The Chesser Family: February 2007

I have recently been thinking about how we as humans expect God to bless us and for things to turn out good in our lives. We expect this so much that when things happen that we don’t like or that we don’t understand we question God. Sometimes we ask “God, why did this bad thing happen to me?” When was the last time that you or I asked God why something good happened to us?
My wife and I have had something happen in our lives that made me think hard about this question. We have had God perform a miracle in our lives. We know it is a miracle and we give our Heavenly Father all the glory for it. Let me tell you the story.
Wendy was about five months pregnant with our third child and she was doing well. According to the doctors the baby was fine and after the first trimester, Wendy was feeling good as well. I serve as the pastor of the Grady Baptist Church in Grady, New Mexico and I had traveled to Pakistan with a couple of other men to preach the gospel and equip pastors and students there. While I was gone, Wendy had a very frightening thing happen – she started bleeding. Her mother was with her and she was able to go to bed and the bleeding stopped.
I had been home a few days and was excited to share the experiences and opportunities we had in Pakistan with our church. That Sunday morning, Wendy was feeling sick to her stomach and decided she would stay on the couch. I took our two children to Sunday School, promising to check on her before the worship service. It turned out that I was caught with a visitor after Sunday School and was not able to cross the street to our house and check on Wendy. The worship service began and after about fifteen minutes, one of the high school girls came running to the front and handed me her cell phone. I looked at the screen and read a text message from Wendy, “Tell Rody to come home immediately – emergency!”
I ran across the street and into the house to find Wendy with tears streaming down her face and blood on her hands! As she cleaned up and changed clothes I ran back and told one of our deacons that I had to take her to the hospital. As the church began to pray, we rushed to the hospital. We prayed as we drove a very simple prayer, “Lord, please save the life of this baby.”
We checked her in and did a sonogram. We braced for the results as they said the baby was just fine. We thanked God! Dr. Alexander examined Wendy and said she would be fine and should take it easy and let us go home. We were thankful and glad to be going home, but we had no answers to the nagging question of why did that happen in the first place.
About a month after the episode which put Wendy in the emergency room, she had taken our kids to a birthday party in Clovis. I was in my office at home and was expecting them back in about thirty minutes when the phone rang. A lady introduced herself and very calmly told me that Wendy and our two children had been in a car accident. She quickly let me know that they were all OK, but that the ambulance was going to take her to the hospital.
I thanked her and rushed out to my pickup to get to the hospital thirty miles away. I called a brother in Christ, Ryan Figg and asked him if he could get the kids because he could get there before I could. I met Ryan with Kyra and David at the hospital. He was just the right person to be with them because they knew him and they were scared after the accident. I sat down and Kyra (five) told me that Wendy had started getting sleepy while driving and her foot came off the brake at a stop light. She was in the left-turn lane and was waiting for the arrow when she passed out and relaxed her foot from off the brake. The car drifted through the intersection of Llano Estacado and Prince Street during a very busy time of day and bumped into the car on the other side of the street in the left turn lane. The kids had heard the cars honking horns and then saw people trying to get them to unlock the car because Wendy was still passed out. Finally, Kyra said that she heard the siren of an ambulance and knew it would be OK to unlock the doors.
The kids were scared, but they were excited to know that they could go with Ryan and eat pizza with his family. So I went in the emergency room to see Wendy. She was strapped to a back board and was saying how bad her back hurt. I could tell that she was a bit disoriented. She told one of the nurses that she was getting sick to her stomach and as they turned her onto her side to vomit, blood ran off the back board. About that time Dr. Alexander came in and realized how urgent the situation was. She had to have a back and neck x-ray to make sure she wasn’t injured in the accident. Dr. Alexander pushed her bed himself to the x-ray room and then to the sonogram room. He leaned over the back of the person doing the sonogram to see if the baby was OK.
