The Walking Stick Journal
Stepping Stones of Transformation
An Unfolding Manuscript
by
C. D. Baker
Chapter Seventeen: In the Belly of Suffering
On Saturday, April 2, 2022, I was awakened by a 12:30 AM phone call from my daughter-in-law, Brittany. I took a breath and answered. “What’s wrong?”
“Will [my son] fell and the ambulance is taking him to the hospital…” Her voice was strained. “I gotta go.”
Ten hours away on the southern Outer Banks, I began to pace.
She called back an hour later. Her voice was tight, tearful. “He’s headed for brain surgery…”
Stunned, I blinked. My wife and I threw our stuff in the car and roared up a lonely North Carolina two-lane. At around 4:30 AM my phone lit up again. The contact’s name was Brittany’s best friend. I braced myself.
“Mr. Baker, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was hesitant yet steady. “The news isn’t good.” She paused. “The surgeon says that Will Is unlikely to survive and if he does his future is a trach and a feeding tube…”
I jerked the car to the gravel shoulder, jumped out, and collapsed by the back bumper, broken and folded in half under a canopy of stars. Wailing, I soon railed at God with sounds coming from my throat that I had never heard. My son…dying? Institutionalized for life? “What kind of monster are you!” I shouted. There was no reply and I eventually climbed from my knees to stare helplessly into a fearful, deep-night nothingness.
Dumbstruck, I slowly crawled back behind the wheel for the remaining eight-hour ride home. The drive remains a blur, though I remember alternating waves of trembling anxiety and swarming dark thoughts. My faith had failed me and I didn’t care; rage and terror competed for my soul.
Arriving, I raced into the ICU to find Will in an induced coma, stuffed with tubes, draped with wires, and surrounded by medical staff. I tried to breathe. Electronics filled his room with a palpable energetic insistence. The forced rhythm of Will’s ventilator was a claustrophobic intrusion. Alarms of things going wrong brought a rush of footsteps.
***
Agonizing days passed with no improvement. The doctor gathered a meeting on Thursday and I listened still as stone. Against my fragile hope he advised that we should begin considering what kind of life Will would want.
I tried not hearing.
They would do a final test tomorrow and after that we would have to make some hard decisions. The hopelessness in the doctor’s voice said it all. I choked, then abandoned the meeting to hide my sobbing in the little chapel next door. Brittany found me there and took my arm, offering one word: Trust.
A sleepless night followed and when morning broke, I grabbed my walking stick to trudge alongside my faithful creek. I asked God for a miracle and then glanced at my feet where I discovered those little yellow wildflowers once again. I stared at them for a long moment, remembering how God once used them to tell me how he saw me: fragile, vulnerable…loved. This morning I was too shattered to care.
Time to go.
Arriving at the hospital on that Friday morning, my pastor, Mark, asked if he could pray for Will with an anointing of oil–a biblical act of releasing the sufferer to God. It was not a common request among Mennonites but why not?
Just before the final test, eight of us gathered to hold hands in a semicircle around Will’s ICU bed. The hospital chaplain bowed his head just outside the door. Two nurses turned down the alarms and pulled the curtain closed. There we were, nine helpless human beings in a sterile room, eight of us breathless and Will on a ventilator.
Sometimes words simply fail. As Mark prayed it was as if some ethereal veil suddenly parted and an invisible but tangible Presence filled the space. I literally experienced God’s Spirit enveloping the room with such other worldly comfort that terror and despair melted away.
The Comforter then delivered another grace. She enabled me to do that which I could never do on my own: From the depths of my soul I willingly surrendered my beloved son to whatever God wanted for him. For once, God felt safe and I could feel–absolutely FEEL–the love of Will’s heavenly Father holding him.
Mark’s tender ‘amen’ dismissed us for the doctors’ final examination. Staring at the curtain now closing us out, it did not escape my notice that a disorienting chaos had swallowed me whole on that first day and that I had been delivered into an indescribable rest on this, the 7th. In one week’s time I had never felt such soul crushing anguish, such feelings of betrayal by God, such rage, terror, abandonment… nor such love, trust, peace, and embrace. Mark’s anointing prayer had been the life-altering moment that God opened my heart to experience divine love. And in that lifting of the veil I suddenly awakened to the truth that a good God had been there all along.
There are terrible, wonderful mysteries in the belly of suffering.
A stir behind the curtain had me gnawing my lip; a moment later a nurse walked the curtain open and a doctor turned toward us. He yanked away his mask to reveal a smile. “Will’s in there,” he said.
He’s in there? Another nurse hurried past me whispering, “One in a million.”
The doctor gathered us and said something about hope. He quickly added some words of caution…but we knew only one word: ‘miracle.’
More wonder filled the days that followed. Within a week, I watched Will open one eye and look back at me–I’ll never take that for granted again. A few days later he offered a thumbs up!
What’s coming next? I don’t know and it may not be all that I am hoping. All I know right now is that in that ICU a good God revealed the beauty, the power, and the peace of belonging to him.