Christians can be blasé about the wonderful things they see in
the lives of family or friends, and especially that they hear about from fellow believers who are moved to give testimony of the goodness of God. What follows is such an account from an American family who adopted a Chinese son. For
the sake of privacy, the boy’s name has been changed to Elijah.
I do not know the family, but they have been vouched for by
those whose judgement I trust. The father wrote in early March:
My six-year-old son Elijah was born mostly blind, afflicted with microphthalmia and congenital cataracts which in turn led to other issues, among them amblyopia and nystagmus. The conditions would have been treated almost immediately after birth here in the United States: in China, for a mother in desperate circumstances — which she must have been — there were no such options. My son was abandoned in a public place as an infant, and eventually found his way to his orphanage, and received no treatment whatsoever for his vision during the most critical early months of his life.
Several weeks before I met him for the first time I received a courtesy call from China: as the prospective adoptive father for [Chinese name], age 21 months, would I object to a local Ningbo medical clinic performing cataract-removal surgery tomorrow? Of course not, I replied. Please proceed. I felt confident in the decision. I have some familiarity with international health and medicine, and I knew that cataract-removal surgery is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world. It’s the sort of thing you can trust a small Zhejiang clinic to do right, even in a child.
I informed my wife, almost as an aside — it was late evening in Houston, early morning in Ningbo — and she said okay. Then she called me back. She was filled with a sense of dread. She was possessed with a conviction that this surgery must not happen. I had to call China back immediately. I had to stop them.
Responding with the gentle understanding that makes marital life with men from my family an exercise in premature aging, I ticked through all the reasons she was being preposterous. The surgery made sense. It is exceptionally common. Zhejiang is a cut above most of China in medical care. The chances for harm are small anyway: the boy is probably almost totally blind no matter what. Reason says do it. Plus, I have no idea how to track down these people in China now.
She listened, and then said: Stop it. Stop it now.
Frustrated and tired at this stage in the evening, I told her I’d think about it. I indulged my frustration for a little while, and then decided that it wasn’t worth the domestic squabble. The child would be blind anyway. The surgery can wait. I’ll make the effort, which won’t work, and then I can say I tried.
Mostly my ego was bruised at the emphatic rejection of what I thought was my knowledge and insight.
I called the adoption agency’s man in China. He picked up the phone and, across a bad connection, I explained to him that he had to track down this orphanage and stop this surgery that was happening in — oh, maybe thirty minutes? I will try, he said, but I don’t think I can. I hung up.
About an hour later he called back. They were bundling the child up to go to the clinic when he reached them, he said. They were annoyed, but they complied. There was no surgery. Thanks, I said, and I thought that was the end of it.
A couple months later, I met him at the orphanage in Ningbo — May 12th, 2016, possibly the most wonderful day of my life — and watched him feel his way along the floor, and thought I was right about that surgery.
Six months after that, I saw him again, on the date of formal adoption, and I thought again that we still should have done that surgery. But in a truly heroic act, I kept it to myself.
Three months after that, after a series of exams and scans of his afflicted eyes — now in the United States — we learned that the peculiarity of his cataracts and the scarring within his eyes meant that had that surgery gone forward, his retinas would probably have been pulled off and he would have been plunged into darkness forever.
It stopped me short. My complacent assurance would have doomed him for his entire life. My wife’s passionate conviction, so unusual in its context, arising ex nihilo as it were, was the antidote — as was my (candidly) very uncharacteristic decision to acquiesce to it. My little boy was saved from a maiming and blinding by mere minutes.
I still think it was Divine intervention, and I thank God my wife had the sense to listen to the abrupt conviction that seized her then.
This morning Elijah went to the eye surgeon for a periodic check-in. He’ll have surgery for the amblyopia this summer. The first time this surgeon saw him, four years ago, she estimated his vision at perhaps in the 20/600 to 20/800 range: shapes and colors and shadows and nothing more for him.
This morning his distance vision tests out at 20/100 to 20/150. His near vision is 20/30.
Someone watches out for this little boy, and we are just the instruments. My son, my miracle, my Elijah.
But there is more in the brief history of this adopted
child. A friend of the family gave them an icon of St Paraskevi, a second
century Greek Christian who was born in Rome. She is considered to be a healer
of the blind, because of a miracle she prompted in restoring the sight of Emperor
Antonius Pius, who had been torturing her because of her faith. An account of her life can be read here.
Elijah’s father provides more details of what seems to be miraculous
care for the boy. He writes:
Elijah came home with us in early December 2016, and we got him examined, with the surgeon and an MRI, in January. The examination results were grim: lots of scarring (likely from in-utero infection), and what’s known as persistent fetal vasculature (PFV) in both eyes. (This is where we learned that the China-side cataract removals would have likely pulled off the retinas.) The PFV is usually a consequence of the eyes’ failure to develop in the womb: they start to form, and then basically stop, meaning the network of blood vessels that normally dissolve into the vitreous fluid within the eyes, don’t. We got those results back, and it basically meant that any future intervention would be marginal at best: even with cataract removal, the PFV inside the eyes would permanently block vision. You can’t go in and clean those out.
A week or so after this happened, a good friend of ours — [a priest] — called to let us know he was in [our city]. That was a nice surprise. Even more surprising was that he had relics of St Paraskevi with him. I forget why he had them, [and] he offered to come over and bless Elijah with the relics. So I said of course, and he came over and did just that. Elijah was only two years old then, so he squirmed about a bit while it happened, and that was it. Then we had a nice chat, and caught up, and I thought no more of it.
Maybe a month or so after that, we had to go get another MRI — or maybe it was an exam under sedation, I’ll have to ask my wife — because the retinal surgeon wanted it. So we did. And guess what: the PFV was gone.
Gone, gone, gone.
This changed everything for Elijah. Now we could start planning for what we actually ended up doing later in the autumn: have surgery to remove his cataracts and give him artificial lenses, which is what he sees with today. About a month later, I took Elijah to the monastery of St Paraskevi [in] central Texas to give thanks.
So that was the big miracle as far as I’m concerned. What’s really interesting, by the bye, is how utterly unfazed the physicians were by the change. I was totally astonished and amazed, and they weren’t. (I didn’t tell them about the holy relics.) To them, it was simply a matter of conflicting inputs, with the latest one invalidating the earlier one. I suppose I should allow that possibility: that the PFV was never there, and that it was a bad scan at the outset, and that I am imputing a miracle where there is only ordinary processes. But I don’t think I am: PFV is, well, not subtle.
Two thoughts on this that have occurred to me as we’ve watched this happen:
First, there is nothing — nothing — about me or my wife that suggests a holiness in family life or personal devotion that would suggest the sort of people who may simply expect saintly intercession.
Second, I have to admit that I never quite believed saints like St Paraskevi really existed. […] Surely we can’t be expected to believe that a young Roman woman of no social standing once proclaimed her faith, and performed miracles, before the Emperor Antonius Pius? I was very much taken with modernist standards of proof. Then I was given an entirely different standard of proof: that a once-young Roman woman interceded before God for my little boy.
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