Stories have always been important to me – my stories or those of others. Telling stories, too, has always been exceptionally meaningful to me. This is probably why I gravitated towards Theatre as a young boy. Well, that, and I had more energy than anyone knew what to do with.
As I have gotten older, I found writing stories and sharing my experiences to be very important to me. It is one way through which we can be a Light in this dark world, one way through which we can give glory to God. Keeping that in mind and after many, many months, I think I am finally ready to reveal the ending of one of the darkest chapters of my life. I call this Chapter…
“Nice Try, Satan!”
As most people in my life know, on August 10, 2018 I was struck by a falling tree on my head. I wish I could tell you I was just walking down the street when a tree hit, but that is simply not the truth. The truth is I was doing something I never should have…trimming a tree which was struck by lightning.
This injury knocked me out cold; it gifted me with seven stitches on my head, three broken vertebrae in my neck and upper back, a nice big dent on my noggin’, months of anxiety attacks, and countless hours of lost sleep, but, first, let’s start with the ambulance ride.
I don’t remember much after getting hit, but I came to not long before paramedics arrived. I was taken by ambulance to UAMS, a trauma one hospital, in Little Rock. For those who don’t know, trauma one just means all the really horrible stuff goes there. I remember reaching my hand into the air while on the gurney and asking an EMT to pray with me. I will never forget how I felt the moment one did. Loud and proud he prayed to Jesus, our Lord and our Help. To this very day, I truly believe the three EMT responders contributed to saving my life.
When really terrible traumas happen, EMTs will alert hospitals on the drive over so the hospital can start to prepare for the trauma’s arrival. I mention this because several of my wife’s coworkers heard my call over “hospital radio” and had very much written me off as dead, or dead soon. Upon arrival at the hospital, I was striped naked and underwent a ton of tests.
If you want all the juicy details of that day, then read that day’s blog called Second Chances, Human Whack-A-Mole.
In the wee hours of the morning on August 11th, just hours after the whole tree incident happened, God came to me, as I lay in fear and anxiety on the hospital bed, to tell me that He still has plans for me. Mind you, He said this hours before any doctors came to give me their input on my current health status. In that moment, I knew that God had spared my life from imminent death and, most importantly, that He was carrying me. I like to imagine my guardian angel pushed me far enough away that I would not get mortally wounded when the tree fell on me. That imagery resonates with my soul; I know the essence of it is true, and so I can confidently say God saved my life for His purposes.
Some weeks later, I would meet a man in a wheelchair who ironically suffered the same fate as I…getting struck by a tree…unfortunately for this man, He lost the use of his legs due to his spinal injury. His story was too close to home when he shared it with me. Yet, he still carried a smile on his face as he openly shared his unfortunate lumberjacking story with no malice towards God, Man, or himself. He was at peace with his circumstances, a peace that can only come from a deeply rooted relationship with God.
I see now that meeting this man was supposed to be a lesson for me, but I was not in a place to hear it. Often times Jesus expressed contempt at his audiences whose ears were not open. Turns out this man was an example of the disposition that I should have carried with me during the entire six-month healing process. I wish I was at peace for most of the time I spent healing. Quite the opposite, I spent a great deal of time in despair.
The first few months following the accident, I found myself stuck in a collar and mostly confined to my couch. That collar was one of the most uncomfortable pieces of equipment I have ever worn. During these first few months, I was extremely thankful that my boss allowed me to work from home. I am also thankful that my job is one where I can still be an asset working entirely from home. God is good!
Although my spine was structurally sound, my head had been shaken pretty badly. I found myself at the mercy of any number of rational and irrational anxiety attacks. My wife had to talk me down and reassure me whenever I gave into my anxiousness and despair. I also found myself jumping awake after I was able to drift off into sleep. I was reliving the tree incident in my dreams. This reliving is what would cause me to jolt awake. It is a terrible experience to jump jarringly awake from a deep sleep. It’s a lot like waking suddenly in a panic from a terrible nightmare.
The lack of restful sleep and the insuppressible anxiety was quite the cross to carry for a man that had never experienced either in his life. I turned for help to my doctor who in turn prescribed me some medications to help with both. The anti-anxiety medicine worked very well and with little adverse side effects. The sleep aid, on the other hand, helped me sleep solidly, but really messed with my mood. So much so that I stopped taking the sleep aide altogether and resorted to taking over the counter medicine for help sleeping.
I should add that I also began seeing a psychologist to help with the anxiety and the insomnia. She helped me cope with the entire tragedy and helped give me some positive outlooks while in the trenches of post-trauma life.
I also visited with a neurosurgeon who kept tabs on my neck and it’s healing progress through radiologic procedures. He did so up to the point when he no longer felt I needed him because surgery was not necessary. (WOW! Break a neck and no surgery…who can deny God’s hand in all this?)
Medicine, radiologic images, and psychology were all employed to help me heal from one of the most traumatic events of my life. Yet, the greatest healing came from our Father, my Savior, my Lord, my God. Man can do many wonders in health, but he cannot heal another’s soul or bring one back from the brink of utter despair. There are some aspects of our being that only God Himself can heal and only God can make whole again.
