Lessons from My Heart Attack

My seven-year-old daughter asked the question from the back seat on a family road trip. “Does God still do miracles?” I guess those are the kind of questions a child asks when her daddy is in ministry.

As I drove I fumbled for an answer. “Yes, God still does miracles today,” I told her, “even if they don’t always look like the ones in the Bible.” Little did I know, my daughter would soon get an answer to her question through events that were about to unfold in our family.

No regular morning

January 9, 2014, started out as a typical Thursday in our house. My alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. so I could join the guys for some pick-up basketball at the YMCA. As I rolled out of bed, my wife sent me off with a kiss and her regular encouragement. “Have fun, and don’t hurt yourself.”

It was a typical game, and I was showing my rust from having taken a couple of weeks off over the holidays. I’m not a great offensive player, so I focused on other strengths: hustle and defense.

As the game went on, I hit the floor a couple times and was banged around by guys bigger than me. At some point I began to feel a pain in the middle of my chest. I chalked it up to all the body-checks and unrestrained elbows flying my way. Then I started having difficulty catching my breath. Again I dismissed the discomfort as the result of not having played in a couple of weeks. Plus I was recovering from the stomach flu. I’m just not in game shape, I thought. I will be good to go by next week.

At some point I began to feel a pain in the middle of my chest. I chalked it up to all the body-checks and unrestrained elbows flying my way.

About 20 minutes later, the games ended. We headed to the bleachers to cool down, collect our things, and head to work. As I sat on the bleachers, I was still struggling to catch my breath. Without warning my stomach got into the action. I rushed to the locker room and vomited. As I gathered my gear, I recalled what a friend once told me: vomiting, along with chest pain and shortness of breath, are all signs of a heart attack. The thought hounded me all the way home.

When I got home, I felt tingling in my hands and feet. I sat on the couch hoping the feeling would subside, but it only got worse. Finally, I said to my wife, “You better call someone.” That was the only moment in the whole ordeal I saw my wife panic at all. At the time she was 20 weeks pregnant with our third child.

Within minutes the paramedics arrived and rushed me to the hospital. In the ER, I was stripped and prepped for a heart catheterization. From there, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. to undergo surgery. At 38 years old, I was having a quintuple bypass.

My new story

My surgeon said that most people who experience what I did do not even make it to the operating room. The fact that I made it was a miracle in and of itself, but it wasn’t the only miracle of that week.

Everyone wakes up from anesthesia in a different way. There’s the guy on YouTube who forgot he was married. Or people like me, who can’t remember most of the events of the previous afternoon and evening. However, as I came to, the words of Philippians 1:21-22 came to my mind with crystal clarity: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know!”

I have studied that passage, memorized it, and taught it. But now I could almost hear God reading it to me, as if to drive it down deep into my soul.

For years, I had felt my prayers were weak. They seemed to bounce off the ceiling or barely escape the room, let alone ascend to the throne of God. In many of those prayers, I had asked God to make me more effective in evangelism. I didn’t feel like I had grown in my ability to share my faith with others. I’d read books, attended workshops, and even gone on evangelism and service trips, but sharing the gospel never came naturally for me. I am a pastor of a church. Shouldn’t I be leading by example by showing others how to share the gospel?

Part of my sense of inadequacy came from believing I didn’t have much of a story to tell. I was raised in the church and didn’t have any “black sheep” kind of moments. Yes, I knew was a sinner in need of a savior, but I hadn’t committed any of “those” sins. How could I, a goody two-shoes, share the gospel with others who had different life experiences?

But I was realizing that I did have a story, one in which God had proven faithful repeatedly. He sustained me despite being let go from two financially struggling churches. It was God who I clung to when my son had to have surgery a week after his birth and spent the first five weeks in the NICU. And now, here I was, in limbo between life and death—with an abiding sense that God still had my best in mind. Why couldn’t I share that?

So, there in the ICU of George Washington University Hospital, God gave me my story. I could have died that day. I was scared when I realized I was having a heart attack. I was scared to think about what the future held. But God sustained me.

Thousands of brothers and sisters in Christ from all over the world cried out to God on my behalf. My college alma mater, Ozark Christian College, posted a request on Facebook asking my fellow Ozark alumni to pray for me while I was in surgery. It was “shared” 14,000 times. God heard their prayers.

He allowed the EMTs to quickly diagnose my condition and prep the ER team. He assembled a great cardiologist and heart catheterization team. He gave them the knowledge to diagnose the problem and execute the proper treatment, even if it meant flying me by Medevac to another hospital. He had an operating room available and waiting with a topflight heart surgeon ready to fix my heart.

Heart change

But more than that, God worked on my heart as well. And that was the second miracle. My entire perspective changed that day. My will has been put to death; it is Christ’s life I now live. God has given me one life to live, and I choose to live it for him.

We don’t often think of our own mortality. We tend to reserve such thoughts for funerals or other life-threatening events. Thanks to my heart attack, I have a keen sense of the extra time I have been given.

What will I do with these days given to me?

I repent for not sharing the gospel. For the invitations not given, for the opportunities not seized. Since repentance means more than saying, “I’m sorry,” I need to act on this conviction. I have a newfound urgency not to wait until tomorrow, because none of us is promised another day.

I listen for God’s whispers. It would be so much easier if God was a drill sergeant, barking commands. But the fact that he speaks softly, subtly (a “still, small voice”) means we can easily tune him out. I need to be willing to hand over my calendar, my checkbook, and my agenda so God can use me to speak words of life and grace to others. I need to be sensitive to his leading, so my actions can show others the love God has shown me.

I need to labor. The fruitful labor Paul talked about didn’t just happen. Labor requires action. Labor means putting in the time and energy to be present. Labor means going the extra mile. The fruit comes because God gives us good seed to plant, but we have to be faithful and patience. We don’t create the fruit (that is God’s job) but we must be diligent in our labor to plant and tend.

Today I have the answer to the question my daughter posed to me that day in the car. Yes, miracles still happen! Miracles of common grace, where others use their God-given talents to change the life of someone else. There are also miracles of saving grace, where God uses common people, like you and me, to plant seeds of grace so that he can bring about the fruit of salvation in their lives. It is in these miracles that God reveals himself and allows us to be part of his plan to bring redemption.

Mike Foster is lead minister for the Church of Christ at Hagerstown in Hagerstown, Maryland. He blogs at mikefoster.wordpress.com.