Bring Him Myrrh

Another foggy shot over the lake on a morning walk this December.

There at the top of the stairs of our home, my son not yet two years old, was convulsing on the floor. My wife while weeping called emergency services between rending the walls with pleas,

God don’t take my son from me…

His body clenched in a crescent on his side, shaking with crevasses white where there were eyes, I took my boy’s seizing hand and began to pray.

After a minute in my arms, my son slipped away.

Hues of blue filled his face. I laid him before me and began compressions on his chest pausing only to rest with my ear to his airways.

It took about a full minute to find the delicate depth of my hands on his body before he came back. Though he had resumed respiration, my boy was unconscious and laboring breaths like a band saw on lumber.

Paramedics soon arrived and in seconds I was lifting the unresponsive body of my child into his seat. My wife boarded the ambulance with our son. I followed swiftly.

There are many images from this day that won’t seem to fade. The contrast of his body on that hospital bed will be with me to my end. Those leads and beeps of little machines monitoring my baby.

Dismayed I began my advent devotion for the day:

This is precisely why Jesus was born. To teach us how to die.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Gold and Frankincense make sense but it is scandalous for a baby to be gifted Myrrh, the scent of the dead from the ancient Mediterranean. A gift card for a casket to a swaddled recipient would be our generations equivalent.

Yet this is part of the meaning of Christmas.

Now all I wanted to know was how a mother who watched her son die could recount her story with this opening line:

My soul rejoiced in the God of my salvation…

-Luke’s Gospel Account 1:46

How can there be joy when your child dies?

I became empty when I saw my son’s body without life.

empty and empty and empty reprised.

Then softly I began to sing:

Love is living how death lost its sting¹,

Glory to the newborn king².

***

Slowly stirring in the hospital bed hours after we had arrived my son began to rise. First twisting to tear the leads from his chest then unwrapping the monitor from his leg he asked mom and me:

Down please.

And we returned home a family.

Until next week,

-Steven

PS. For those of you who have kept us in your prayers, thank you. We have had a week of follow up appointments and exhaustion. Our story continues…

1. A reference to 1 Corinthians 15:55

2. From Hymn for Christmas-Day better known as Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. A reference to Luke 2:13-14