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gentlemanwarriorFor most of my life, I wanted God to give me a sign.
I started asking when I was a kid. I was born Hindu in New Delhi and came to the United States when I was seven. My family remained Hindu, but I went to Catholic schools, so I spent a good part of my childhood trying to make sense of two religions at once. At the same time, I was being abused and bullied. I prayed for it to stop. I prayed a lot. It didn't stop.
After a while I decided God either wasn't listening or wasn't there. I stopped praying and, eventually, stopped believing. For a long time I stayed away from religion altogether. Later I attended a Unitarian Universalist church, but it never quite filled whatever hole I was trying to fill. I liked parts of it, but there was still something missing.
Years later, my family started attending a Methodist church within walking distance of our house. We began going regularly and continued through COVID. Nobody there pressured me to convert. Nobody cornered me after church and asked whether I had accepted Jesus. I was allowed to sit there, listen and think, which was probably the only approach that had any chance of working with me. I still wasn't a Christian. I wasn't even sure I believed in Christianity. But I kept going.
About a year before my heart attack, I started having serious back problems. I had a pinched nerve and was in a lot of pain. I had an MRI, went through physical therapy and had steroid injections. Nothing was working. Eventually we got to the point where surgery seemed to be the only option left, and I was terrified of it.
On the day of the surgery I was in the hospital, in the gown, on the gurney and hooked up to everything. The anesthesiologist came by, asked me a bunch of questions and did whatever else anesthesiologists do before they put you under. Then my pastor came to see me and prayed over me.
That prayer mattered to me because I was scared. By then I had been attending the Methodist church for a while, but I still had not accepted Jesus and was still trying to figure out exactly what I believed. I was nevertheless perfectly willing to have my pastor pray for me before someone started working on my spine. There are times when theological uncertainty becomes considerably less important.
They wheeled me into the operating room, and the surgeon was there. I jokingly said, "Are you sure we have to do this? I feel a lot better."
I knew I was joking because I didn't actually feel much better.
But the surgeon didn't just laugh it off. He asked me to move my toes, so I moved them. Then he asked me to move my feet and my legs. I did that too. He examined me again, right there in the operating room, and then said he wasn't going to do the surgery.
I was shocked. I was already hooked up. The anesthesiologist had seen me. I had been wheeled into the operating room. My pastor had prayed over me. In my mind we had reached the portion of the day where the surgeon performed surgery.
Instead he told the nurses to unhook me.
He said the movement in my toes, feet and legs showed that I was improving enough that he did not think he should operate. So I went into the operating room expecting back surgery and came back out without having it.
At the time, I did connect it to God.
My pastor had prayed over me because I was terrified, and then a surgery that everyone expected to happen was called off after I was already in the operating room. I thought the prayer had something to do with it. I couldn't prove that, obviously. The surgeon had a perfectly sound medical reason for stopping. But I still wondered whether I had just been given one of the signs I had spent so many years asking for.
What I didn't know was that there might have been another reason that cancelled surgery mattered.
I did not know how poorly my heart was functioning. Later I would learn that my heart was working at only about 25 percent capacity. Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had gone through anesthesia and back surgery with my heart in that condition.
I don't know.
Maybe I would have been fine. Maybe I would have had the surgery, recovered and gone on with my life. I can't claim that God cancelled the surgery to save my life because I have no way of knowing that.
But I have thought about it many times since.
During 2022, while I was still attending the Methodist church, I decided I needed to settle the religion question for myself. I had been going long enough that I could feel myself moving toward Christianity, but I did not want to become a Christian because I liked the people at church or because a Christmas Eve service made me feel something. If I was going to change something this fundamental, I wanted a better reason than that.
I wanted evidence.
So I started reading. I read Lee Strobel. I read Stephen Barr. I read Francis Collins. I also read Bart Ehrman because I didn't see much point in reading only people who already agreed with Christianity. I read about archaeology, the early church, Roman sources, the Gospels and what historians could actually say about Jesus.
I approached Christianity more or less the way I approach work. Read everything. Look for the holes. Assume nothing.
By late 2022 I had reached a conclusion I had not expected. I thought the case for Christianity was pretty strong. Unfortunately, that created a new problem. If I thought Christianity might actually be true, eventually I had to do something about it.
That was harder than the research.
I was born Hindu. My parents were Hindu. My grandparents were Hindu. Hinduism was tied to my family, India and the people who came before me. Becoming Christian felt like more than changing my mind about theology. Part of me felt as though I might be turning my back on my ancestors.
So I dragged my feet. I kept reading and thinking because reading and thinking were much safer than actually making a decision.
Then came the night before Thanksgiving in 2022. I got up from a chair and passed out. There was no warning. No chest pain. No shortness of breath. Nothing that made me think anything was wrong with my heart. I stood up and then I was on the floor.
This was especially inconvenient because the next morning was the Turkey Bowl. A group of my college friends and I have played flag football every Thanksgiving for years. At this point it is probably as much an excuse to see each other and eat pancakes afterward as it is an athletic event, but I intended to be there. After the game, I was supposed to go home, help load the car and leave on a family road trip.
Instead I ended up in the emergency room.
