C.S. Lewis, who was no stranger to tragedies in his life once wrote “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
My life experienced a tragedy on March 30, 2009, when my middle child, Scott was involved in a near fatal motorcycle accident. The accident was marked as a fatality, but God had other plans for Scott. God had other plans for me as well. Scott was in a coma for 5 months, and will be in rehabilitation for the rest of his life with a traumatic brain injury.
I have been journaling my experiences, feelings, and thoughts for over 15 years. While not everyone thankfully will be affected with a similar tragedy, God has taught me numerous lessons that I pray will help you during difficult times. Jesus said in John 16:33, “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” The road of life takes many interesting turns. We can either learn from them or ignore the lessons.
I am trying to learn the lessons and hope these lessons encourage you.
I Just Want to Hear Your Voice
By David Malutinok
The call came that no parent ever wants to answer. I was in my office on March 30, 2009, and at 4:30 p.m., someone called me out of the meeting I was in, telling me that I had a call from the main switchboard about my son. I glanced down at my cellphone and saw that I had received a number of calls on it, but I had silenced it before my meeting. As I looked closer at my phone, I saw that two very good friends had called me. I wondered what the problem was and then I receives a call from my wife Peggy. She said, “Dave, Scott was in a very serious motorcycle accident, and they’ve marked it as a fatality. He’s been airlifted to a hospital, but we don’t know which one.”
Emotional Shock Wave
Immediately panic, concern, fear, and every other emotion that you can imagine came through my mind. But then my fatherly instincts kicked in, and I immediately started calling police stations to find out where he had been taken. After about 30 minutes, I found out that he was at the Atlanta Medical Center in downtown Atlanta. His accident happened in Marietta and so I assumed that he had been taken to one of the local hospitals. I believe it was the Cobb County police who told me that for extremely bad accidents he would need to go to a level one trauma center, and the only ones were Atlanta Medical Center and Grady Memorial Hospital. I called Grady first and then Atlanta Medical Center, and he was there.
I remember driving down to the hospital during rush hour, praying and begging God that he was OK. I was praying for a miracle and voiced prayers that only a mother or father prays during a time like this. This came so out of the blue. I had just seen him before I left for work. He was going to study the Bible with a friend and then going to work out with another friend. How can this be? “Dear God, this makes no sense. He was just trying to live for you.”
I was not able to see him immediately because of the seriousness of his situation, but later in the evening, the doctors came out to see Peggy and me. We had driven there separately, and the doctor did not have very good news. He said our son had a broken clavicle, a broken nose and was internally bleeding profusely. He said they were trying to stop the bleeding, but whether he would live was very much in question. The feeling a parent has at such a moment was the worst gut punch I have ever received in my life, and I have had many.
After two days of not knowing whether he was going to live or die, another surgeon came out and said they had found the bleeding. “It was in the rear part of his spleen,” he said, “and we took out his spleen, and we believe we stopped the bleeding.” He had multiple tubes in his body and had been put in a medically induced coma. I can’t tell you the despair and pain that I felt. The worst feeling was the hopelessness of being totally out of control. His life was purely in the hands of God. We prayed, and we prayed, and we prayed. Those nights were agonizing.
An Emotional Roller Coaster
During the first evening and night, many. many of our Christian friends and some of my friends from work started coming to the hospital. They offered so much comfort and so much emotional relief and yet there’s nothing anyone can say or do to remove that gut wrenching pain and fear of a parent. We are so grateful to the North River Church, my friends there and those from my workplace at the time, Habitat for Humanity International, who came to offer comfort. We spent three nights in the surgical waiting room near the intensive care area and waited and prayed.
My pain became anger: anger at God, anger at the situation, which drove me to ask the two questions that we always seem to ask in the situation: “Dear God, Scott is a Christian, he’s a good man, why him?” I then started asking God, “What is the purpose in this, what do you want to teach me? What do I need to learn?” I’ve always trusted the grace of God; I’ve always trusted the power of God, but something like this can just throw everything I thought I knew about the power of God out the window, and yet God never left us. I knew that God was there; I knew that God had lost his Son, and I knew that God understood the feelings that we were having. Although that was my greatest comfort, I still vacillated between despair, anger, fear, faithlessness, courage, hopelessness, worry and so many other emotions.
A New Opportunity
After two weeks, Scott physically stabilized (he would live…prayers answered) but continued to be in a coma. We heard from a neurologist that multiple brain scans showed that his brain was not working properly. He had sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury. In cases like this, no one can tell what the extent of that injury was. We would have to determine the damage only by what he was able to do, if and when he “woke up.” He would most likely never return to “normal”, but would he permanently remain in a vegetative state, would he ever walk, would he ever talk, would he even be able to recognize us?
