Loving Landan

A few days after Landan’s first intubation, I went to the hospital chapel.  I was feeling all the things and barely in control of my emotions.  While I was in there, another woman entered.  I immediately left, not wanting to break down in front of a total stranger.  I went back to Landan’s room, still feeling very helpless and lost. I later went down to the gift shop to get a snack, and as I was on my way back up to Landan’s room, I walked by the same woman from the chapel.  She stopped and asked if I needed prayer.  I immediately broke down and told her a little bit about what was going on with Landan.  She asked to pray with me and after she told me, “God put on my heart to pray for you.  Your miracle is coming.”

As Landan’s health rapidly declined at the end of his life, I often replayed those words.  How could she have been so sure of a miracle?  I fully believe God had spoken to her and led her to me that day.  But why would he put words on her heart that weren’t true? After all, Landan wasn’t going to heal.  We weren’t going to get the miracle that Andy, our family, hundreds of people who had never met him, and I had been praying for for months.  And it wasn’t until a few weeks after we lost him, as I was looking more into the valve issue that we weren’t aware of when he first went into the hospital, that I realized there was so much about what Landan was able to do that defied his actual heart defect.  Maybe our miracle wasn’t what we wanted. But it doesn’t mean we didn’t get one.  It was simply that we got 4 more months with him.  Andy and I got to know him and love him in a way we hadn’t yet been able to when he was first hospitalized.  Landan passed knowing he was so loved.  Andy and I lost our son with no regrets with what we did for him or the relationship we were able to build with him.  It doesn’t make his loss easy, but I imagine that it’s certainly made it easier than losing him at 6 or 7 weeks old.

Andy and I have questioned many times why we didn’t get our miracle.  Why Landan couldn’t be that amazing miracle story you come across on the internet – where the child spends hundreds of days ill in the hospital and comes home to live life.  Landan had such an amazing life ahead of him and we know he was going to reach so many people.  A miracle would have only strengthened all of our testimonies.

We already know that prayers get answered, just not always in the way we are asking.  And I think many people would tend to agree that when looking for a miracle, it either happens or doesn’t.  But Landan taught us that miracles can occur just as prayers do – not always in the way we asked for them.  And that probably makes them easy to overlook.  Had I not had that conversation with that particular woman that day in the hospital, I don’t know that I ever would have been able to identify the miracle we received. I think one day, when we’re able to look at the true big picture of our life, we all will find that miracles occurred in our life far more times than we ever acknowledged.