It was 4 years ago… Sunday December 4, 2005
On Friday December 2nd we had enjoyed our annual youth Christmas party. A missionary from the Dominican Republic was our guest speaker. Huge party with lots of food. I ate plenty of our 12 foot sub from Subway.
Saturday the 3rd we had plans to take my friend, Ryan Hansen (the missionary) to San Francisco on a sight seeing trip. I woke up feeling terribly, throwing up and bailing out of my plans. I cursed Subway while David Eddings (friend and youth worker) took the missionary for me. He is and was such a great guy.
Sunday the 4th. I woke up feeling like death. I had to report, early that morning, to the pastor that I would not be able to lead music at either service. Kelly, who played keyboard, still went and left me at home. I slept. When she returned that afternoon I felt so awfully that Kelly took me to the hospital. I was quickly admitted.
As it turns out I was experiencing heart failure, but it would not be evident until Tuesday morning. Monday night I had the worst night of my life, without any question. By Tuesday morning I knew something was dead wrong. The pastor and my wife came and I was utterly unaware of anything except that I felt like I was dying. In the background, doctors took blood non stop to determine if I had an infectious disease causing my heart problem. Un-known to me, discussions were taking place about my critical status and that I needed to be intubated or I was not going to make it. My last memory was of that process and of this larger than life person sitting on me to restrain me.
I slept, and while I did (for 3 days) my family stayed in a donated RV at a church nearby (we were in San Jose, 3 hours from home). My condition was critical and I was placed on a heart transplant list.
When I awoke, I was unaware of anything that had happened. I had nearly died and was facing heart transplantation. I remember vividly going to a heart transplant luncheon on the 10th. I met alot of heart transplant survivors, but I was unaware of why I was there. Even at that point I did not know how badly off I was.
I did know that I was sick and that God had given me a second chance. And, believe me, I was closer to our Lord in those days than I had ever been. By the grace of God I was recovering well enough in 2 weeks that I was sent home. A few months later I took a heart stress test that was the best score the staff had ever seen by a patient. My heart was completely normal with no signs of any heart damage. It was all of God: the gift of healing, the grace, the blessing.
This is a short account of this time of my life in which God got my attention. So many details of grace that I am leaving off. So many examples of God meeting me at the point of my need. So many embraces that God gave my family during this time when I slept, through the worst of it. But what I learned through it and after it are two primary lessons…. two life altering ideas that God so graciously imparted.
1) Every breath is a gift of God given for the primary purpose of worshipping Him. Just a month before my heart failure I had come to music by Matt Redman that said so much. In November I saw Mr. Redman in concert, but the message of worship with my breath took root a month later. Would to God that we lived with the intention of taking every breath precisely for His glory.
2) My second learning had to do with ministry. I was serving my church far more than I was serving God. Now that lesson came home with crystal clarity. All my friends were church people and had hardly spoken to my neighbors. I was the worst kind of Christian… inward focused and focused on “God” without concern for His mission. But loving God apart from the other side of the coin (loving neighbor) just never works. Inevitably “loving God” is distorted to look nothing like the Bible version.
The first teaching deals with me as a person, and the second with me as a minister (though it is true of me as a person, as it is for you). In the end, though, today (4 years removed from the ordeal of near death) I am aware of God’s deep and rich love for me. He loves me. He doesn’t love me because I am a part of the world and since He loves the world He must love me. No….. He loves me. And, He loves me enough to do good things for me. He loves you in the exact same way. Today I am pondering His great love. Join me!