As she was having the sonogram, I was helping a nurse get pads under her because she was bleeding a lot. When Dr. Alexander was satisfied that the baby was OK, he rushed her to a room and they began giving her blood. There were four nurses and the doctor in the room, all working on Wendy. The doctor was trying to stop the bleeding and the nurses were busy giving her a blood transfusion in both arms at the same time! I don’t do well with blood any way, but I was standing beside her and talking to her. I began to get light headed and had to sit down. There was blood everywhere.
When the blood transfusion was complete, they called a helicopter from a larger regional hospital in Lubbock, Texas. The helicopter was there in about thirty minutes and she was rushed to Lubbock. We prayed together as they loaded her on the helicopter. This time our simple prayer was expanded a little, “Lord Jesus, please save the lives of Wendy and the baby.”
She received more blood in Lubbock as soon as she arrived and in all received eight units. When I arrived, the doctors told me that they would have taken the baby then, but it was too early for the baby to have a good chance of living. Their concern was that Wendy’s body was not allowing her blood to clot and she was in a life-threatening situation. They told us they were giving her a blood clotting agent but if that didn’t work, they would have no choice but to take the baby by C-section in order to save Wendy’s life.
At this point we knew it was very serious but we determined to trust the Lord and committed the situation to him in prayer. By morning she was doing a little better and by the next afternoon her blood-clotting factors were back to the point that she was out of the woods. We prayed and held our breath as she was taken for a sonogram. They said the baby was doing good and put her in ICU. She remained in the hospital for ten days and the doctors told her that they did not know exactly why she was bleeding. They began the week saying that she would have to stay the rest of her pregnancy in the hospital, but within a few days, they released her saying that she needed to stay off her feet and take it very easy.
We were so glad to be home again and thankful that God had preserved her life and the life of the baby. She continued to bleed a little during the entire pregnancy and about two weeks before the baby was due, she had an amniocentesis. This was done to determine if the baby’s lungs were developed. They said she was ready, so they induced her on February 13, 2007. We were a little nervous as we sat talking in the delivery room. It had been such a difficult pregnancy we had no idea what to expect. She began to have pretty hard labor about two thirty on February 14th, and at 4:13 am, Katie Grace Chesser was born. She was healthy and beautiful and Wendy hardly bled any more than a normal pregnancy! Praise the Lord!
We brought her home to meet her big sister and brother and a church that had prayed for her for months. I cannot tell you how thankful I am to God and to his church for their prayers. Our church family from all over the world prayed for this baby. We had brothers and sisters in South Africa, Pakistan, and Venezuela and all over this country praying for her. A young lady that works at the hospital prayed for Wendy as she was waiting for the helicopter. God truly did a miracle in our lives and he used some wonderful people to make it happen.
As I held Katie in my arms, I thanked God again for protecting and preserving her life and the life of Wendy. The doctors still do not know how she bled as much as she did and did not loose the baby. Wendy herself was on the doorstep of death as her life drained out in the loss of blood from her body. And yet, God worked a miracle. There is really no other way to describe it. He used some incredible doctors, nurses, x-ray technicians, and hospital staff to do it. We thank God for Doctors Alexander and Moore and Cristy Walsh and all the wonderful people at the Women’s Medical Center. We also thank God for all the very special people at Plains Regional Medical Center and especially for the labor and delivery and emergency room nurses.
And yet, I continue to ask myself this question, “Why did God bless us and work a miracle in our family?” We do not deserve his love. We do not deserve his provision. We are not more faithful people than anyone else. We are just simple followers of Christ and yet he blessed our socks off. God deals with us on the basis of grace. Jesus Christ has ratified a New Covenant in his blood and as his children we are the beneficiaries of this grace. “Every good gift and ever perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” (James 1:17) “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8,9) No, we do not deserve God’s grace, but in Christ He gives it. God is love and he hears the prayers of his children.
May I encourage you? The Word says, “And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.” (Psalm 50:15). No matter what difficulties come your way, call upon the Lord knowing that he hears the cry of his children. He answers prayer to bring glory to his name.