Sometime in the month of November or December (I can't quite remember), my great aunt and uncle of North Dakota both ended up with covid-19 at the same time. This was when a large portion of the state was infected with covid, and their hospitals were severely overwhelmed. My great aunt did okay, but my great uncle suffered a stroke, likely triggered by his illness. He was flown from his farm to a hospital in Bismarck by helicopter, where he spent the next three days on a gurney in the ER waiting room, alongside numerous other patients with all sorts of illnesses. It took two days for a neurologist to finally check him out, but only briefly. The prognosis wasn't good.
He would need to undergo surgery to remove a blockage in an artery in his neck. It was an incredibly risky procedure; few doctors were willing to give it a try due to its high fatality rate. But, before going into surgery, doctors put him on blood-thinning medication to try to safely break it up, only for my uncle to suffer a series of mini-strokes as the blockage began to break up in tiny chunks, which flowed right up to his brain.
To be honest, I didn't expect him to make it. But, despite preparing myself for the worst, I prayed that my great uncle would manage to make it. Late every night, for about a week, I prayed mainly for my great uncle. If it was his time to go home, I prayed that he'd suffer minimally. If it was not yet his time, I prayed for his swift recovery.
Amazingly, my great uncle survived, and was flown via passenger plane to a rehab center in western North Dakota to regain the use of his left side, which had been partially paralyzed by his strokes. I don't really know most of the details, but from what I've heard, he has since regained control over most of his left hand and leg, and only struggles to move his fingers and toes.
While I am well aware of the fact that my great uncle would've died had it not been for medical intervention, I still feel a spiritual connection to that event. For I believe that God can and does work through the hands of others. He made us smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom, after all. Unlike every other animal, we are so far the only species who can ponder the future, envision the bigger picture, and be enormously creative. We are certainly the only animals who regularly perform organ-transplant surgeries and find cures and defanging treatments to deadly diseases and conditions. But, why is this? Why are humans so far advanced? Why did God choose us, and not dolphins or dinosaurs, to be His image bearers? What does it even mean to bear the image of God?
