My patient Harry, a 70 year old economics professor, is in for an office visit after a long hospitalization. Fifty seven days ago, his leaky mitral valve suddenly ruptured, plunging him into florid congestive heart failure. He showed up in the emergency department with perilously low blood pressure and suffocating in his own fluid. He required ICU care and emergency open heart surgery. Numerous complications ensued. Harry is fortunate to be alive.
I am eager to connect with Harry, interested in hearing how he feels about his brush with death, and also ready to hear details of how his physical therapy is progressing and whether he needs medication adjustments or other specific interventions.
He has always had a piercing look, which, combined with bushy eyebrows and unkempt hair, gives him an air of gravity and intelligence. I expect him to look weak today, but as I enter the room, I am gratified to see some of the old strength in his eyes. In fact, a strange fire seems to simmer there.
CONVERSATION WITH GOD
As I ask a few questions of Harry, he seems to disregard them and keeps fixing me with a significant look. I realize he has something important to tell me, and I need to be completely quiet and let him direct the conversation.
We settle into chairs and I close the laptop (and my mouth) and return his gaze. Harry does not want to talk about medications or therapy. He wants to focus on an experience he had while critically ill. He recounts that in the ICU he had a near death experience, complete with his life flashing before him in a reckoning of all his deeds. I have heard such accounts before. Each of these stories is fascinating.
But there is more. Harry relates that at death’s door he conversed directly with God. Obviously that gets my attention. But I am even more drawn in when Harry announces mysteriously:
“God didn’t just speak to me about myself. He also gave me a message for certain people.”
He pauses for full effect. I have been in this kind of situation often enough to know that I should not interrupt. We sit there a few seconds with our eyes locked in attention and sympathy. It is a pregnant moment.
“Doctor Maynard, you are one of those people.”
GETTING MY ATTENTION
Despite my skepticism, I nevertheless find my pulse quickening, and I slide to the edge of my chair. My mind races with questions. What if this is real? Am I really about to hear words especially for me from the almighty? What if Harry’s message rebukes some deficiency in my walk of faith? Maybe God will affirm me in some area of success or even set me to some new and wonderful direction in life.
Then Harry leans in very close, fixing me with a piercing gaze, and slowly reels off the question:
“Would you like to hear what God said to tell you?”
We are all jaded by the nonspecific announcements from “prophets,” trumpeting supposed words of God from television screens or street corners. Maybe some of us in Christian circles have been treated to more personal, but still fairly generic, exhortations reportedly from God. I have grown cynical about such things.
But here is a man who truly has been near the gates of death and claims to have spoken directly with God. Amid my cynicism, I feel a rising anticipation. What if…?
Perhaps enjoying the suspense a little too much, Harry solemnly repeats the tantalizing question:
“Would you like to hear what God said to tell you?”
NEAR DEATH, BUT FAR FROM SPECIFIC
In the end I find myself not surprised, but still a bit let down, when Harry’s heavenly tidings turn out simply to be:
“You are to do exactly what you are doing.”
Talk about disappointing and nonspecific! My chance to connect with God via direct divine revelation was a frustrating non-event.
We have every right to be disappointed by the glib and shallow tidings that ring out about God and mankind from the television and even from well-intended men like Harry with his supposedly divine prescription for my life.
How then should we expect God to speak to us and relate to us? I was guardedly hoping for a conversation. But often I believe God gives us something different, maybe even something better. God certainly speaks in words – wonderful words! – but that is for a later post. He also has devised a medium of communication that no one else could possibly replicate.
The form of that wonderful message and its content are what I am eager to tell you about.
Dr. Bill Maynard