Our grandson, Thomas Anderson, age 7   

Intensive care in a

children's hospital

The chaplain's office publishes a daily prayer list. Here are a few requests:  Hank, 22 months, "third heart surgery."  Brendan, 5 months, "pray for relief from pain." Pamela, 2 months, "for vision in eye after surgery." Carlos, 18 months, "Watch over him during his brain surgery. May the mass be benign." It was an encouragement that the prayer list also named 26 children who had recently gone home.

            The children's hospital is a place where you can witness the tragic and the miraculous.  Just being there both builds faith and poses unanswerable questions.  Every day you can see the results of excellence in medicine; the competent and amazingly dedicated staff work around the clock for a single purpose:  life.  You might also see healings for which there is no scientific explanation.

Joel's grandparents stood embracing each other and wiping away tears.  He had been born with blood clots throughout his body.  Later, he developed bleeding in the brain.  His grandfather, a family practice physician, thought that Joel could not possibly last another day.  He admitted to me that he had lost his faith "somewhere back in medical school," but he was grateful when I offered to pray for his grandson.   I asked God to "dry up the issue of blood" (Luke 8:44-45).  Later, I saw his grandparents smiling; Joel was about to be released.

I was spending time in the chapel because our first grandchild, Thomas Anderson, was a patient in Neo-natal ICU.  I was not without hope in the Lord I love and serve, but I was as focused and desperate as I have ever been.  My daughter had complications in childbirth and almost bled to death.  She had improved, but Thomas was suffering rapid breathing caused by an as yet unidentified infection. 

Each day, my wife and I would go to the NICU and rock Thomas, pat his back, and pray.  He had an IV needle inserted in his scalp and received regular injections of antibiotics.  He was breathing 80+ times per minute.  Doctors and nurses would come by occasionally to study his chart and write notations.  This was not how we had visualized our first taste of "grandparenthood". . .