I’ve always believed in God. But over the years, my beliefs about who God is—and what he can do—have changed. It wasn’t until my son was gravely ill that I learned you can believe in God and yet not know him at all.
Know. Knowledge. Logic. When I was younger, those were the words I wanted to live by. As a child, I contracted scarlet fever, and this illness ruled out my ever playing sports or roughhousing around. The only real adventures I could go on were adventures of the mind. I read books with a vengeance—Great Books of the Western World, the volumes of Will and Ariel Durant, and literally thousands more—and out of my reading I formed my strongest beliefs. I believed in logic, in the mind’s ability to put all creation into neat, rational categories.
At the same time, I was growing up in a strong Christian family, and so I believed in God. But I insisted—and my insistence caused a lot of arguments—that God himself was also a Being bound by logic and his own natural laws. I guess I pictured God as a great scientist. Miracles? No, God couldn’t and wouldn’t break laws in that way. When my family told me that Christianity means faith in a loving, miracle-working God, I turned away and went looking for other religions—ones that respected the rational mind above all.
As I became a man, my belief in rationality helped me in my career. I became a salesman for the Bell System, and when I needed to formulate sales strategies and targets, logic unlocked a lot of doors on the way to success.
But other doors seemed to be closed. I felt dry, spiritually empty, and anxious. I tried meditation, ESP, and so on, but the emptiness increased to despair.
In utter defeat, I turned to God in prayer. His Spirit answered with, “I don’t simply want belief that I exist. I want you, your will, your life, your dreams, your goals, your very being. And I want your faith, faith that I am sufficient for all your needs.” My despair overcame my logic, and I yielded all to him. But just saying you have faith is not the same as having it. In my mind, I still had God in a box.
Maybe that’s why I never thought to pray when my oldest son, Frank, came home from first grade one day and said he didn’t feel well. What would God care about stomach flu?
A doctor whom my wife, Janice, and I consulted wasn’t very alarmed about Frank’s illness at first. “It’s really not too serious,” the doctor assured us. “Just a bad case of the flu complicated by a little acidosis. Give him this medicine and in a few days he’ll be fine.”
But Frank wasn’t fine, not at all. The medicine worked for a day or so, but then his symptoms—the gagging, choking, and vomiting—came back more violently. His small, six-year-old frame was bathed in sweat and racked with convulsions. We checked him into the local hospital for further testing, but later in the evening, our doctor said the original diagnosis was correct. “He’s just got a real bad case of it,” we were told.
I went to work the next day fully expecting to take Frank and Janice home that night, but when I stopped at the hospital to pick them up, our doctor was there to meet me. “I’d like to have a word with you two,” he said, showing Janice and me into a private room.
“A problem, Doctor?” I asked.
“Further testing has shown our previous diagnosis was incorrect. We think your son has acute nephritis. It’s a terminal kidney disease.” He paused, and I could feel the blood running from my face. “But we’ve found that in children there’s a good chance of recovery. Your son has a 90 percent chance of being as good as new.”
But by ten o’clock the next morning, the news was worse. Sometime during the night, Frank’s kidneys had failed. Janice and I rushed to the hospital again.
“X-rays show Frank’s kidneys are so badly infected that no fluid will pass through them,” we were told. “The odds aren’t in his favor anymore. If those kidneys don’t start working within forty-eight hours, I’m afraid your son will die.”
I looked at Janice, watching the tears well in her eyes as a huge lump formed in my throat. I took her hand in mine, and slowly we walked back to Frank’s room. We were too shocked, too upset to even talk. All afternoon we sat at Frank’s bedside, watching, stroking his matted blond hair, wiping his damp forehead. The stillness of the room was broken only by the beeps and blips of machines monitoring little Frank’s condition. Specialists would occasionally come, adjust a few tubes, make some marks on Frank’s chart, and then silently go. I searched their eyes for an answer, for some glimmer of hope, and got nothing. When our minister came to pray for our son, I could only cry in desperation.
Late that evening, after Frank was asleep, we went home. Friends were waiting with a hot meal, words of encouragement, and news of a vast prayer chain they had begun. And for a fleeting moment, I thought I saw in Janice’s eyes the spark of hope that I had been looking for from the doctors all afternoon.
By the following morning, that spark of hope had ignited a flame of confidence in Janice. “I turned Frank’s life over to God last night,” she told me excitedly, before we were even out of bed. “I feel a real peace about what’s going to happen, that God’s will is going to be done.”
