Known by Dick Foth
Author:Dick Foth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-05T16:00:00+00:00
SPEAKING TO GOD
When I pulled my brand-new Vespa scooter into our front yard on Congress Avenue in east Oakland, California, on that November afternoon, I had my standard expectation: snacks at the hand of my stay-at-home mom. What I got when I walked in was no mom and no snacks. The house was silent.
If you have been brought up with a theology that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ could happen at any moment, a disappeared mother is not a good sign. Our 1920s stucco bungalow wasn’t big, so I quickly covered most of the rooms inside and headed down the short hall toward my folks’ bedroom. That’s when I heard the noise. It was coming from the small walk-in closet in their room.
Creeping up to the door, I was able to decipher the muffled sounds from down near the floor. It was a mother on her knees praying for a wayward son. Really? I wasn’t that wayward. Sure, I was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Cal Berkeley, but I came from a highly structured, conservative religious family. Perhaps I was sowing some wild oats. But by twenty-first-century standards there weren’t many oats and they weren’t very wild! Anyway, Mom was talking to God in classic fashion: “Oh, God, don’t let Dick do anything more stupid than he’s already done!” For the most part, it worked.
My takeaway from that day was not that my mom was fervent in prayer but that my mom cared enough for me that she would get on her knees in a closet in the middle of the day to bring my name and need before the Creator of the Universe and invoke his help. Now, that’s affirmation.
Prayer cuts through arguments, crosses all the lines of bias, and soothes the wounded soul. It invokes the help of Another in strengthening your hands, healing your heart, and giving you hope. No other action we take can do what prayer does.
Ruth lay in an induced coma at the Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland. She had been that way for thirty-six hours, when a doctor we didn’t really know walked into room 2B in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. He introduced himself as a cardiac surgeon making nightly rounds. It was 10 p.m.
The morning before and an hour away at 8,000 feet in the Rockies, Ruth had collapsed. The EMTs called it “sudden cardiac death” caused by ventricular heart arrhythmia. Survival rate nationally outside a hospital is just 6 percent, and 11 percent for those resuscitated in the field. Of those, just a few survive without some brain function impact. The doctors who initially treated her simply said to us, “We have no idea what you can expect by way of function when she wakes up. If she wakes up.”
The surgeon who had walked into the ICU looked around and said, “Dick, I have a sense this is going to be all right.” As far as I could tell, there was no empirical data to support that statement.
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