Response Theology

I have fragmented memories of the three days during which he was dying. I remember his little sister nearly fainting when she first saw him comatose with all sorts of tubes coming out of his face. I remember my call to my parents in Kansas telling them that one of their grandsons was in a deep coma after collapsing while running. The whole family gathered to be with us. I remember asking about my son’s blood enzymes and being shown levels that were the hallmark of massive tissue destruction. I remember praying on my knees beside his bed, “Not my will but God’s will be done.” I remember having to sign a DNR (do not resuscitate) paper when the doctors started shocking his heart to get it restarted. When he died, the four of us in his immediate family gathered at his bedside, held each other, and cried and cried and cried. I remember having to tell those gathered in the waiting room that my son had died. That evening, the lead pastor at our home church conducted a service for us in the hospital chapel. I remember my stoic father crying beside me during the service. I was numb with grief.

Once my son was buried, I began to vent my anger toward God, the omnipotent God in whom I was taught to believe. For about three weeks, I seethed with bitter anger toward God. If God were truly omnipotent and had just let my son die or caused his death, I had no use for such a god. Indeed, I had prayed that God’s will be done. Then as the storm clouds of my grief began to lift, I started to understand that God had been there all along working through those folks who had come to love on my family during our time of deepest suffering. They had responded to our suffering. No one wants to be where someone’s child is dying. No one. But they came anyway. And they stayed until he died.

It was only in the wake of the loss of my son that I began to take a scientist’s view of what I had been taught to believe. Was Christianity a cruel hoax to mollify the masses including me? Would another religion be better for me? I even read the Qur’an as best I could. How far could reasoning take me in my belief journey, and how much did I have to rely on faith? As I formed a rational belief, I found that it was seriously tested.

As a board-certified toxicologist with a PhD in pathology, I was troubled by the possibility that my son could have been saved by potassium replacement therapy. Patients with low potassium and life-threatening heart arrhythmias, which he had, need to have potassium replacement therapy. Parts of his medical records suggested that he had refused a pacemaker, but I knew that his only refusal was for a loop monitor, which was evident in earlier parts of his records. I was further troubled by his medical record missing the results of his cardiac MRI. I became a patient safety advocate.

I often visited the grave of my son. There, I discovered the meaning of the beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4 NRSV). I learned to mourn at my son’s marker with everything I had to pour out of my eyes and heart. I found that about an hour after such deep mourning, I was comforted by a level of peace I had never experienced since his death.

One day in the spring after my son died, I was reading Romans 8 as I sat on a bench in a cypress grove beside a pond from which I could see my son’s grave marker. As I read slowly to verse 28, I felt Holy Spirit seize me as certainly as if I had been struck by a large-caliber bullet. I struggle to use words to begin to describe my feeling … It was sudden, certain, and comforting. Holy Spirit led me to know that I must try to stop the harm that happens to those who seek to be healed by medical care, and I was also led to understand that my son was fine but without any deeper insight into what that meant.