In my darkest hours of restless nights, horrific anxiety attacks, and thoughts of sheer hopelessness for my future, the God of the Universe would find a way to sneak me a message of Hope, of Healing, of Joy.
The first such moment when God pierced through to deliver a message of hope happened in a familiar way. You know those times in your life when you cannot shake the feeling that you need to do something…like check on the baby, get a copy of the newspaper, or stay off the airplane? Well, the hope was delivered in a similar way…
Maybe three months after my injury, I was still sleeping on the couch because sleeping flat on a bed was very uncomfortable for my neck. For most nights on the couch, I would try to drift off into sleep while reading God’s Word. One such night, I was pretty sleepy. I had decided not to pick up my Bible. I was about ready to drift off. However, I could not shake the feeling that I really needed to open my Bible and read it. It was like someone was nudging me and would not stop until I opened my Bible.
There is really only one way to shake off that type of feeling and it usually involves giving in. So, I picked up my phone. Opened my e-mail. I found the day’s Reading and was simply blown away!
I found myself reading from the last few paragraphs of Job. I could feel God anxiously watching me as I read.
Then when I got to a specific part in my reading He said, “These words you read, I also speak to you.”
“After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; and he saw his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-grandchildren. Then Job died, old and full of years.”
Job 42: 16-17
Here’s the deal. Two to three months after my injury, I was lost in a dark world of despair, doubt, and uncertainly. I didn’t know what was to come of my injury. Being the pessimist that I am, my outlook was not good. So…when the God of the Universe tells me that my life will be long and filled with Him, my response was profound gratitude, humility, and hope!
Although this revelation from God brought me hope, I was not out of the water yet. Anxiety attacks would still sneak up on me. Sleepless nights and awful dreams would still haunt me. Despair still settled in on occasion when I would forget, or choose not to acknowledge, that God has Good Plans for me. He told me so and then revealed what those plans are, but still, at times, I would lose myself to despair.
An intriguing note about the word despair…split it up and you have des-pair, or unpair. Unpair yourself from God and despair is what you’ll have. Truth!
An interesting battle of the mind ensued during the second half of my six-month healing process. The battle consisted of a terrible fear of relying on medication to normalize me versus relying on my own sheer will to get through the anxiety and bad dreams. For those paying close attention, you can guess at where I was going wrong from the battleground stance I mentioned. Nowhere in there did I leave room for Jesus. Nowhere in there did I give my worries over to God to carry my burdens with me. I put my trust in myself and my medications.
To help illustrate this point, I want to narrow in on a moment when God said he had my back, but I went above and beyond executing a Plan B. You know, just in case God didn’t mean what he said…
During a particularly difficult time of unrestful nights, I had been working with my doctor on trying to find a sleeping aide that didn’t alter my moods. (For the record, there is no such thing. All sleep aides are also mood “enhancers”, but I’m no doctor.) My doc sent in a prescription for a sleep aide that he thought might help. Alas, it was denied by insurance as needing an authorization. At that point, I spent the better half of two hours on any and all of the following activities:
⁃ Trying to get my doc to send in an auth
⁃ Finding a prescription drug savings program to cover the drug
⁃ Calculating the feasibility of paying out of pocket for a handful of pills.
At about 5 minutes in on this two hour panic fest, God spoke very clearly in my head and told me that He had this; don’t worry. He was referring to my sleepless nights. He was asking that I not fight so hard to try and get a prescription. He had my back. My immediate response to Him was a very dismissive, “okay, sure,” like when a parent isn’t really listening to his kiddo talk, but fakes listening with an “Uh huh.” Same thing, only I did it to God.
God kept telling me that He has this handled during my entire panic-fest, but I kept on brushing Him off. I brushed Him off to the point where all avenues of trying to get this drug covered were exhausted and failed. In my utter loss, I finally relented into believing God’s Word that He had me.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I slept like a baby for five days straight after the God of the Universe followed through on having my back. I am ashamed that I didn’t put my trust In Him. I am thankful that He Loved me enough to still keep to His Promise, despite my lack of Faith or the fact that I turned to Him as my last resort. Truly I tell you, I am not that good of a person to be able to be someone’s last resort after several scoffs at my offer for help. Again, thankfully, we worship the God of Love.
There came a point in my healing journey when I had to come to terms with the fact that I was going to be okay…that I had survived the worst traumatic experience of my life… It wasn’t until I had my MRI Brain when I finally started to believe what God had been telling me all along!
Days before our trip to visit my Northern family for the Holidays, I went to my PCP and asked to have an MRI Brain. I wanted to ensure there was no structural damage to the Brain from the tree incident. I was curious to see if some damage might have been why I was having headaches and dizzy spells. My doctor obliged, and I went to St. Vincent Infirmary for the scan. Never in my life was I so overjoyed to be insulted by a radiologist when they concluded that my brain was “unremarkable.” A scan with nothing interesting or abnormal to report is often dictated in the medical world as “unremarkable.”
