Pentecost 16
21 September 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
LIFE IS A MIRACLE:
OUR JOURNEY THROUGH
THE ILLNESS OF A CHILD
Psalm 139:1-15
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester has been driven into the depths of despair and seeks to end his life. His exiled son, Edgar, has returned disguised as a beggar and calls his father back to life with these words: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” (IV, vi, 55)
Life is indeed a miracle. And the miracle that is our life has spoken much to me and my family in significant ways since the birth of our son Ryan some 20 years ago. I would like to share with you this morning some of what we learned during our son’s illness in the hopes that you can see the many miracles evident all around us that we often view as ordinary.
Psalm 139 has become for me more than ancient words of scripture. They have become autobiography. We are, the psalmist says, “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Each and every life is precious to God. I believe that God no more wants harm to come to any person than any loving parent wants harm to come to their own child. God loves us infinitely more than we could ever love our own child. In every illness and tragedy life brings, I believe God is at work seeking to bring healing. And what we cannot fully understand is why healing sometimes comes and sometimes not.
So while I am careful about using the word “miracle,” having done so in the sermon title today: as I reflect upon the birth of my son and the days immediately following, and as I listened to doctors describe the severity of his condition in the first hours and days of his life, “miracle” is the first and best word I know that names the reality of our experience. The word was even found on the lips of his doctors – and we all know what a miracle that is!
So in the light of Psalm 139 I want to share with you this morning our story in the hopes that it will awaken or reawaken us all to the miracle that is our life.
To briefly summarize Ryan’s condition: Ryan was born with a congenital heart defect known as “Transposition of the Great Vessels,” where the placing of the pulmonary artery and the aorta are switched. Very soon after conception the two cells that lead to the formation of these two vessels settled in the wrong place. The main problem this creates after birth is a lack of oxygenated blood to the body.
When Ryan was two hours old, in severe respiratory distress, he was taken by ambulance from Baptist East Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky to Kosair Children’s Hospital also in Louisville. In the ambulance, his heart stopped beating and his doctor performed CPR to keep him alive. At Kosair, a heart catheterization was performed, providing a temporary fix in the hopes that he would one day be strong enough for open heart surgery. The great concern in addition to the question of his survival was the possible damage done to his brain and other organs due to the lack of oxygenated blood. An hour after his birth, the doctor who delivered Ryan, in tears herself, was preparing us for the very likely possibility that he would not survive. Later that day we were told that if he did survive his quality of life could be anywhere from near normal to a permanent vegetative state. “Near normal” never sounded so good. Over the course of those first two weeks, MRIs revealed a minor brain bleed, but nothing that suggested brain damage.
Surgery was scheduled for the morning of October 3rd. Ryan was 13 days old, with a fever of 102, and oxygen levels in the thirties. But the surgery could not wait any longer. Before the surgery, the nurses allowed us to hold him. I fully believed in that moment that it would be the last time I would hold my son alive in my arms. But eight hours later, the open heart surgery was complete, repairs made, fever gone, and oxygen levels were at 100 percent. We were told there may be delays in his development. And he was a little slow to crawl and walk and very slow to catch on to the concept of eight hours uninterrupted sleep. But mind and body are now as normal as any boy his age. We are grateful beyond words.
Would I call his survival a “miracle”? Yes, I believe so. Through the wisdom and skill of doctors, the diligent care of nurses, the wonder of science and medicine, and the mystery of prayer’s power – all instruments of God – my son was healed. That is, as best I can understand with my limited mind, how I believe God works in the world. God has gifted the world with freedom, a freedom it seems God chooses not to overpower, but does interact with. I believe God is always working for healing in every situation through the contingencies of human ingenuity, the God-given resiliency and fragility of the human body, and the powerful mystery of prayer.
I do not believe in God’s arbitrary choosing of who dies and who doesn’t because it is impossible for me to speak of my son’s healing without also asking the questions: What about the babies who do not live? Did God care more about my son than God did about them? Does Ryan have some special purpose in life that those babies did not have? I don’t believe so. I may very well be wrong, because this is God and God’s ways we’re talking about. But I believe in ways beyond the comprehension of my little mind that the givens of every unique situation go a long way in determining when healing can come. I believe the God revealed in Jesus is always working toward healing. We never see Jesus doing otherwise.
I don’t understand the mystery of it all, but when a child dies, I believe what pastor William Sloane Coffin said at the death of his young adult son, that God’s heart is always the first to break. The miracle of healing is a mystery. Beneath that mystery in the light of miracle I can only say thanks.
