“It’s the ambulance! It’s the ambulance!” Gaston told me excitedly on the phone. “He’s about to go park.”
“Don’t let him park,” I told him. “We’re waiting at the hospital.” I quickly went to tell the midwife that the ambulance was coming to take my wife to Natitingou, the main town in our region, about an hour away. “We might not make it there,” was her only reply, but she got all her stuff together. As soon as the ambulance arrived, she got in with my wife, and I was left in a cloud of dust to follow on my motorcycle.
It was about 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning and pitch dark. I could see the tail lights of the ambulance disappearing down the road as I started up my motorcycle. We had been at the village hospital since Wednesday when my wife’s water broke. Just this morning, half an hour ago, the midwife had called and told me to come right away because the umbilical cord had started to come out before the baby, and she was afraid the baby would die if the cord got pinched.
What if my wife or my child dies on the way to the Natitingou hospital? I thought to myself as I got the motorcycle into gear and sped off to follow the ambulance. Will I say that God has left me? Will this destroy my faith? How can I go on if I lose either or both of them? The thoughts circled in my head like a flock of vultures, each one swooping down with a more pointed attack than the previous one. I started praying, “God, since I am alive, I know that You are with me. You are the One keeping me alive. You have done so many miracles in my life up until now. Even if something bad happens now, it cannot make me forget all the good things You have done for me. Please give me the strength to accept whatever is coming.” As I sensed God strengthening me, I began to sing praises to Him.
At about 6 a.m., as it was starting to get light, we finally arrived in Tanguieta, a town about 45 minutes north of Natitingou. We had gone to two different hospitals in Natitingou without finding help. They sent us on to Tanguieta. I had worried we wouldn’t arrive in Natitingou in time, but I chose to keep trusting that He would help us get to Tanguieta as well. And He did.
My wife was whisked off to the emergency ward, and I kept praying. “God, I don’t know what You have in store for us, but please prepare me for it. Prepare me for the news.” I didn’t pray that He would make everything good, but that He would help me accept whatever happened. But then I started thinking, “God, if my wife or my child dies, the people in the village will say that the ancestors and evil spirits have power over me. They will say that this happened since I didn’t do the sacrifices. Oh God, what will I do?” Battling onward in prayer, I continued; “God, do something to save my wife and child, but may Your will be done. Glorify Your name. Help us out of this situation. Deliver them so the enemy will not have victory over them. Prepare me to accept whatever happens.”
Right then the midwife came out, and I jumped up. “How are things going with my wife?”
“Keep praying,” she replied. “Ask the pastors to pray a lot, too. It’s serious. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” I nodded, understanding the seriousness of the situation. “Keep praying,” she repeated, trembling and obviously stressed.
I sat back down and kept praying. But at the same time I kept thinking about the midwife. When we had first met her on Wednesday at the hospital in the village, she had seemed to want nothing to do with religion. I had offered her a copy of The Great Hope, (excerpts from The Great Controversy), but she hadn’t taken it. She wasn’t wearing any amulets or other visible signs of spirit worship. How did she know to tell me to ask the pastors to pray? She must have heard me talking to the pastor on the phone the other night at the village hospital.
About an hour later she came out again and said, “Your wife has given birth, but the baby isn’t breathing. Ask your pastor to pray again.” I praised God that at least my wife was doing well. I could tell God was already at work answering our prayers. At that point I didn’t know if I had a son or a daughter, but I knew that my wife would be all right, and I thanked God for that.
The midwife came out again. “The baby has cried! Praise the Lord! Go closer to the room so you can hear the baby cry. That’s your son crying.”
When I heard the baby cry, I started crying tears of joy. Up until then I hadn’t cried, but when I heard him and the midwife told me he was alive, I couldn’t hold back my tears.
“What church do you belong to?” the midwife asked. “The Seventh-day Adventist church,” I said.
“Oh, I’ve never heard of that before,” she remarked. “Is that a new church?”
“Not really,” I replied.
“Well, God is strong. Pray that your child will be a servant of God. Make sure of that. He has to stay a child of God, because God has done something great for him.” I could only nod, amazed that this non-Christian midwife was giving God the glory for the miracle that had just taken place.
My wife and the baby stayed in the hospital several more days, but I had to go back to our village to be with our girls. My wife didn’t get to see our son until the next day. He had a feeding tube for the first 48 hours and wasn’t able to start nursing until that was taken out.
Now we’re back home in our village. When people heard that we had to go to Tanguieta, the hospital that takes the worst cases, they all thought we wouldn’t come back with good news. So now people are visiting us to see what God has done. It was a big crisis, but God brought us through.
We named our son Koderi Amethyst Miracle Tianati. Koderi means “God saves” in Ditammari, our mother tongue. Amethyst is one of the 12 stones in the foundation of the New Jerusalem, and it follows Jacinthe (Hyacinthe in French) in Revelation 21. Tianati, of course, is our last name. But the name our son goes by is Miracle, a constant reminder to us of what God did for us.
