray for her life. Did I really care more about my own ego than my sister’s life?

But as God healed her, he also healed our family. He also healed me. I am learning this year that my part in the story is not to be at its center. Those seeds of envy and bitterness were planted many years ago, but I am learning not to water them. I am learning that my desire to fix and to be at the center is a very simple and common form of idolatry—wanting that attention that only God deserves. I am also learning that there is a better life for me—and, I believe, for all of us—than the one I would plan for myself. God brought my wife and I safely through a spring snowstorm in Utah. He brought my sister through profound suffering and a year of recovery to health and wholeness that we could never have imagined—only twelve months later. And that’s to say nothing of all the other people and stories who have interacted with me and my family just this past year. I am learning to recognize that the stories which make up my life are not, first of all, about me. I hope it’s clear that even the story I’m sharing here is much bigger than me. But then, that’s true of everyday life as well. As CS Lewis fondly said, “You’ve never met an ordinary person in your life.” My story isn’t first about me. Not anymore.

As my story unfolds, I am beginning to place my battle against self—especially stubbornness and pride—humbly inside of a story that is much bigger than me. This is, I believe, what following Jesus (Christianity) is all about: seeing God not just as King of the Universe—able to do what he wants—but also as a loving Father who desires to give good gifts to his kids. And deciding to embrace my identity as a child of God, part of his unfolding story and growing family. No longer a rebel with a selfish cause, but a son motivated by the love of his Father. I am beginning to understand what Jesus means when he tells his disciples that in order to live, they need to die. I am beginning not just to “believe” in my head, but also to live in the truth that making my life about someone other than me is actually better for me; not to mention everyone else. And I am beginning to believe that my healing is no less miraculous than my sister’s recovery. Trust me—you don’t know me like I know me. And that’s not to make the bigger story of her recovery about me. Instead, it is to recognize that my God cares about the mundane just as much as he cares about the extraordinary. His healing love has been vested in the privacy of my own heart just as much as the public arenas of prayer. And his love is not limited to me or my family; his love is boundless, limitless, and never dries up.

What do I have to do to get that kind of love? It’s already mine. But I can’t get it from anyone other than my heavenly Father. But he cares for me today writing this and you another day reading it. And that, no less than he cared for that little girl in Capernaum all those years ago. I am learning that the power of the Savior’s message and the Comforter the Savior promised are not stories just for days gone by. God’s power is for all who believe. His Spirit is with all his children. And all of us can hear the Father’s voice. To some, he says, talitha koum. And the Spirit wakes them from their slumber. Others have to wait until the sleep of death, but then Jesus too opens their eyes and welcomes them into his presence. But to all he whispers words of love and invites us to step into a story that is bigger than ourselves, to engage with a kingdom power that we can’t control, and to follow in faith—across the ocean, across the street, or even across the room.

This is a story with a happy ending, even though it’s not over yet. But there were a lot of rough spots in the middle. Honestly, there still are. But God’s mercies are new every morning and ride on the wings of the dawn. And it’s time to get up.