God is great.
I like rational explanations. Given the choice between believing in a rationalization based on fact and science versus accepting a faith-based justification, I default to science; there is much comfort to be had in believing that things happen randomly, rather than as a result of judgement on your moral worth. And to be honest, believing in science also sets a very low bar for personal behavior. If stuff is just as likely to happen to you as anyone else, then there is less pressure for you to be good. And if you are good, then you get to boast that you’re good, for goodness’ sake rather than out of fear of some divine punishment; it is a comfortable arrangement. And then my mother happened.
Early in December while I was out of the country on official business, my mother’s long struggle with hypothyroidism suddenly took a turn for the worse. I cut my trip short and while I was in transit, things turned critical. Fearing the worst, I reached out to everyone I could and asked them to pray for my mother. In my heart, I knew that science—medicine—would eventually decide the outcome, but isn’t it always that in the extremes of our despair, we become like children, left alone in the dark and calling out for mother? Well, my mother was in trouble, and I felt grossly unequal to the task, so I cried out for help—at one point, even literally.
The response was overwhelming (for which I am eternally thankful) and my mother made it through the night, even surviving cardiac arrest. Immediately, things started looking up and she was ready for discharge from the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) in a little less than a week.
On her discharge from the ICU, however, my mother was seized by what she said was an anxiety attack. Fairly confident that her vital signs were strong, I and everyone around me, sought to calm her down. But the anxiety continued well into the night. In the end, I suspect that the only reason she had managed to sleep even a little was because she had passed out from fatigue.
My sister and I were no less exhausted, but she stayed by her side while I tried to get some sleep. At 3 a.m., I woke up to a cluster of nurses surrounding my mother, talking in urgent tones. I could barely muster up the courage to ask what was going on. “Mommy’s gums are bleeding,” my sister told me. It was bad; so bad that a cotton ball held up to the bleeding was soaked within seconds. A quick-thinking nurse dipped a cotton ball in cold water and held it up to my mother’s gums and that worked, stanching the bleeding. But by morning, my mother’s mouth was black; she had kept on bleeding through the night.
The doctor who came looked at my mother’s gums, noted the loose tooth where most of the bleeding seemed to be coming from, and guessed that the tooth had been knocked loose by their efforts to intubate her four days prior. It made no sense to me why the bleeding would take so long to start, but it was a convenient explanation, and it seemed to satisfy the doctor.
The following day, the consulting dentist took one look at my mother’s tooth and dismissed the idea of it being in danger of falling out. “It’s just loose,” he said, and asked to see my mother’s records from the night the bleeding started. He took one look and, with a jab of his finger at the nurse’s clipboard, muttered “there it is. That’s why she was bleeding.” At around the time my mother had started bleeding, her blood pressure had spiked massively.
“Your mom was lucky,” the dentist said. Instead of causing bleeding into her brain, the elevated blood pressure had caused the blood to burst from the vessels in my mother’s gums, saving my mother’s life from what might have very well been a fatal stroke.
There is a rational, scientific explanation for my mother’s survival, of course. The tooth had been knocked loose when they tried to force a breathing tube down her mouth; that action had weakened the blood vessels around her tooth, making them most likely to burst in the event of a spike in her blood pressure; when the spike happened, the blood found the quickest way out. A simple, casual, pedestrian explanation. And yet, for all those circumstances to be in just the right juxtaposition, at just the right time that they needed to be, and specifically for my mother —randomness, science, these things suddenly felt inadequate.
Lucky? That’s one way of looking at it. But there’s only one way to feel about it, even for a skeptic like me. It was a miracle for my mother and for those who would have been shattered by her loss. If I—unworthy as I am—rate a miracle, then I have faith that there is certainly a miracle for each of you.
God is great.
1 comment
Justifying God is Great with this sort of rubbish argument is rather repulsive. “And to be honest, believing in science also sets a very low bar for personal behavior.” This rates as the most ridiculous statement of 2017, what sort of person needs the threat of godly punishment or reward to ensure good personal behavior? At the same time “God” flooded and killed 200+ people in Mindanao, are you suggesting those unfortunate people, men, women and children deserved it?