The Path Series | #8

335 Words / Read time: 2.25 Minutes

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I Need You to Come Home and…

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Conviction can give birth to conversion.
Often, to do the right thing we must be convinced that we are doing it the wrong way.

I had recently turned thirty.
My wife Kim was 28-weeks pregnant with our third daughter.
Suddenly she went into labor.
By means of an emergency C-section, our O.B. saved our daughter’s (Anna Marie) life.

She was tiny.
Her legs were the size of my index finger.

She spent the next month in the NCCU.
Soon after, Anna Marie arrived home, healthy and functioning normally.
Five days later she spiked a fever…
She struggled to breathe.
We re-admitted her to the hospital’s pediatric unit.
She recovered quickly…
But, due to nurse neglect, she suffered a hypoxic event.

Paramedics scrambled to put her on manual life support…
And by a medical evacuation helicopter transported her to a children’s hospital a couple hours away.

By the time Anna Marie arrived, she suffered three clinical death experiences and permanent brain injury.

That night I drove to the hospital to be with Anna in her isolation unit.
Kim arrived at the hospital the next day.
Anna Marie was unrecognizable.
The respirator breathed for her.
She frequently coded out only to be resuscitated by the doctors.
She was swollen from Lasix.

Kim crumbled.

Through tears she said something to the effect, “I need you to come home and be a husband and father.”

But I thought I was.
But I was not.

I appeared to be a husband and father.
But my focus was on me, my career, and my success.

Kim begged me to focus on what matters most:
my vocation, my marriage, my children, my family.

The realization of what I was not convicted me to become what God has intended me to be.

In that moment I realized the most important thing I could ever do is to be a faithful husband in the image of Christ, and a father in the image of God the Father.

Then the hard work of becoming what I was not had commenced.