How Some Kids Saved My Life
COVID almost killed me in 2021, but it wasn’t because I caught the disease. Restrictions of the pandemic, especially in Silicon Valley, CA, impacted everyone in unexpected ways. As a high school teacher and swim coach, I masked outdoors while coaching practice at another campus’s pool, a facility that should have been crawling with dozens of adults and kids. In May of that year, however, only a handful of students were in the water, and no one else was in sight. The scene would have been outlandish just months earlier.
For someone who fights off more than an average share of anxiety, this was distressing. There is an extra level of worry when kids are in deep water, especially when they are practicing headfirst block starts as I had them doing on May 5. With no one else around, I had to be more vigilant in case of disaster. Who knew that I, the coach, the adult, would end up being the disaster?
Reflecting on this moment and a thousand others like it, I consider how prayer could have entered into my anxious moments. The scriptures of our Bible speak directly to our mental health struggles. Consider Peter, one of Jesus’s closest followers, who was concerned enough with anxiety to remind us that we can “cast” it on God, “...because He cares for you.” (I Peter 5:7) A quick prayer can be as compulsive as an anxious thought. I sometimes forget that.
On that day at the pool, I may have been anxious about the kids’ safety, but it turned out that I was the one in danger. One of my students resurfaced after a dive and turned to face me for feedback. I called out, “That was good, now next time…,” then dropped to the pavement without finishing the sentence. I was in the middle of a sudden cardiac arrest.
A sudden cardiac arrest is different from a heart attack. Heart attack happens when something hinders blood flow, such as a clogged artery. Heart attack is accompanied by severe pain and worsening symptoms. Cardiac arrest, on the other hand, is when the heart suddenly stops beating as it should…sometimes, (as in my case), for unknown reasons and without any warning. When it happens, the biggest danger is lack of blood flow to the brain, which will be catastrophically and irreparably damaged after just a few minutes.
If those few minutes had elapsed without the teenagers doing the right things, no one would have blamed them. They were not lifeguards, they were not first responders, and they were just kids. But without question, I would have died if they didn’t call 911 and find someone to give me CPR. That someone turned out to be the athletic trainer on campus, whom my team captain sprinted out of the pool area to find. She came sprinting to me even faster than the captain, attaching an AED which shocked me in between her chest compressions. Paramedics took me to a hospital, where I remained comatose and at risk of life-threatening brain damage due to the lack of blood flow. The medical notes from that night read, “We will have to wait 24-48 hours to see whether the patient will have neurological recovery.”
In a crisis like this, the circle of people who are aware of it always starts small, and then it grows with each passing hour. In my case, this widening circle of awareness, which started with my immediate family, then my church family, and then the staff, student, and parent community of my Christian school, was composed overwhelmingly of praying believers.
I don’t know exactly how prayers work; I just know that they do. I also know that during that critical 48 hours, there were hundreds if not thousands of people praying for my life.
“The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective”, wrote James the brother of Jesus. (James 5:16) Many people balk at the idea of God because of the amount of suffering in this world. But if there were no suffering, if there were no crises, there would be no hope, no redemption, no good. We wouldn’t know any different. It is at this intersection of crisis and hope that the prayers of the righteous are at their most effective. The apostle Paul teaches us that the Spirit intervenes on our behalf through “wordless groans.” (Romans 8:26) It was two actual words, however, spoken by the smallest of my prayer army, that made a special difference.
The day after my collapse, as I lay comatose and oblivious to all the prayer, my wife sat at my side and put my three young children on a video call. Each child called out “Hi, Daddy!”...the first, then the second, and then the third…and after the third child called to me, I woke up.
How much power is in a child’s voice? “Out of the mouth of babes…you have ordained strength,” wrote King David in Psalm 8:2. For all the prayers that were spoken for me during those hours, it was my children’s voices that brought the full force of God’s love. It was my children’s voices that reminded me of how much I had to live for.
My children's voices, at least for one brief moment, drowned out all those anxieties that try to degrade me and tell me I am not good enough. At that moment, I wasn't thinking about my career, success, or failure. I wasn’t anxious at all.
Moreover, when the students in the pool climbed out to help me, they did not stop to consider whether I was a good coach or not. When the EMTs wheeled me into the hospital, the doctors didn't say "Ok, before we save this guy, what is his salary?" And none of the hundreds of people who prayed for me hesitated to first consider whether I was a “good person.”
Your life is precious. You are precious because of who you are, not what you have accomplished. If anything like this ever happened to you, it would be your faith community rushing the Holy Spirit with prayer. Your life. Is. Precious.
The prophet Isaiah wrote the words of God: "You are engraved on the palms of my hands." (Isaiah 49:16) You are engraved on the palms of God's hands. And He let those hands get destroyed by nails, when He died for you on the cross.
Even after what I went through, I don't always appreciate what I have. I still get weighed down by my routine, I still complain sometimes, and I still get anxious. But I hope my story will remind you that even in your most tedious moments or your most anxious moments, you still have a lot to be thankful for. Your chores, your job, your relationships, your acts of service…these are all things that you don't have to do; these are things you get to do.
Take it from someone who was just a few minutes away from being gone for good…your life is precious. YOU are precious.
God bless you.