Swallowed Up In Life

****I'm posting this because I feel the atitude Mr. Andrew has is a testimony to all. Please pray for the Andrew family. Thank you!****



Swallowed Up in Life

-By Larry Andrew October 26, 2006



The most common question we received back in Portland was, "What happened to your son, David? I didn't know he was sick. He looked fine. He was bright and energetic. Why did he need surgery?" and "What went wrong at the hospital?"

So let me tell you what happened. Shortly after David married Shanin, he complained of pain in his neck. Nobody could figure out why. He took an anti-inflammatory, which helped. Within the next couple years, his condition worsened. He lost weight and became very weak. He had little use of his right arm and his pulse could not be read in the normal manner. There was too little blood flow.

His doctors determined that his disease was Arteritis—not arthritis, but an inflammation of the arteries—Takayasu's Arteritis. He began receiving a stronger anti-inflammatory. The disease had caused the insides of the arteries to his arms and brain to scar and reduce in size. This caused the aorta—the big artery leaving the heart—to weaken and enlarge. It's called an aneurism. If David had not had the surgery, his weakness would have worsened, he would likely have suffered strokes, or his aorta would have burst—immediately stopping the flow of blood.

David did his best to avoid causing pain to others. He kept the magnitude of his condition from all that he could. Few knew the extent of it.

In consultation with his doctors, it was decided that he must have surgery to replace his aorta and bypass arteries to his arms and brain. The amazing thing was that Kaiser Permanente paid to have another hospital perform the procedure—at great cost to them. The best heart hospital in the world is the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Dave and Shanin went there, tests were performed and the date of the surgery was set for the end of the September.

Shanin's employer instituted a new policy to allow her four weeks paid leave to accompany David to Ohio and aide him in his lengthy recovery in Portland.

I told the elders that I would need a couple weeks off in October, so that Lynette and I could help David when Shanin went back to work. We were not even planning on attending the surgery.

Fortunately, the elders decided that we should go to Cleveland and support Dave and Shanin, and you were asked to fund the trip. The finances that came in were overwhelming. Lynette and I can't convey in strong enough terms how important that was to us. Besides the expression of love and encouragement, we were able to determine what was best to do—not what we could afford.

So we packed for a five-day trip and went to Ohio. When we got there, David was in the midst of tests, mostly to determine how much needed to be replaced.

We enjoyed a day and a half with Dave and Shanin, while he did his best to show us a good time. Other family members arrived—his brother, Rick, with his wife and two-year-old daughter, and Shanin's Dad. David checked into the hospital and on Thursday morning, we all went in early to pray for him before his 6:30 surgery.

We went to the waiting room, chatted in a relaxed manner, and played with our granddaughter, whom we had not seen for sixteen months. We knew that there was no significant risk of complications.

That evening, we were allowed into the Intensive Care Unit, two-at-a-time, to see David. The ICU has beds a few feet apart, separated by thin curtains and each bed is surrounded by life-support machines with many highly-trained medical people in attendance.

David had not yet aroused from the anesthetic. He had a breathing tube attached to his mouth and various other systems functioning. We touched him and talked to him, glad to have the surgery over. Sometime during the night, he would awaken. All was well.

About 7 o'clock the next morning, the hospital called us at the hotel, and told us to hurry over. We got there very quickly and waited. We waited for the doctor to arrive, we waited for a special conference room to be unlocked, and we listened while the doctor gave us bad news.

He said that David was very sick. Since he had not awakened from the surgery in the allotted time, the specialists were called in. They administered an EEG and found little brain activity. The doctor who reported this to us also said that he had had a stroke. "He is very sick," he said, again. Shanin naturally burst out each time more bad news was given to us. "This wasn't supposed to happen!" "I can't handle this!" Finally, the doctor said that since David was young—only 32—they would wait and see what would happen. Once more he said, "David is very sick." It was a harbinger of worse news to come.

Our other son, Kevin, arrived later that day—Friday. We took turns going in to see David and praying for him. It was a very somber time, alleviated by periods of our granddaughter's cheerfulness. She would run down the hall and call me, "Grampa." When she saw Shanin crying, she would crawl up on her lap and say, "No cry, Shanin, no cry. I love you."

Each report was more devastating than the last. By Saturday morning, it was clear that David had died. He was with the Lord in Heaven. We didn't quit praying, though. The Bible talks of Jesus and his disciples raising people from the dead. In Mt 10:8, Jesus said, Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead. So we prayed to that effect.

