One May Morning

What was they'd say in Ireland? Top of the morning to you. This is Dick Thoth with stories from the road and we're about to head out on the road in a few hours to Boise, Idaho, with a graduation from high school of a grandson, Addison Oatman. But I wanted to do this before we hit the road. So here I sit on the morning of May 22nd, Wednesday. It's one of those Colorado Robbins egg blue skies and I just felt like I'd like to reflect just a little bit on a moment that happened 11 years ago today and some of you have heard me speak, have heard me speak of this. But it's a story from my perspective worth telling. I'll be back in a moment. There is a passage in the gospel of John where Jesus friend Lazarus has died and his sisters Mary and Martha are a bit upset with him because, quote, he didn't get there in time to save him. And in a conversation in John 11 with Martha, she is the worker bee in the house, if you will. Martha says this, Lord, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask. And Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha answered, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. And Jesus said to her, I, I am the resurrection and the life, the one who believes in me will live even though they die and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. And they go on to have another conversation. As it turns out, the story says that Jesus brings Lazarus out of the tomb. I know that many of us have lost loved ones. Many of us have had near death experiences, all of those things. And I didn't have one of those, but this lovely woman Ruth that I've been married to for 60 plus years had one on this day at 10, 15 in the morning in a place called Estus Park, Colorado. Estus Park sits at about 7,500 feet up in the Rockies in its favorite vacation spot and camp setting for tens of thousands of people every year. But Ruth and I were with some friends on this morning 11 years ago, 2013, in a cabin, a lovely place. And we were there, I think there were nine of us in the room. And along the way, this was a group of folks with whom we had been meeting for 20 years, once a year, we'd get together as couples. And this was our time. And usually we would share our stories, what's gone on the last year. And one of our folks had had a tremendously difficult year in Ruth responded to that by quoting a poem, if you will. And she's not one for talking in small groups necessarily, but this was a moment. And she has a favorite poem by Grace Noel Crowell, I believe is her name. And the poem is entitled for those who are tired or for those who are weary. And she said, I want to share this with you, but my heart's pounding so hard. I guess she doesn't like to speak in public settings like this. My heart's pounding so hard. I don't know if I can do this or not. But anyway, she went ahead and spoke. And then she slid back beside me on the love seat that we were sitting on in that living room, all of a sudden she slumped to her left and I turned. And there she was with her eyes open and her mouth open. And she wasn't breathing. And she had suffered what is called ventricular tachycardia or sudden cardiac death, where your heart, though, supposed to beat in a rhythm like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If it shorts out electrically, it'll start fibrillating and just go like that, like a bowl of jelly and it stops pumping blood. And one of the first places to lose blood is the cortex of the brain. And your brain cells start dying. And within an older person, it's two to three minutes. And within a younger person, maybe four to five. But when I saw her, I grabbed her. I intuitively sensed what had happened here that she had suffered what is known in the medical community in in colloquial language, sudden cardiac death. And I grabbed her and hugged her and shouted, Ruthie don't leave me and started to weep. And the group started making two calls. One to heaven in prayer and one to 9-1-1. And Ruth later would call them her first responders. As it happens, we were two minutes from a hospital. And then within just that three to four minutes, maybe that a young rookie cop runs into the room. The folks on 9-1-1 had asked us to lay her on the floor. He came in, dropped on his knees and started giving her cardiac recicitation CPR. And when he did that, of course, one's rich crack and the men who are wimpier we are, they left the room, but the ladies stayed. And all of a sudden, within moments, there were six or eight folks in the room. And I could hear the CPR being done and the count was going one, two, three, four, five, like a metronome. And they gathered around her and cut her clothes off. All I could see were her bare feet. And they shocked her with the paddles. And I saw her feet come off the floor. And they kept doing the other CPR and shocked her again with the paddles. And again, her feet came off the floor, but there was nothing. And the third time they shocked her with the paddles, perhaps the most profound sentence that I've heard besides Jesus loves you was we have a pulse. And I'm sitting there and shocked as you can appreciate long story short. They airlifted her from there to the Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, Colorado. And