The First Time I Cheated Death-Part 2

I don’t remember my head hitting the ground, or what happened shortly thereafter.  I have a vague memory of falling towards the cold tile before everything went blank.  I was aware that tile was too hard for my head to comfortably collide with as I went down. Yet I was unconcerned about the effect it would have on my skull.  In some ways, it was one of the most peaceful moments of my life. It was a tranquil surrender.

In the ambulance, I regained consciousness. Everything was a flurry of activity.  I leaned up out of the gurney, humiliated by my helplessness, and tried to at least push open the door for the EMTs carrying me as we entered the hospital.

“Stay down,” one of them cautioned me, not unkindly, but his words increased my feeling of burning shame.  “We’ll do that.”

Once in the ER, nurses attached me to beeping machines and the smell of antiseptic stung my nose.

I was calm, almost apathetic.  Since coming to know God a year earlier, I felt confident that heaven was real, and my fear of death was almost null. For reasons I won’t explore here, I was afraid of losing almost everything and almost everyone close to me at that time.

It was from that personal nadir that God rescued me for the first time.  It’s true that “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalms 34:18).  On one of the most painful nights of my life, God sat in the room with me, permeating every molecule of air around me.  God enveloped me in his arms in such a way that His spirit was palpable.  I was the most hurt and most hungry I’d ever been, and all the fight had gone out of me.  Wrecked by my own desperation, I fell into His perfect love.

Years of questioning and reasoning and wondering if God was real faded away.  I had no choice but to acknowledge God.  The mystery of God and the signs I saw of Him everywhere awed me. I was startled by how profound my own prior blindness had been.

I was also calm because I’d recently returned from a 38-day hike from the French border across Spain to the Atlantic Ocean (referenced in Part 1).  I was keenly aware that, whatever the future may hold, I had already been luckier than most in my life. 

In a way, being in the hospital (initially) was kind of a relief.  I had a valid reason for not working for a while, and it was a welcome respite.  Because I had been mandated to lay prone, I did so without my typical panicked wondering if I had somehow grown lazy.  I’ve been haunted by the fear of not contributing my fair share to the world for as long as I can remember, feeling compelled to earn my privilege of breathing air.  For once in my life, I didn’t have to think about that; I was, after all, following doctor’s orders.

But as hours turned to days and days to weeks, I became restless.  None of the medical professionals knew why I had mysteriously lost enough blood internally to almost kill me.  Some of them scratched their heads, one of them asked another if they thought I had cancer when they thought I was already under anesthesia, and one of them, losing her cool, remarked directly to me, “This is scary.”

I remained calm, ready to accept whatever fate the Lord determined. But somewhere, deep down, I knew that He had work for me to do.  It nagged at me over and over again, biting at the corners of my mind as I tried to ignore it.

A few months prior, I had found a teaching application online for a nonprofit.  I felt called to fill it out, but I didn’t want to.  I knew being a teacher wasn’t lucrative and have always felt instantly exhausted around children.  Teaching a grade between kindergarten and 12th didn’t jibe with the idea of the life I had planned for myself.  It sounded difficult and tiring and distinctly lacking in glamour. My friends were all either still living abroad doing extraordinary things or in Manhattan making extraordinary money.

But it was clear what God wanted me to do.  It was clear that I’d be on this hamster wheel of medical crisis, or else (and I believe this was more likely-die), if I didn’t make a move.

I could ignore God’s prodding no longer.

So I said, “Ok, God, if you save me now, I’m yours.  I’ll fill out that application.”

For the second time in my life (the first was shortly after the night described above a year prior), I heard the Lord’s audible voice.  He replied, “By His stripes you are healed.”

While I didn’t know the exact source of this quote in the Bible, I understood that God was telling me I was healed in that moment, in exchange for me keeping the promise I’d just made to him. I later googled this, curious where it was from, and discovered it’s from Isaiah 53:5. (I’d read the bible through that first year but wasn’t familiar enough with it to remember specific verses or know where they’d come from).

I didn’t know what to tell the doctors, but multiple medical tests soon confirmed what I already knew: they could find no sign of illness in me. 

Click here to read about the 2020 death cheat.

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