At this point, I think it’s important to review some key facts of this whole incident thus far. I was struck in the head by a falling tree and was rushed to a hospital. I broke my spinous processes on several cervical and thoracic vertebrae. I did major soft tissue damage to my neck and upper back. I put a big dent in my skull. I was released from the hospital hours after the incident. I met with a Neurosurgeon who ordered more scans which determined that I did not need any sort of surgery and that my spinal column was stable. I had more scans done later which showed that my brain was unremarkable. In all, that means I survived a truly horrible and tragic accident. The tree that hit me was massive and it is nothing short of a miracle that I survived. That, my friends, is God at work in my life. He never lets me down. He carries me in the storm. Praise God!
As we can infer from our the quick recap, God was constantly reassuring me that everything was okay – through my constantly reassuring wife, through doctors, through comforting psychologists, through medical scans, through prayer, through Faith. Sometimes, though, my Faith would waver and doubt would creep in. Even in my doubts, our Father, who is ever-faithful and who never abandons us, would still find ways to penetrate through my darkness and bring the Light of Hope.
One such break-through happened again not long after Christmas. We were blessed with the privilege of being able to visit my parents and siblings this past winter break. During that time, I had some pretty awful anxiety attacks. I also was having problems shaking them off. The worst anxiety attacks are the ones where I start to have an existential crisis, where I start to doubt my reality. In Truth, it gives me anxiety attacks to even write about those attacks. When my anxiety gets bad enough, I will take medication to help me stave it off. I am thankful that the medicine consistently works and does not produce any adverse side effects. But, here is the deal. I start to feel like I am not moving past my traumatic injury when my anxiety gets the better of me. It makes me think things are not getting better, like things aren’t getting back to normal. Those thoughts give me anxiety! It’s a vicious circle!
Well, I needed some moral support at that time, and God found a clever way to break in yet again! You know how Dove chocolate now has little uplifting phrases printed on the inside of the foil? Well, I had a piece of chocolate while visiting my mother. I was going to throw the wrapper foil away, but, as is His normal nudging way, God really wanted me to check the message. He said it was from Him and important. Relenting, I cautiously opened the wrapper filled with hopeful anticipation. The wrapper read, “To get to see the rainbow, we sometimes must travel through the storm.”
HOLY GOOD LORD! How could that message NOT have come from God. How could that message have been any more perfect! Rainbows are a symbol of God’s Faithfulness to God’s promises. I was certainly going through storms of anxiety. He said to persevere through the storm for the rainbows were waiting on the other side. Finally, the messenger of this Hope was a Dove – the same messenger used to express the Father’s Love for His Son after Jesus was baptized! WOW! PRAISE GOD WHO IS LOVE! I am not ashamed to admit that He made me cry when He spoke those words. I am proud to share this story so that other’s will remember the dumbfounding Love that God has for each of us.
One might think that this beautiful, delicate, and masterfully crafted message was enough to assuage all of my anxiety, but, alas, it did not. It did, however, give me Hope! The Hope needed to continue to trudge along through the desolate deserts, much like Moses in the wilderness seeking the Promised Land. And, I think that is fitting. God doesn’t promise that our lives will be problem-free, but He does promise to be there for us…as He said, “I am with you always.”
When it was time to return home from visiting family during the winter break, God did have some more Good News to share with me. During the whole break, the weather was just awful. It was cold, rainy, wet, and just plain yucky! During the break, like I mentioned earlier, I continued to experience awful anxiety, despite being surrounded by people who I love dearly. Well, Good News came in a beautiful moment of peace and great hope. The moment overcame me when we were driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. (For you Biblical people, there is some irony in the fact that this happened on a mountain.)
In the distance, on down the road, after nothing but cloudy, rainy days, I could see beautiful and vivid blue skies coming toward us. They were a stark contest to the gloom and doom that prevailed overhead. In the moment when my eyes caught sight of the blue sky, I heard the God of the Universe tell me that my days of living in fear over my traumatic event were over. It is finished. I thanked God for this Good News. I turned to my wife shortly after getting this Good News and shared it with her. I also told her that she is the greatest gift I have in my life, and that I love her more than words.
I wish I could tell you that I have no more anxiety that grips me in fear. The truth is that I still get anxious about my health or my reality. I still on occasion wake up suddenly from sleep having dreamt of trees falling or strangers bashing my skull in or just really unpleasant nightmares. But! I no longer have to fear these things. They will pass; the God of the Universe told me that I no longer need live in fear.
If I have learned anything over the past six months since my injury, I have learned that when God speaks His Word is Truth. He means what He says and says what He means. Thinking back over all the words He spoke to me, I know I have a very beautiful life to look forward to with Him, both in this life and the next.
I called this chapter of my life “Nice Try, Satan!” because just like God can use the circumstances of our lives to teach us about His Love. So, too, can the enemy use the circumstances of our lives to trick us into losing our way, that is The Way, who is Christ Jesus. Despite all of my time spent in despair over my traumatic accident. I am thankful and happy to say that Satan did not prevail in driving me from My God. It is in God where I place my Hope. It is in God with whom I store my Faith. It is through God that I live out my life in Charity.
Seeking Him 