there she was for 11 days. But when we went to the ER before they airlifted her, the doctor said we have, we have paralyzed her. They put her into what's called the Haka Protocol where you take the body temperature down several degrees over 24 hours and then bring it back a half a degree an hour over the next 12 hours. And the airlifted her packed in ice in a helicopter, 13 minute ride down to what we call MCR. We took the car, took us an hour and 15 minutes. Long story short, when we got there, the cardiologist who talked to us said we don't know how much damage there's been. We don't know in the earliest she might wake up is in 72 hours or two or three four days. We don't know. It could be weeks. It could be months. There's a chance she will never wake up. Of course, people around the world really started praying as the word got out. Our daughter Erica put a candle on her Facebook site and again around the world, people started doing that. And she was in this coma, an induced coma for that 24 hours and then they started to warm her up. On that second night, the surgeon who was doing rounds in cardiac ICU was a person we had only met in passing, didn't know him. He walked into the room and looked around and made a statement that I will never forget and that is Dick. I think it's going to be okay. I don't know if there was any empirical data for that from the monitors or whatever. But then he said another thing up till that point that I had not really heard and that was, may I pray for Ruth? Never at a doctor say that that I can remember. And he said absolutely. And he put his hand on her and started to pray in a rather loud voice, not with passion but with intensity. Not with by that, I mean, not shouting. And he just said, Lord God Almighty, I pray that you will raise Ruth up. He'll learn from the top of her head to the toes of her feet and pray to a couple of other sentences and left. A few hours later and I was trying to sleep at the head of her bed in one of those hospital chairs and I was awakened about 10 minutes after two and a friend who was with us said Ruth is waking up, stood beside her bed as they went through the protocols because I think you have 12 nerves that go to various parts of the body and there's a protocol they go through. And the male nurse said, Ruth, open your eyes. She opened her eyes. She said, look at me, look at me. And this is 10 hours into the warming up protocol. And she looked at him. He said, squeeze my hand. She squeezed his hand. Said, wiggle your toes. She wiggled her toes. Said, wiggle the toes of your right foot. She wiggled the toes of her right foot. He said, shrug your shoulders. She did that. He said, give me a smile. Of course she was intubated. So it was one of those little crooked smiles. And then he said, give me two thumbs up and she brought both hands up, thumbs in the air. And I lost it. I'm thanking Jesus. I'm whatever I'm weeping. And she walked out of the hospital nine days later. She had to learn to walk, had to learn to write a check during those days in rehab. And I know that many of you listening have lost someone in similar circumstances or in other kinds of physical challenges, cancer and so forth. I don't know why Ruth was spared in this moment in God's great economy, except looking back on 11 years of walking with her. I know why, because so many things have happened in this time, of which we were supposed to be a part. That's the only thing that I can figure out. But to this day, we have friends who called her Lazarus or Resurrection Ruth. There's something about that moment in time when life returns or life comes back. And I don't know how the resurrection from the dead will work in that day, whatever it is. But this Jesus says, I'm the resurrection in the life. And when you follow me, you will rise again, not with the same bodies, but in life, in immortality. And for that, and to that, I look forward, actually, it wasn't long after she, as we put it, went down on the mountain, that I sat down to take a pen in hand and write something. I'm not the poet or son of a poet. But I wrote this on Thursday, May 24, 2014, a year later. And I called it one May morning. One May morning, 8,000 feet in the Rockies, you surprised us all. I'm speaking to Ruth here. You surprised us all by slipping away without a word. One May morning in a cabin full of friends, you encouraged a sister and took your leave as we called out to you. One May morning, our lives were changed as your heart stopped and my heart broke. One May morning in a place where he eaglesore, seconds stretched and eternity rolled through the room, carried on the prayers of the saints. One May morning, I knew that I, and perhaps we could never be the same. One May morning, I longed to see you smile, to love you some more and to fill our days full. One May morning, the one after the next, you woke up again and gave me that chance. On this May morning, one more time, I pledged to love and to cherish you for better or for worse and sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, on this May morning. Amen. That's it for now. This is Dick Foth, signing off. We'll catch you later. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless. God bless