Lessons from My Heart Attack: Every Day is a Gift

Lessons from My Heart Attack: Every Day is a Gift

 “But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands;” — Psalm 31:14-15a, NIV

On January 27^th at around 5:00 a.m. I suffered a massive near-fatal heart attack.

I have no memory of the heart attack that almost took my life. Indeed, I can’t recall anything from the entire previous day or for the following week.

I’m told that I came about as close to death as it’s possible to come without dying. Humanly speaking, I shouldn’t even be here. Best-case scenario, I should have significant brain damage. Consider:

• My daughter performed CPR for 12 minutes before the EMTs arrived.

• The EMTs continued CPR for another 30 minutes or so, and I was shocked multiple times.

• Because I wasn’t stable, it wasn’t until late afternoon on the 27^th—nearly 12 hours after the heart attack—that any kind of procedure was performed. And then, only a stent was put in my coronary artery. No bypass surgery.

• Early consensus was that I would probably need a transplant, and for a brief time I was #1 on the transplant list. When I got to Dallas, that recommendation changed to an implanted defibrillator. Then it changed again to a vest with a defibrillator for 3 months, after which they would reassess whether I needed an implant. Finally, they came in and said, “Your heart is healing so fast, we don’t think you need anything.”

One of the doctors who treated me in Dallas summarized it well. He said, “I have only one word to describe this: Amazing, amazing, amazing! God is great!”

Another said, “I don’t often use the word miracle, but in this case I’ll make an exception.”

It’s a strange feeling, to be described as a miracle—or at least as the recipient of a miracle. Knowing that by all rights I should be dead is a sobering thing. Over the last month and a half,  I’ve pondered much about my life and the purpose I have in still being on this planet.

I’m not sure how to process those thoughts other than by writing about them.

So, for a while at least, I’m going to blog my thoughts and reflections on my life-changing experience. I hope they may be of some help and encouragement to you, too.

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“But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands;” — Psalm 31:14-15a, NIV

I memorized those verses years ago when I was on staff with First Baptist Dallas’s prison ministry and commuting sixty miles each way to downtown Dallas. I had more than one close call on the Dallas freeways, and my commute served as a daily reminder that my “times” were in God’s hands.

I knew that, but I didn’t really take it seriously. Like most people, I was aware of my mortality but lived with a dominating sense of invincibility. Other people died. It wouldn’t happen to me. Couldn’t happen to me.

I pushed death into the closet and lived as though my future was unlimited.

That all changed on the morning of January 27^th.

The crazy thing is that I don’t remember any of it. My life could have ended that dark morning and I would have had no time to tell my dear wife how much I loved her, or hug my family, or play with my grandchildren. My life would have been snuffed out like a candle, and I would have been gone.

That leads to lesson #1 from my heart attack: Every day is a gift.

Yeah, I know that’s a cliché. It rolls off our tongues easily and we rarely give it any thought.

But it’s true. Every day that I climb out of bed and greet the sunrise is a gift from God. But more than that, every breath I take is a gift from God

In a dramatic moment from the Old Testament book of Daniel, Daniel confronts Babylonian King, Belshazzar, by telling him, “the God in whose power is your very breath, and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored” (Dan 5:23 NRSV, emphasis mine).

God holds my next breath in his hand. So, not only is every day I live a gift, so is every breath I take.

How does that knowledge change me?

I’m learning not to take a single moment for granted, whether it’s with my wife, Laurel, or my kids and grandkids. What used to be a theoretical concept—my times are in God’s hands—is now a governing principle.

Lesson learned: I don’t know how many more years, months, days, hours, moments, or breaths that God will give me, but I’m learning to savor every single one.