A couple of Sunday mornings ago, one of the teenage girls in our church family was found unconscious at home. No one knew how long she had been that way.
She was rushed to hospital and needed emergency brain surgery. By the time we gathered at church that morning, her family was at the hospital and the rest of us were hearing bits and pieces of what had happened. So we prayed.
Later, when the sedation was reduced, her parents were terrified she might not wake up. Then she started breathing on her own.
A few days later, as they prayed beside her and said “Amen”, she opened her eyes. Her parents said it felt like a resurrection.
She is awake now, thank God. Still very weak. There is another operation ahead, rehabilitation, and who knows yet what the bleeding in her brain may have affected.
There is a long road ahead. But what a week it has been, especially for the family.
When one part hurts 🤕
One of the most precious things to see has been the church family coming together around them.
People prayed and cried. Messages, calls and visits went out. A meal train started so that people could take turns cooking for the family.
Someone told me a few days ago that she had never cried so much for someone she barely knew. And I thought: that’s right.
When one part of the body hurts, somehow we all hurt. You don’t have to be someone’s closest friend before their suffering matters to you. That’s one of the strange and beautiful things about being joined together in Christ. Her parents have been overwhelmed by the amount of love they have received. This is what family is supposed to look like.
Within the same week I spoke to another woman whose husband died about a month ago after years of cancer. She told me she has no drive to do anything now. Her son lives elsewhere. She goes home by herself. And unlike the family at church, she doesn’t really have a community walking alongside her.
The contrast stayed with me.
Suffering is suffering either way. A church family doesn’t remove it. But there is a difference between walking through darkness with people beside you and walking through it alone.
A simple thing
I heard that her dad still came briefly to church that Sunday morning.
He had been due to help serve the Lord’s Supper, and apparently came by simply to say sorry and let the others know he couldn’t be there.
Of course nobody expected him to be there.
Then when he heard that the church was gathering to pray for his daughter, his instinct was apparently to think about coming to that too.
It is a privilege and joy to travel in life together with brothers and sisters of all kinds, and certainly someone like him who reminds me of a humble childlike faith, and also one who never loses the wonder of God and life regardless of how many decades of life he’s lived.
The road ahead ⏳
The dramatic moments naturally bring people together. The emergency surgery, the critical first 24 hours, and waiting to see whether she wakes up.
Those are the moments when everyone is alert.
I also know of someone who fasted for her, cried for her and stayed close to the family through those consecutive days until she finally opened her eyes.
Rightly so, we should be deeply concerned and weep with people who weep. But I’m thinking perhaps the harder test comes later.
She is awake, but this story isn’t finished yet. There is another operation coming up. There is rehab. And there may be effects nobody yet knows about. But eventually everyone else’s life returns to normal. The crisis isn’t quite as new anymore. And people get busy again.
That’s when walking alongside someone actually becomes really walking.
Our minister said it is up to the church family to walk with them on the road ahead. I think that’s true.
Just like with grief too. Everyone gathers when someone dies. Then comes the funeral, the flowers, meals, messages, condolences. And eventually the world moves on. Except the person who has lost someone doesn’t necessarily move on at the same speed.
Family stays after the emergency.
It was our turn
How fragile life is. A day earlier she was walking, talking, laughing and doing whatever an ordinary teenager does. Hours later everything had changed.
With a brain bleed, she could just as easily have been found dead. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but it is true.
We live as though tomorrow is simply today’s continuation. 🔁 You wake up, go to work, make plans for next month, put things in the calendar, and assuming the people around you will still be there.
Until one day something happens and they’re not. Or they’re there, but life will never be quite the same again.
You don’t know when it is your turn. And somehow you also live like it’s never going to be your turn.
And I was also thinking that reality didn’t actually change last Sunday. Something enormous changed for this family, of course. Something changed for us because they belong to us and suddenly this suffering came close. But suffering did not suddenly enter the world last Sunday morning. Even while we were praying so earnestly for this one girl, there would have been parents elsewhere receiving news much worse.
Nothing new happened under the sun. ☀️
People were having brain bleeds before that. Parents were already sitting beside unconscious children before that. And people were dying before that too, and even now, and it will continue so too. It was simply our turn to feel it.
I think sometimes when suffering touches our own little world, we feel as though reality itself has suddenly shifted. But we really haven’t received new information. We’ve just experienced personally what was true all along.
The world has always been this fragile. We just forget when everything is going well.
The danger we can see ⚡
I look at how urgently we responded to physical danger.
Again, rightly so. Someone’s life is in danger and suddenly everything else moves down the priority list.
People rearrange schedules. They go to hospital. They pray late into the night. They fast. They cry. They call each other with updates.
Nobody says, “I’ll think about it when I have time.”
The urgency is obvious because the danger is obvious. And I started wondering why we don’t feel spiritual danger with anything like the same urgency. In fact, it was this father (who’s also a doctor) who observed not too long ago that there were some 20 over them doctors trying to save one life in the operating theatre.
If someone’s brain is bleeding, we understand immediately that this is serious.
What about someone spiritually dying?
Or spiritually dead already?
We believe eternity is real and judgment is real. And we believe Christ really is the difference between life and death. Yet somehow we don’t normally feel that reality with the same sharpness.
Of course, understandable that perhaps because physical danger is visible. You can see the hospital bed, the tubes, the frightened parents.
Spiritual death look perfectly healthy.
So the problem is not that we cared too much physically, but that we often care too little spiritually.
If I really believe life is this fragile, and eternity this real, shouldn’t there be more urgency in my prayers for people who don’t know Christ? More concern, more willingness to rearrange things?
More tears?
Healing, for now
We prayed very earnestly for her to wake up. 🙏
And thank God, she did. We continue to pray for healing.
But every healing in this life is provisional. Everyone Jesus healed eventually died, didn’t they?
The blind man who could finally see grew old too. The paralytic who picked up his mat eventually lay down again for the last time. And Lazarus came out of his grave, and eventually went back into one. 🪦
Jesus did not come merely to keep postponing death. He came to deal with death. Not merely to give us a few more years before death catches up with us again, but to bear sin and death Himself and give eternal life to those who belong to Him.
Surely that deserves at least the earnestness with which we prayed this week. Probably much more.
Someone’s child
I’ve seen parents this week respond very keenly to what happened. Even parents who might not otherwise be particularly involved in church were quick to want to help.
I don’t have children myself, but I can imagine something of the horror of seeing your child unconscious in a hospital bed.
Parents certainly feel it even more instinctively. You look at someone else’s daughter and think of your own. And her parents, of course, need not imagine. That was their little girl lying there.
There is something about the love of a parent for a child that makes the suffering almost unbearable.
If we can feel such anguish for someone else’s children, or even our own children, what about for God’s Son? And what does it say that God did not spare His own Son for us?
The Son He loves who is infinitely precious is given for people like us.
Of course the comparison only goes so far. God was not helplessly standing by while something happened outside His control. The Father gave His Son willingly, and the Son gave Himself willingly likewise. But that’s exactly what makes it more staggering. He knew the cost and gave Him anyway.
We prayed desperately this week because we wanted this girl to live.
God gave His Son so that people who were already spiritually dead might live.
That is love on a scale I don’t naturally comprehend.
This family said that on the Wednesday when she opened her eyes after they said “Amen”, felt like a resurrection. And I pray there will be many more good days ahead for her.
Yet there is a greater resurrection still to come. One where nobody wakes up weak nor needs another operation. Not going back into hospital. And nobody dies again.
Until then, we pray. We cook, visit, cry. And we walk with one another.
And we remember what all our smaller rescues are pointing us towards.