In the 1960’s John Claypool was pastor of the same church in Louisville where I was pastor when Ryan was born. During his tenure, his nine-year-old daughter Laura Lue contracted an acute form of leukemia and died eighteen months later. He published a collection of sermons around that season of darkness entitled Tracks of a Fellow Struggler. Ironically, John Claypool died 17 days before Ryan was born. I had met Dr. Claypool on a couple of previous occasions and would have given almost anything to have spoken to him in the days after Ryan was born. But his words I had read long ago lived with hope deep inside of me during the illness of my son. Out of the deep darkness Claypool concluded that “Life is Gift.” He said there is nothing we do to deserve breath. It is ours as pure gift. And even from the wrenching depths of grief, gratitude to the Giver of that gift is always an appropriate response.
Over the past several years I have come to believe that all of life is a miracle. To me,
a miracle is when something wonderful happens that, according to conditions and expectations, most likely should not have happened. Like this world – in all of its beautiful splendor. How God lovingly works within everything is a mystery to me – a mystery and a miracle for which I can only speak to you in gratitude.
The psalmist says that the depths of the ways in which God knows us is a reality too wonderful for words, so high we cannot get our minds around it. And I agree. But words are all I have to share with you as I speak of some of the miracles my family experienced in those first fragile months of my son’s life.
To begin, we were struck by the wondrous miracle of the human body. Given all the complexities and requirements of the human body just to stay alive, it is absolutely amazing to me that it works as often and as well as it does. The body’s capacity to function and to heal is nothing short of miraculous. God has worked a wonder beyond our wildest imaginings. The psalmist is right: “We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made.”
As we read the psalmist’s words of God “knitting us together inside our mother’s womb,” I think it is important that we hear these words with poetic ears, faithful to the poetic genre of the psalm itself. Literal ears would imply that God knit together Ryan’s heart and many other hearts and organs of infants incorrectly. I don’t think any of us want to say that. I think the psalmist is poetically proclaiming the wondrous miracle of the human body and naming God as its Originator and Designer. And what a design it is!
Even breath that gives the body life is a marvel and a miracle. I remember in those first few days Cindy and I watching Ryan take breaths with the help of a ventilator. There were days when I thought it was more difficult for us to breathe. It is nothing short of a miracle to possess the ability to breathe when your heart is breaking and your stomach is in your throat.
Five days after Ryan’s birth I was talking to a woman in our Louisville church named Alice. Her 18 year old son had been killed in a car accident only 14 months earlier. She knew pain much much deeper than mine. I asked her how one makes it through times like these. And she said, “You just remind yourself to breathe.”
Following Ryan’s successful surgery when it appeared that he was going to be alright, someone else shared with me the words he heard a woman say when her son came home from war. The mother said, “Now my heart can breathe again.”
It took awhile after Ryan’s birth, but our hearts learned to breathe again.
In those first few days of Ryan’s life it took a miracle of strength to breathe. Thoughts of your child holding on to life by a machine will take your breath away. As a pastor I had seen it before in the faces of families caring for sick loved ones. But I had personally never known exhaustion so absolute. Many of you have been there – an exhaustion so depleting that even sleep cannot give you rest. Cindy and I would need the miracle of strength as we waited three and a half years for the miracle of Ryan sleeping through the night for the first time!
We were sustained by the miracle of prayer. Prayer is yet another mystery we cannot fully understand. Though I do not believe prayer is the way we convince God to act or that the great number of prayers makes healing more likely, there is power in prayer. Cindy and I know the prayers of others as a miracle that sustained us through some very dark days. Prayer made a difference that we could feel. Cindy has often said about those days, “I’ve never felt so prayed for.”
As a partner with prayer there works the miracle of science and medicine. Contrary to some popular thinking, science and faith are not enemies but partners in God’s healing. Given the severity of his illness, doctors tell us Ryan should not have survived. But he did. Medical technology brings its own share of questions and problems. And while imperfect, it is still miraculous.
Our family knows the interaction of God and prayer, science and medicine as a miracle that saved Ryan’s life. We have nothing but gratitude to offer the medical staff at Baptist East Hospital and Kosair Children’s Hospital, and all the medical researchers all over the world who made his medical treatment possible. Because of their diligence and scientific discoveries Ryan is alive today.