We heard about an amazing brain injury hospital in Atlanta called The Shepherd Center. There was not much more that the Atlanta Medical Center could do for him, so we prayed that we could transfer him to this rehabilitation center we had discovered. We worked with the Shepherd Center intake team, and they accepted him to be transferred. (Prayers answered again.) He spent over three months in Shepherd hospital. The first two weeks there he barely opened his eyes. There was no response.
I remember praying to God about how much I loved his laugh and how much I loved his jokes and how much I loved having fun talks with him. I remember praying to God, “Please let me hear his voice again. It doesn’t have to be spectacular. He doesn’t even have to put words together. I just want to hear him. I just want him to be able to respond to me, whether by voice, touch or smile – just some reaction that acknowledges he sees or hears me.” Yet there was nothing. The weeks turned into a couple of months, and one of the fallacies that people think is that when a person goes into a coma, they suddenly wake up and everything’s okay. He was in my world completely, but I was not in his world. He couldn’t squeeze my hand. He couldn’t follow any commands; his eyes just looked straight ahead. I continued the prayer, “Lord please help him to understand that I am his father. I just want him to communicate with me even if it’s just by blinking his eyes or squeezing my hand.” I love him so much and I just wanted him to communicate with me.
After a few weeks, he would follow people in the room slowly with his eyes. I would smile at him, talk to him and touch him, but there was no reaction. I would look at my son, the young man whom I spent 20 years nurturing and raising and enjoying life with, and that same young man would just stare at me with no reaction or acknowledgment that I was in the room with him. I can’t tell you what it’s like to see your son listless, motionless and unresponsive. I was with Scott. I could see him. I could touch him. And yet no acknowledgment of me or anyone was occurring. I would stop by the hospital before work, and I would pray, “God, let today be the day he speaks. Let me see an acknowledgment. Let me hear his voice just a little bit and again it doesn’t need to be anything profound, just a touch, just to squeeze my hand, a smile, and if possible, some words.” But there was nothing.
I would come back from the office and pray for the same thing, yet nothing happened day after day, month after month. I prayed the same prayer and yet it remained the same unanswered prayer. As I looked at Scott day after day after day and would look into his eyes, it was almost like I could look directly into his spirit as if I could see the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I knew that the Holy Spirit dwelling within him was still alive and vibrant and that I could communicate with Him, and believe me, I was communicating with Him so much. Yet from Scott’s physical body, I heard nothing back – no acknowledgement, no smile, no words, no touch.
God’s Heart for Us
I then realized a very profound mystery of God. You see, I had a son whom I loved so much, but he didn’t acknowledge me. He wouldn’t speak to me. He wouldn’t touch me. He wouldn’t smile at me. Scott was fully in my world, but I was not in his. I realized how God looks at me as a son. Just like I spent hours and hours in Scott’s room, hoping for some kind of acknowledgment, God sees us every day and what does he want from us? He loves us so much and he’s looking at us. He’s in our room and yet when we don’t pray, when we don’t talk to Him, when we don’t acknowledge Him, we are breaking his heart because he wants to hear our voice. He wants our acknowledgment of him. How selfish it is for us not to acknowledge the Creator of the universe. To not acknowledge the God who gave his only Son for our salvation, for our joy and our peace in this lifetime must be so painful to our Creator. It must break his heart. Just like it didn’t matter to me what Scott said or how he communicated, but only that he let me know that I was in his world, our God wants us to acknowledge him. I can’t imagine how God must feel when we go day after day without prayer, without the acknowledgement of our Father, without thanking him for the nature that he provided us, the lives he provided us, and most importantly, without thanking Him for the salvation that cost Him so dearly.
As you go about your day, your heavenly Father is in your room, in your car, in your house, in your workplace, while you’re sleeping, while you’re awake, and like a father or mother to their child, he wants to hear from us. Our prayers do not have to be anything profound; he just wants to hear from us. Prayer took on a whole new meaning for me. Prayer is not simply asking for things. Prayer is not simply using God as a Santa Claus – “I’ll do this if you do that for me”. The God of the universe wants a relationship with us. He shows us his love every day. He shows us how much he cares about us every day. When we pray, do we talk to him as a father, as a son talks to his earthly father? Remember how much God loves you and remember he just wants to hear from you. We are totally in his world; Is He totally in your world? He just wants to hear your voice.
