WLSU: We Almost Died

Many years ago, a previous owner of our house added on one little room. Instead of putting in any new ducts and connecting it to the furnace, they added radiant heating – a small radiator that runs along the baseboard of this one room. This room has become my wife’s office, and last spring the heater broke. We have a home warranty company which functions about as well as you think it would. You pay this company so that when things break in your house you can call up a stranger and argue with them about why they should replace it, and then sometimes maybe they do but with cheaper parts. It’s all very amusing.

So the heater didn’t get fixed last spring. And we forgot about it because it was getting warmer. And now here we were in Late November, with a few freezing nights under our belt, and my wife’s office is generally too cold. She had been using a space heater, but we knew that could not be the solution for the next few months: That would blow up our electric bill, and of course space heaters can be dangerous. After dragging our feet for a couple weeks, my wife finally called an HVAC technician with whom we’d worked last year. Almost as an afterthought, she asked him to just check on our furnace too while he’s at our house.

The technician shows up and takes a look at our radiant heater. And it’s working. As in, nothing is wrong with it. There was no reason for us to call. It just works. It was not working before. Now it is. He shrugs and goes off to the furnace. He runs some tests, comes back upstairs and says the heat exchange is cracked on our furnace and it is blowing carbon monoxide all over the place. He says he thinks it’s just blowing outside through the exhaust, have we noticed anything inside?

And then when it dawns on my wife. Yes, in fact, half of our family has been getting inexplicable head and stomach aches for the last week. He asks if the carbon monoxide detector has gone off. And you know the answer to this. You know that the battery was dead on our carbon monoxide detector and we hadn’t replaced it or tested it in a couple years. My wife heads to the store and buys several detectors, brings them home, sets them up, and they all go off the charts. Our house has been filling up with carbon monoxide. Our home isn’t safe.

I want to say at this point that I know full well what a disaster this makes me look like as a parent. Aside from being horrified after the fact, I am embarrassed. I should have replaced that battery. I should have tested that detector regularly. I should have thought something was funny about the random stomach and headaches. I didn’t. And everyone almost died and there’s no way around that.

And there was no reason for that technician to be there. There was no reason for him to be there. The radiant heater worked. It hadn’t worked. I promise you. It stopped working. We couldn’t get it to work. So we called someone to fix it. And he got there and it was working. And if the radiant heater had been working we wouldn’t have called him and he wouldn’t have come out and saved our lives.

I believe that we were recipients of a miracle. I know I’m religious and I’m supposed to say that, but it’s true. In all honesty, I’m a little embarrassed to say that too. Because I don’t like admitting I was in a position to need a miracle, and because I want to consider myself too reasonable to rely on miracles, and of course because why were we saved that day and others have not been and will not be?

There is so much I don’t understand. But I know what I believe about that day. And I know above all else that I am grateful, deeply grateful for my life, and for the lives of my family. I am so glad we’re here. I know it all feels so impossibly random at times. But here we are and am filled with gratitude.

We got ourselves, all five of us and our two dogs, into an AirBnb for a couple days, let the house air out, figured some things out, and now we’re back home with a new furnace that is not killing us. Many people prayed for us and showed us great kindness. I am extremely thankful.

Here is something that is also true: We were back in our home for one day and I was stewing over some difficult things and right there in that moment I began to consciously question the existence of God. The same God who had just saved me. The same God that I worship daily. The same God for whom I work. Friends, the struggle of faith is ongoing. The questioning. The doubting. Just a few days earlier I had experienced a miracle firsthand and had known with every bit of me that God was working in my life, and here I was wondering to myself if there was indeed any kind of order, intelligence, wisdom, or divinity at work in the world.

My faithfulness is spotty. It is very frail. I believe except when I don’t. I see God one day and doubt God the next. Perhaps I should be more embarrassed about that than I am about the carbon monoxide detectors. I am a Christian and a priest and I love Jesus. Sometimes I can literally feel God. Other times it’s nothing. And maybe if I tell you this story you will check the batteries on your carbon monoxide detector. But also, maybe if I tell you this story, you’ll know that you’re not the only one for whom faith is non-linear, for whom faith is hard, messy work. If sometimes you absolutely know God deep within your bones, and then moments later you’re not at all convinced of anything, I get you. And I’m sorry to say, there are no batteries to check on that.

We are not always faithful. But the Christian narrative is that God is always faithful. God believes in us whether or not we believe in God. God loves us whether or not we love God. God is working in our lives whether or not we see or feel or know it. The Christmas story is not a story about our faith in God being rewarded – it is a story of God’s faith in humanity being fulfilled, embodied, realized. The miracle is not contingent upon our belief in it. But when the belief shows up, so does gratitude. And today I am grateful.