It’s the last day of what has been, for many of us, a very trying year. It’s been a year of economic hardship and global terror, a year in which talk over climate change and health care shared headlines with scandal upon tawdry scandal. Good news? Hard to find much in 2009. Perhaps its fitting that the year’s last big news story would feature a man trying to blow up a plane with explosives stitched in his underwear.
But, in the midst of this not-so-fond adieu to 2009, here comes a reminder of who’s really in control.
On Christmas Eve, in my hometown of Colorado Springs, a child was born.
His name was Coltyn, and he was, for all intents and purposes, dead. His mother, Tracy Hermanstorfer, had also inexplicably died just minutes before in the throes of childbirth—a cardiac arrest, doctors said. According to The Gazette, husband Mike Hermanstorfer held her hand when her heart stopped beating. He felt his wife’s skin grow cold, watched it turn blue.
“I lost all feeling,” Mike said. “Once her heartbeat stopped, it felt like mine did, too.”
Doctors still hoped to save the baby, though, and they quickly wheeled the mother into surgery to perform an emergency Cesarean section. Yet when they pulled the baby from his mother’s body, he wasn’t breathing, either. He was, in the words of Dr. Stephanie Martin, “limp.”
But, as Mike held Coltyn in his hands, doctors continued to work until the baby sucked in his first breath. And then, in that bittersweet moment, Mike learned something else: His wife had, miraculously, come back to life.
“My legs went out from underneath me,” Mike told the Associated Press. “I had everything in the world taken from me, and in an hour and a half, I had everything given to me.”
Doctors can’t explain it. Dr. Stephanie Martin says that Tracy had “no heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn’t breathing.” Her skin was a deathly gray. But the Hermanstorfers know what happened.
“We are both believers … but this right here, even a nonbeliever—you explain to me how this happened,” Mike told AP. “There is no other explanation.”
Imagine being pulled from death’s maw to life again. Imagine the sense of glorious responsibility such a miracle leaves in its wake—the responsibility to live with joy and purpose, the duty to make your life mean something.
All of us, of course, are imbued with that same purpose. I believe our lives are part of a glorious tapestry, made knot-by-knot by a Divine hand. We can’t see this tapestry in its entirety—not yet—so our lives can feel pretty random, pretty confusing and pretty painful at times. But I have faith in the big picture: Faith that my talents (however meager they are), my experiences (however vexing they might be) and my life (however small it might seem) adds something meaningful to the whole.
But, in the midst of life’s messiness, God’s big picture is hard to imagine, much less see.
Tracy and Coltyn were given, in a way, a very special Christmas gift—a heart-stopping reminder that our lives are not our own, that we’re meant for something more. That we’re part of a bigger picture.
My New Year’s resolution (or, maybe, my New Year’s prayer) is this: To treat 2010 as the gift as it is, and to remember that my being—who I am, what I do, what I write—should be a gift, too. We are all gifts to the people around us—reminders of the One who sent us.
It’s almost 2010. The sun’s about to rise on a beautiful new year. Time to wake up.