“God’s will?” I said angrily. “What kind of God makes little boys get sick? He doesn’t care!” And I rolled over. Peace? God’s will? No, little Frank would need more than that to get well.
But my anger didn’t stop me from trying to reason with God. All that morning, while Janice kept a hospital vigil, I begged and pleaded and screamed at God, daring him to disprove my skepticism, trying to goad him into action.
“Who do you think you are?” I shouted once. “Why are you doing this to my son? He’s only six! Everybody says you’re such a loving God—why don’t you show it?” I yelled until I was exhausted. Finally, convinced my arguments were falling on deaf ears, I took our other children to a neighbor and headed to the hospital, thinking this might be the last time I’d see my son alive.
I never arrived; at least a part of me didn’t. In the car on the way, this Higher Being, this remote Power, this unjust God, spoke to me through his Spirit. I felt his presence soothing my still-hot anger. And I heard his voice, gentle, reassuring. He reminded me that I had made a commitment to him, that I had promised to trust him with my life, my all. And he had promised to take care of me, in all circumstances. “Take me out of the box you’ve put me in,” he said, “and let me work.” By the time I parked the car, my heart was beating wildly. I sat for a few moments longer and uttered but two words in reply to all that had happened: “Forgive me.”
By the time I reached Frank’s room, I knew what I needed to do as clearly as if someone had given me written instructions. There had been no change in Frank’s condition, so I sent Janice home to get some rest. Then I walked over to Frank’s bed. Placing shaking hands on where I thought his kidneys should be, I prayed as I never believed I would ever pray. “God, forgive me for my ego, for trying to make you what I want you to be. If you will, heal my son, and if you won’t, that’s all right too. I’ll trust you. But, please, do either right now. I pray in Christ’s name. Amen.”
That was all. There were no lightning flashes, no glows, no surges of emotion like the rushing wind, only the blip-blip-blip of monitors. I calmly sat down in a chair, picked up a magazine, and began to wait for God’s answer. There was only one difference. For the first time in my life, I knew I was going to get one.
Within moments, my eyes were drawn from the magazine to a catheter tube leading from Frank’s frail-looking body. That tube was supposed to drain fluid from his kidneys, but for nearly two days, it had been perfectly dry, meaning Frank’s kidneys weren’t working at all. But when I looked closely at the top of the tube, I saw a small drop of clear fluid forming. Ever so slowly it expanded, like a drop of water forming on the head of a leaky faucet, until it became heavy enough to run down the tube and into the collecting jar.
This was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen—the hand of God working. I watched the tube, transfixed, fully expecting to see another drop of fluid form. In about two minutes, I did. Soon the drops were coming regularly, about a minute apart. With every drip, I could hear God saying to me, “I am, and I care.”
When the nurse came in on her regular half-hour rounds, she could barely contain her excitement. “Do you see this? Do you see this?” she shouted, pointing to the collecting jar. “Do you know that this is more fluid than your son has excreted in the past forty-eight hours combined?” She grabbed the catheter and raised it, saying she wanted to get every drop, then rushed off.
Within minutes, she was back. Grabbing a chair, she sat down next to me, and, excitedly, we watched drops of fluid run down the tube. We were both awed at what was happening; for half an hour, we murmured only short sentences. “Isn’t God good?” she asked me once, and I nodded. When she finally got up to call the doctor, I went to call Janice.
An hour and a half later, one of the specialists assigned to Frank’s case arrived. Taking one look at the collector, he told us it was a false alarm, that the fluid was too clear. Anything coming from a kidney as infected as Frank’s was would be rust-colored and filled with pus. No, he said, the fluid had to be coming from somewhere else. But I knew—Frank was well again.
By the next morning, more than five hundred milliliters of the clear fluid had passed into the collector, and it continued as the doctors ran tests and took X-rays to try to determine its origin. Finally, two days later, our doctor called us into his office.
“Joe, Janice, I think we’ve been privileged to witness an act of God. All the X-rays taken in the last two days not only show no kidney infection but also show no sign that there was ever an infection. Frank’s blood pressure and blood-poison levels have also dropped suddenly. . . . It is a definite miracle.”
And this time I wasn’t about to argue. At last I fully believed in a God whose love knows no bounds—not the bounds of logic, not the hold of natural laws. Faith. That’s what I now had—that and the knowledge that one’s belief in God is essentially hollow if the belief isn’t founded on faith.