Each day, like providential fireworks, God’s grace lights up our lives. Just like John the Baptist, each exploding glory is meant to call us out of our spiritual stupor. Each testifies to our soul about the light. Yet more often than not, we are deaf to these calls and blind to their brilliance.

“Praise God for boring days.”

These are the words that my wife, Abigail, wrote to people who were praying for our one-year-old son, Calvin, as he lay hooked to an ECMO machine in Johannesburg, South Africa. ECMO stands for “extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.” It is essentially a life-support system that replaces a patient’s heart and lungs — modern medicine’s last-ditch effort in its war against death. The machine’s recovery rate is only 50 percent. And even if someone recovers thanks to ECMO, the side effects range from nothing to the loss of essential brain functions. In other words, only half of our son might have eventually been restored to us.

So there my boy lay, hooked to this mechanical contraption that looked like it belonged in a low-budget sci-fi movie. A monstrous, blood-filled, serpentine tube came out of the right side of his neck, connecting body and machine. My baby was now relying on it to function.

I distinctly remember our fear of this sinister life-support system as we came to greet our sleeping beauty. It seemed almost a holy apparatus, a carrier and purveyor of life, whose grounds were not to be approached irreverently. The tiniest misstep and we might have bumped a button or snapped that cable. The risky nature of this machine was ever present to us.

Still, my wife wrote that afternoon, “Praise God for boring days.” I heartily concurred.

Out of the Whirlwind

How in the world could these words have come from our hearts? Surely nothing of what I just recounted could come across as boring. And why would we praise God in view of our son’s condition?

That day was the first in almost three weeks with no decline noted in Calvin’s health. We had been swept up in such a vortex of tribulations that merely a severe thunderstorm seemed to offer ample reason to praise God. To fully make sense of this, I would need to relate our whole story. Since length precludes this, permit me to highlight the main events.

Abigail and I were missionaries in Yaoundé, Cameroon, when our one-year-old burned half of his body with boiling water. The care there is insufficient for dealing with such a condition, so we were medically evacuated to Johannesburg. Upon arrival, the doctor remarked that Calvin’s lungs had almost completely collapsed because of the infections from his burns — and from COVID, which, we discovered, he had also picked up. The doctor was not even sure how he was still alive.

She proceeded to put him on a ventilator. When that failed to restore his lungs, she hooked him to an oscillator (basically a stronger ventilator). That eventually failed as well, so after being resuscitated several times, he was put on ECMO. While on ECMO, he developed a blood clot, which is essentially a death sentence. The doctor said she could not operate and that the clot would not go away on its own. And yet, in response to much prayer, it miraculously disappeared! The medical staff were stunned. In his sovereign grace, God had saved Calvin from death again and again.

Sweetness of Dull Days

I hope this brief summary shows you why we praised God with thankful hearts for a comparatively boring day. A day without any major event worth reporting to our prayer warriors was a pure delight. We had endured our fill of eventful days, so we praised God for this dull one. Most of us are not naturally inclined to do so.

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