And through it all we have come to know the miracle of divine presence. The Designer of the human body, the Giver of breath and strength, the Power at work through our prayers, the Wisdom in and behind all medical knowledge, is also our life’s Faithful Companion. The One who searches the depths of our hearts and knows all there is to know about us surrounds us with strong and tender arms of Divine Presence. The psalmist says that God knows when we sit and stand and lie down, that God knows everything about us, is acquainted with all our ways, and surrounds us day and night. Where can we go to flee from your presence? the psalmist asks. “In heaven or hell, and anywhere in between, God’s hand will lead us and hold us fast.”
My family and I know this to be true. I can say to you today, “We went to hell and God was there, and it was holy.” To borrow the language of the psalmist: The darkness covered us and the light around us became as night. But God, but God, as God has done since the beginning of creation, God brought light out of the darkness.
That light came to us not only in the healing of our son and the gift of God’s presence, but also through the miracle of human presence – God with skin on. The love and care of our families and friends were truly saving graces. The joy of being able to go home from the hospital each day and hold our two beautiful healthy daughters, then 12 and 8, brought light to dark days. The doctors and nurses at Kosair Hospital became our family. We found strength, hope, and love in the presence of familiar faces.
Our church family became our pastoral community. Through them we experienced the miracle of the church. I’m not sure we would have made it through without their presence and their prayers on our behalf. Because when you’re walking or crawling or curled up in the darkness, sometimes you need someone else to pray for you because it’s very hard, almost impossible, to pray yourself. They came through for us. Their presence and prayers, cards and words, gifts and endless supply of food brought to us the miracle of the church.
As a faith community, they helped bring the miracle of hope.
A few months before Ryan was born, I was, in what now seems providential, reading a book by Lewis Smedes entitled Keeping Hope Alive (Nelson, 1998). Smedes says the first step towards hope is a conscious decision to hope. That is, despite the overwhelming fear and despair in your heart, you decide to hope. I vividly recall, late at night on the day Ryan was born, riding back from Kosair Children’s Hospital to Baptist Hospital where Cindy was, making a conscious decision to hope. It was not a decision of certainty that everything was going to be fine. It was a decision to not give in to despair. It was a decision to place my hope in the possibility that he would be alright and that we would be alright. The only alternative at that point was despair. And as John Claypool had written, “Despair is presumptuous.”
Two images of hope came to me in those dark days through the dreams of two women in our Louisville church.
The first was from a woman named Sharleen who shared with me by email how she had a dream that Ryan was led into the sanctuary in the cradle the church had made for him before his birth. She dreamed he was placed down front and the congregation came by to greet him like the new church member he was. That was a sustaining vision of hope for me. In my mind, it placed the arms of the church around him.
The other dream came from Alice, the woman whose 18 year old son had been killed in a car accident a year before Ryan was born. She said to me, “I had a dream I saw a boy, two or three years old, running around the pulpit one Sunday after worship. I walked up to him and I asked him his name. And he said, ‘Ryan.’” And do you know what? Three years later, on a Sunday after worship my son was running around the pulpit of Crescent Hill Baptist Church. And Alice and I stood there and watched and remembered and smiled.
Now I don’t believe Sharleen and Alice were trying to offer me guarantees of Ryan’s survival or of his ability even to one day run. It’s important that we never offer such guarantees to people walking through dark places. We simply do not know if things will turn out well or if everything will be alright. Sharleen and Alice were simply sharing a word that had been given them for the sake of hope. And I was grateful.
Some people who know his story call Ryan “a miracle child.” There were many things about his condition in those early days that say he should not have lived beyond two weeks. Doctors speak of his vital signs in those days as “non-conducive to life.” Is he a miracle child? Perhaps one could say so. But I would also want to clearly say to each of you this morning: Your life is a miracle, too. Every life is a miracle. Every life is loved and treasured by God. We are each of us God’s beloved child in whom God takes delight.
The question for each of us then becomes: What will we do with this miracle we call our lives?
Or as the poet Mary Oliver frames it: “Tell me what it is you will do with your one wild and precious life.”
“Thy life’s a miracle,” Shakespeare wrote. “Speak yet again.”
What will your life say? May it be our prayer that our lives always speak goodness and hope, beauty and truth in this terribly broken world. And may we always live thanks – live thanks – to the God who gives us breath.
Ryan turned twenty yesterday and he’s celebrating with friends this weekend. Life is a miracle. Thanks be to God.