We weren't denying obvious circumstances. David was dead; his spirit was gone. We just did what Jesus did and what he told us to do. We spent portions of Saturday calling David's spirit back. Crazy? No. Fanatical? No.

That evening, at 9 o'clock, we were informed that David had been declared dead and that in two hours, life support would be halted and David's body would be removed from ICU—unless, his next-of-kin would allow his organs to be transplanted. Since it would take some time to arrange the transplanting, we would be given 24 hours more in ICU.

Shanin signed the heart-wrenching documents and we went back to the hotel and had a prayer meeting in Shanin's room. We prayed and sang and ministered to Shanin. This encouraged her, as well as the rest of us.

We determined to find a church to go to on Sunday morning, and Lynette went to work on it. But which one? We had a couple connections but Lynette wasn't satisfied with them and asked God for help in finding just the right one.

She got out the Yellow Pages and hunted. One church jumped out at her and we called and got a recording of the service times and took off.

When we got there, we realized that the Yellow Pages don't advise what race churches are. I never saw one white person there. It was totally black. It didn't bother us, but I wondered if it would bother them. It didn't.

One of us told an elder that we had an urgent prayer request. He went to the pastor and told him to come to the back to pray for us. The pastor said, "If we have an urgent prayer request, we're not going to the back, we're going to the front. Bring them up!"

So we were brought up to the front of the church—all eight of us, while the pastor ordered the doors closed during the in-between-services time and announced to all present what our need was. The church went to prayer, with all the noise and intensity of a black church. It was glorious. When he was done, he invited the 80 or so present to come and "love on them." All of us got hugs from all those passionate people. How encouraged we were. He told us that they had just finished a conference where they had asked God to send them people of other races with impossible problems. He said that we blessed them.

I invited the pastor to come to the hospital to pray for David's return and he did. He spent a couple hours with us, but David's spirit did not return to his body. Why not? In modern times we have heard of people coming back from clinical death. That is, when the heart has stopped, it has been restarted. Reports of going to Heaven and returning are ample. People have even returned from brain death after short periods of time. But we realized that by the time we began praying for David's spirit to return, he had been dead for a long time. I'm convinced that he died some time early on Friday morning. They were just letting us down easy—and hoping the tests were wrong.

By the time we called for his spirit to return on Saturday, David had been in Heaven for more the 24 hours. The pastor who ministered to us in Cleveland asked us, "Would you leave Heaven, if you had been there with Jesus that long?" We had to admit that we wouldn't. Who would?

So, as the deadline of midnight approached, we began saying good-bye to David. We did it as a group and individually. David had a two-day growth on his beard by then—which was typical. I stroked his beard and his cheek, rubbed his hair, and kissed him. There's a line from an old black-and-white movie, called, To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the Depression-era South, where a girl invites a visitor to touch her brother who's in a coma. She says, "You can pet him if you want. He wouldn't let you if he was awake, but you can pet him if you want." So that's what we did.

The following Saturday we had an amazing funeral in a very large church. About 1200 came. We asked my brother Jim to conduct the service. David's old trumpet teacher played Great Is Thy Faithfulness. Lynette and I and our two other sons shared our comments, as well as two of his closest friends and his business partner.

The last question people ask is "How are you doing?" The answer is, "very well—most of the time." Our family has walked through the long valley of death's shadow. We found it to be a very trying place. The only reason we could endure it is because God was with us, because our family was united, and because the people of God supported us—here, in Portland and in Cleveland. David is dwelling in the house of the Lord forever and one day we will, too. Through it all, the rod and the staff of the Shepherd comforted us, guiding us along the difficult, dark path.

At the funeral, my brother reminded us that Paul gives us a heavenly view of this life. 2 Corinthians 5:1 says, For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. He's talking about our new bodies. Verse 4 For we who are in this tent, groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed (or die), but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.

While we look at death as the end, it's really only the end of this tent, the body. God looks at the death of the body as being released from this existence and being swallowed up by life. He has promised believers that when we leave our tents, that we will live for eternity in Heaven with him, where He will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes; [where] there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. Rev 21:3

He has prepared a place where He will transform our lowly bodies that they may be conformed to His glorious body. Philippians 3:21 says. Your glorified body won't get sick. It won't get weak. It won't get old. It is going to be absolutely perfect.

One day, Lynette and I are going to be ushered through the gates of Heaven and we expect to be greeted by our son and which ever one of us precedes the other. There we will see David in his glorified body and we will rejoice with him and with the most important one in Heaven: the Lord Jesus Christ.