“Make this your common practice: pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.” James 5:16 (MSG)
The story of how my 23-year-old cousin Ben lived; it starts, in fact, five days before he died. His mom, my Aunt Barbara, woke up on a Sunday morning this past April with a strong feeling she should fast that morning and pray instead of eating breakfast. And on Monday morning, she felt the same way. This feeling continued for four days, resulting in a water or black-tea-only fast until 10:30 each morning, at which point she would allow herself coffee with milk and food for breakfast.
On the fifth day, as Aunt Barbara was fasting, my cousin Ben was on a short morning jog about 30 minutes away, when his heart stopped, and he collapsed on the pavement. His jogging route had taken him through future housing developments that were paused in their construction, where his body would have probably not been discovered for who knows who long, but thankfully when he collapsed he was in his neighborhood, and thankfully in the vicinity of a neighbor who found him on the sidewalk a few minutes later. This neighbor just so happened to work in the hospital emergency room and was able to provide high quality CPR until the ambulance arrived, which it thankfully did shortly. The medics were able to find a pulse after administering the fifth shock. Upon arrival to the hospital, Ben’s girlfriend was a nurse working in the emergency department and thankfully was able to identify Ben as well as his medical history and current medications and dosages. Despite the rain for which April is well known, the weather conditions were good enough for the helicopter to immediately transport him to Johns Hopkins, which somehow had a vacant bed in their small cardiac critical care unit staffed with doctors who happened to be well versed in Ben’s exact condition.
By the time Aunt Barbara broke her fast that day, God had already worked miracles beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Ben’s heart had stopped for 13 minutes, and by the grace of God it was miraculously working hard to beat again.
More miracles were needed for his body to recover from those 13 minutes, though. The doctors at Johns Hopkins at first were hesitant he would survive. After a day they were confident he would live but were hesitant about whether or not he would be brain dead for the rest of his life, or if he could breathe on his own or have functioning kidneys ever again. After another day they were confident he had some brain function but were hesitant about how much and how long it would take to get back to a semblance of quality of life. After another day, they realized he had good brain function and would likely be able to leave the hospital within a year. The doctors reasoned that if things continued to progress, he would be stable enough for heart surgery within a few months. The rate of his healing was so fast that he had surgery within a few days. Ben’s healing confounded and mystified everyone as he walked out of the hospital one week after his body was found on the sidewalk. There was no residual damage to any of his organs and no recommendations for any rehabilitation therapy. He was healed.
Ben’s miraculous healing was inexplicable from a medical perspective, but not from a spiritual one. I witnessed spiritual battle in Aunt Barbara like I had never seen anywhere else. I saw how she laid hands on Ben, fully prepared to go to war with the Enemy as she prayed dozens upon dozens of memorized Scripture verses over Ben’s body. I watched how she declared victory over his circumstances. I saw how she surrendered everything over to God, so that when Ben’s older sister arrived with a deep respiratory cough the third day he was at Johns Hopkins, Aunt Barbara didn’t flinch about letting his sister by his bedside because she knew something as trivial as a cough was no match for the healing being done through Jesus.
The number of prayers being prayed over Ben would be an interesting exercise to attempt to calculate. At his bedside with not much else to talk about, his siblings and I tried to figure it out at one point and reached around 1,500 people that we estimated we knew firsthand were praying for him. That can’t possibly take into account the ripple effects of people we didn’t even know who had heard about Ben’s condition and felt called to pray.
Witnessing Ben’s miracle changed my life in so many ways, but for the sake of brevity for this blog post I’ll just say my biggest takeaway was that we have been given the blueprint for how to fight and win spiritual battles if we prepare ourselves and open our hearts to the Holy Spirit. We never know when or how the Enemy will strike, but we do know there is a faithful God who can defeat the Enemy on our behalf if we are willing and able to call upon Him. Aunt Barbara couldn’t have known what she would be up against that fifth morning she woke up and felt called to fast, but thanks to her willingness to obey God and a lifetime spent memorizing Scripture and developing a trust in God’s Word, she was prepared to fight a battle. And God was so faithful as a result, showing again and again how mighty He is. As Aunt Barbara put it afterwards, God is the same yesterday, today and forever.
Thank you God, for showing us that miracles happen every day and giving us the tools to fight our battles. Thank you for your steadfastness. Help us to trust your plan for our lives and spread the good news of your power and love.