They ran tests and could not figure out why I had passed out. At about four in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, I woke up thinking about whether I could still make the Turkey Bowl. The ER doctor told me they were planning to discharge me, and I was already working out the timing in my head.
Then a cardiologist looked at my EKG and saw something he didn't like. He wanted another test. I wasn't thrilled. I had already spent most of the night there, I had just been told I could go home, and I felt fine. But he insisted.
The test showed that I had had a heart attack.
That was difficult for me to process because I did not feel like someone who had just had a heart attack. I hadn't had any of the symptoms I expected. I had passed out, but otherwise I felt normal. More tests followed, and then I was told that I needed double bypass surgery.
Within a few hours I went from wondering whether I could still play flag football to being told that somebody was going to open my chest and operate on my heart. The Turkey Bowl was officially cancelled.
Because it was Thanksgiving weekend, they could not do the surgery immediately. I had to wait four days.
Those should have been four terrible days. I was fifty-five years old. I had a wife and two boys. I had just learned that my heart was badly damaged. I also have a long history of anxiety and panic attacks. My brain is perfectly capable of creating a crisis when there isn't one, so you would think an actual crisis would have given it plenty to work with. Instead, I was calm.
I don't mean I was pretending to be calm or trying to be strong for my family. I was simply peaceful, and I had never felt anything quite like it. I remember thinking at one point that if dying felt anything like this, maybe death was not as frightening as I had always imagined. That is a strange thing to think while waiting for open heart surgery, but it did not frighten me.
For four days I waited. Doctors came in and explained things. Nurses came and went. My family visited. I watched television. The hospital went about doing what hospitals do. Through all of it, that peace stayed with me.
At first I didn't understand the peace as anything specifically religious. I just knew that for some reason I was not afraid. That changed when they were getting ready to take me into surgery.
I was lying on the gurney when I felt the presence of Jesus. I don't know how else to describe it. I didn't see Him and I didn't hear a voice. There were no lights, angels or anything else dramatic. I simply knew He was there, and what I understood was very simple: Have faith in me. It will all work out the way I planned.
What made that particularly strange was that I had not yet accepted Jesus.
I had spent months deciding whether I was willing to accept Him, and lying on that gurney I suddenly wondered whether I had the whole thing backwards. Maybe He had already accepted me.
The surgery went well. I spent eleven days in the hospital altogether and lost about thirty pounds, although most of that was surgical fluid, so I cannot honestly recommend double bypass surgery as a weight-loss strategy.
Recovery was not fun. There were tubes, pain and a large incision down my chest. Coughing became an event requiring preparation. But the peace I had felt before the surgery stayed with me.
And once I knew how bad my heart had been, I started thinking again about the back surgery the year before.
My pastor had prayed over me while I was terrified. I had been wheeled into the operating room. I made a joke about feeling better, the surgeon decided to examine me one more time, and then a surgery that seemed certain suddenly didn't happen.
At the time I thought the prayer had something to do with that. After the heart attack, I began to wonder whether there had been even more to it than I understood.
I still don't know.
I am uncomfortable when people claim to know exactly when God intervenes or why He does one thing and not another. I learned that lesson early in life. I prayed for the abuse and bullying to stop and they didn't. I am not going to pretend I now understand why one prayer seems to be answered while another isn't.
But I also don't dismiss these things as easily as I once did.
The back surgeon saw improvement and made a medical decision. The cardiologist saw something on my EKG and did his job. There are probably psychological explanations someone could offer for why I was so peaceful while waiting for heart surgery.
All of those explanations may be true.
What has changed is that I no longer think they necessarily rule God out.
For most of my life, I thought a sign from God would have to be something spectacular. I wanted something impossible, something I could point to and say, "There. Explain that."
Instead, one of the first signs may have been a frightened man on an operating table making a stupid joke after his pastor prayed for him, and a surgeon deciding to check one more time.
Another may have been a cardiologist refusing to let me go home even though I felt fine.
And another may have been four days of complete peace while I waited for someone to open my chest.
None of that proves Christianity. I know that. I can only say what happened and what I eventually came to believe about it.
God did not keep bad things from happening to me. That isn't my story. The abuse happened. The bullying happened. I had the heart attack. I needed the bypass surgery. Becoming a Christian did not suddenly explain why any of those things happened. It still doesn't.
I also still have plenty of questions. Sometimes I wonder whether Catholicism or Anglicanism or Episcopalian is closer to what Jesus intended. Sometimes I wonder whether Methodism stripped Christianity down to the basic essentials, although I suppose stripping things back was much of the point of the Protestant Reformation in the first place.
Becoming Christian did not cure me of thinking too much. That would have been the real miracle. But after the heart surgery, I no longer wondered whether I believed in Jesus.
The following year, my wife, our two sons and I were baptized together. When I look back now, I don't see one enormous sign that suddenly convinced me of everything. I see things that happened over several years, some of which meant something to me when they happened and others that only began to make sense later.
My pastor prayed over me and a surgery was cancelled.
A year later, a cardiologist wanted one more test when I was about to be discharged.
Then I spent four days waiting for open heart surgery with a peace I had never experienced before. And finally, lying on another gurney, I felt Jesus there with me.
I spent most of my life asking God for signs. I think part of the problem was that I had already decided what a sign was supposed to look like. Maybe I should have been paying more attention.
