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Hello, My name is Dave; I live in Maryland in the USA. 20 years ago I began to write down the profound experience that I had which I believe God used to lead me to His son, Christ Jesus, and to accept His work on Calvary as the substitute for my debt.
I was raised Catholic, and attended church regularly as a child, so I did learn some matters concerning Jesus in my youth. However, I never felt drawn to accept the Word of God as true. In 1991, my second son, Greg, who was only 18 months old, was diagnosed with AML leukemia. I was crushed, because I feared for his death, and wanted to be able to love him for my entire life.
In this condition, God led me to read the Bible. For the first time, I began to read the Gospel of Matthew, without doubting its authority. I was filled with awe and the plight I was in, regarding my son’s illness, was lightened in great measure, because I came to believe that both my son and I would one day be together in the hereafter, because of what Christ did on Calvary. His Gospels clearly pointed to faith in Him alone as the path to be on. The Word was hard for me to always understand, but when I chose to accept it as true, and not doubt it, I was given understanding. Eventually, I accepted Christ as my savior, after completing an assessment of my self worth, which would always leave my wanting for merit to attain salvation.
My son endured two bone marrow transplants. After the second one, in October of 1992, it appeared not to work. The doctors were 95% certain that he would die from his disease, shortly. I brought him home. He was only 2 1/2 years old. I put him on the couch in our family room. He was, indeed, very ill. His gums were bleeding, his skin was tallow and the whites of his eyes were yellow and bloodshot. He appeared near death, indeed. He stared at the ceiling in our family room, which was a plain white ceiling and said, “Not go home right now; I stay. See the candles?” It was around Christmas time, so we thought he was referring to the candles in the windows out front. He said, “No, see the candles?” as he pointed to our ceiling. This happened over a weekend, and the doctors asked us, if he survived the weekend, to bring him back to the hospital where they would do a bone-marrow aspirate to confirm what they expected, namely, that his platelet cancer had fully metastasized. We brought him back to the hospital that Monday. They did the test. To everyone’s great surprise, they found no cancer in him at all, and his vital signs and blood counts all indicated that he was well on his way to recovery. We were all dumfounded.
I turned to the Bible, as I was confused as to why the world experts told us our child was about to die from cancer, and then days later, he seemed to make a miraculous recovery. I began reading Revelations for the first time. I got to Revelation 1:20 and gasped . . . John the Apostle had a vision of heaven, which indwelt the cosmic Christ, who walked among the candlesticks in heaven which corresponded to churches here on Earth. Remember Greg’s comments? He was dying. He said “I not go home right now; I stay. See the candles?” He saw heaven as it really exists, called it home, and was somehow spared for a time from going to the place he was caused to call home.
Greg lived another nine months, until his cancer once again metastasized and ended his life on September 12, 1993. However, as his mother and I provided his home-based hospice, we were regaled with further astounding events. Before Greg died, he went into a coma. Just before he passed, he came out of his coma. He looked at us through far-away eyes, and said, “Everything is green” (see Revelation 4:3 ). He said, “The men are here now; I have to go. I love you Mom, I love you, Dad.” He closed his eyes, never to reopen them. Several days later, his heart stopped, and he was pronounced dead by the home-health nurse. The pain I felt at that moment, in spite of my faith, was excruciating. It was as if my healthy, happy 3 1/2 year old was just hit by a car and killed. As I carried his cold, heavy-in-my-arms body out to the funeral director’s van, and handed the shell of my son to the director, I realized why my pain was so great. I realized that I could never be his father again.
My solace, though, was in believing that he now had a much greater father than I could ever hope to be. A heavenly and eternal father.