The Real Story of the Boy who Lived

The Boy Who Lived (Chapter 1 of The Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling)

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of a miracle that our family experienced early one spring morning in 1990. That was the day our son, Charles Harry, was born under circumstances that I cannot forget.

I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary of Linda’s pregnancy but then again I don’t think I’m the one to ask about this. I remember her being pregnant of course, of her regularly taking neo-vitamins (or whatever they’re called) and going to the doctor –a Dr. Kidd, no less - for check-ups along the way. But other than this, I’d say it was a fairly normal pregnancy as those things go. She got steadily bigger and the baby’s due date in mid-May got steadily closer. But the night she went into labor, I will never forget. For dread and grace met head on in a single hour and a life was born.

I was working nights then at Bethesda Lutheran Home in Watertown, Wisconsin and our home was in Whitewater, about 40 minutes away. The hospital in Fort Atkinson was about a 30 minute drive from work for me. Due to the fact that I was gone at night, Linda’s mom had come to stay with us until the baby was born. As I recall, it had been an otherwise quiet night at Bethesda when early Thursday morning the call came that Linda and her mother were on their way to the hospital. After quickly tending to some administrative stuff, I was in my car and heading south on Highway 26. I had no way of knowing the drama that was unfolding in the emergency room at Fort Memorial about 20-some miles away. For shortly after Linda was wired and situated in the delivery room, the baby’s heart-rate had plunged precipitously and had been lost altogether. In the terror-filled moments that followed, a specialist had been paged and brought in and a crash cart of sorts was standing by in case they had to perform an emergency C-section. And then for no known medical reason, the baby’s heart began beating normally again. All of this had transpired in my 25 mile drive to the hospital. By the time I got there, people were breathing again and a modicum of calm had returned to the room. They quickly got me up to speed of the situation but then contractions began in earnest.

And then, like a bass caught in the weeds, the baby got stuck. The umbilical chord was not simply around its neck. Rather, our child had become the center of an awful snarl. A forceps delivery ensued and finally at 7:01 a.m., Charlie emerged from the birth canal exhausted from his ordeal weighing 6lbs, 15 oz and measuring 20 inches long. Like all parents after the birth of their baby, we were a hodge-podge of emotions: grateful, relieved, thankful, excited. Charlie’s head looked like it had been squeezed in a vice but otherwise he checked out okay. As wonderful as the birth of any baby is, other than those brief moments of terror when his heart had stopped beating it had been an otherwise normal delivery.

Until the letter came the following week we did not realize that we had witnessed the strange workings of God. It was from Ella, Linda’s aunt on her mother’s side, and in her congratulatory card she shared the following story – that during the early hours of Thursday, May 18, she was awakened from her sleep with a compelling need to pray for her niece, not knowing that at that very moment she was in dire need. Now Ella was known as a “praying woman” and so strong did she feel the burden she interceded in her prayer language until it seemed the weight had lifted. She happened to glance at the clock before she went back to sleep. It was 4:30 a.m. Unbeknownst to her, this was exactly when Charlie’s heart began to beat again.

Our son, Charlie, has a form of autism officially referred to as Pervasive Developmental Disorder. Early on his life we knew something was amiss with him. A diagnosis was confirmed by the time he was four or five. But the trauma of his birth, the fact that according to the small size of his placenta he may have been in fact a month overdue, has nothing to do with his condition. It is – like so much of his life – a mystery, an enigma that defies explanation except that God’s hand is weaving the story that is Charlie.

You can call it coincidence if you like to or if that makes you feel better. You can call it strange coincidence indeed. But his mother and I believe that at the very moment things seemed to hang in the balance, God laid it upon the heart of a woman who knew him and her intercession saved our son’s life. The Apostle Paul said that “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will” (Romans 8:26, 27, NIV). Charlie is not likely to ever discover the cure for the common cold nor bring lasting peace to the Middle East. He won’t ever star on a football team or make “the big time.” No, at the moment he’s a janitor who likes to ride horses. He loves Scooby Doo movies and playing Jedi out in the back yard with his only friend, Anthony. His is a simple life full of simple pleasures and I am so grateful to God and to Aunt Ella for the life of my son. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God,” so says Moses (Deut 29:29). So for purposes all his own God preserved Charlie’s life that night and decreed that he would be the boy who LIVED. And we have Aunt Ella to thank in part for that.