“The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means God with us.” (Matthew 1:23)
I am writing most of this column from my hotel room in Washington, D.C. where I spent the first weekend in March attending the Annual Legislative Conference of the National Association of Counties. It’s a story that I didn’t want to go stale on me before I returned home to tell it.
I told my wife that I had an uneasy feeling about this trip. We left two college-age children at home to fend for themselves and took two teenagers with us. “Lord,” I thought, “Have mercy upon us.”
Little did I know that trouble lurked just around the corner. We had a full day of sightseeing the first day in town. Everything was going well, at least about as well as it could go when you’ve got two teenagers with you, one of whom has never been to Washington and thinks she knows more about the town than anyone else. If you have teenagers, you know what I’m talking about.
About mid-afternoon, however, my son, Mark, told me that his throat was hurting a little. Things got progressively worse and by evening he could hardly swallow and had a high fever.
The only thing I knew to do was try to find an urgent care center so that we could get a prescription and start treating the infection. The hotel information desk told me that Washington was teeming with clinics for everything from AIDS to family planning, but after trying to locate a clinic to get a doctor to see an out-of-town kid with a sore throat, he gave up and suggested that we take him to George Washington University Hospital.
“Great,” I thought. “There’s no telling what an emergency room admission in downtown Washington, D.C. is going to cost, not to mention that they probably won’t honor out-of-state medical insurance from a provider they’ve never heard of.”
Just when it seemed I had run out of options, God brought someone my way with help. An elderly woman came up to me and confessed that she had overheard my conversation with the hotel clerk. “My husband back in Indianapolis is a physician,” she told me. “I know how it feels to be in this kind of jam. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”
And help he did. He telephoned me from Indianapolis, took a short medical history on Mark, and called in a couple of prescriptions to a pharmacy just down the street from the hotel.
I knew immediately that God was at work in my situation and said a short prayer of thanksgiving in the elevator on my way back to the hotel room. Finally, I saw a glimmer of hope and felt that Mark would be just fine.
Later on that night, however, hope turned to fear. Mark’s temperature climbed to 102.9. He was listless and soaking wet as he lay on the bed, crying as he told me how much his throat hurt. If you have children, you know just how I felt.
I’ve always been told that a fever is nothing to worry about until it gets to 103.5. Well that may be true for someone else’s child, but this was my son and 102.9 had me more than concerned. Concern turned to worry when I Iooked over at my wife and saw her on her knees beside Mark’s bed praying for help.
I got Mark up and put him in a cold shower to cool his body down. My wife called the hospital and asked for help. “Since you’ve already started him on antibiotics, there’s really nothing else we can do for him,” the nurse told my wife. “He needs fluids more than anything else right now. If he’s unable to drink a quart of water over the next hour, bring him on in and we’ll get some fluids into him intravenously.”
Things really were at a fever’s pitch in that hotel room. I was afraid and realized as I cradled my fevered son in the early morning hours that I needed to turn to God and seek his help. After all, He is the “Great Physician”.
My prayer was simple and sincere. “Lord, please help me. I have nowhere else to turn. Touch my son and bring his fever down. Heal his body.”
Within thirty minutes, Mark drank a quart of water and his temperature dropped to 101. “Thank you, Lord,” I thought. And although his temperature spiked up and down over the next twenty-four hours, I knew he was going to be fine.
I finally realized the importance of what that Angel meant when he said, “They will call him Immanuel, which means God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) It is an eternal reminder for those of us who call ourselves Christians that hope is never lost because we have something the rest of the world doesn’t have: God with us.
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