That night Deborah continued praying over Chad in silence. She heard God say to her, “Lift your praises to Me.” So she did. “You are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I praise You, God.” As long as she praised the Lord, Chad’s vital signs were stable—his blood pressure remained normal, his heart rate steady. When she grew weary she was startled back to wakefulness by the monitor’s warning beeps. She felt like Moses during the battle with the Amalekites described in Exodus 17. At God’s direction, Moses stood on a hill overlooking the battle. As long as Moses held up his hands as he watched the battle, the Israelites prevailed. But when his hands dropped, the Amalekites began winning. Aaron and Hur finally helped him keep his arms up and the Israelites won the day. But Deborah didn’t have her Aaron and Hur. I tried my best to support her, as did Christian, but we fell asleep sometime after midnight. Deborah prayed until three thirty when she felt if she could only close her eyes for a moment, she could begin again. But then sleep overcame her as well.
This experience taught her of God’s power—how the fight was going on in the heavenlies. She believes that Chad was fighting, too, and, as we subsequently were to learn, he made a final choice.
The next morning dawned with a bright blue sky—November 1, All Saints’ Day. I felt tired and beat-up from the long night but cheered by the start of a new day. I stood at the window, and off in the distance I saw a small dark cloud in the middle of bright blue sky. There were no other clouds in the sky. But this black cloud was coming straight toward us. I saw thunderbolts shooting out of it. I motioned to Deborah to come stand beside me, saying, “You’re not going to believe this.” There were scores of blackbirds in the trees below us. And that cloud kept coming.
I immediately thought, as did she, Not today, Lord, not today. We were afraid that the black cloud with its thunderbolts was God in his Shechinah glory coming to take Chad to heaven. I kept thinking, I don’t want this to be the day. This isn’t You, Lord, is it? Not today. I need him.
I went to Chad’s bedside and sat with him, but all the time I was watching that cloud come closer. The closer it came, the more Chad’s breathing slowed down. More quickly than I expected, the cloud was right over the building, lightning glazed the windows, thunder shook the building, and rain poured down. Chad’s heart rate dropped. He struggled for another breath or two, his chest heaving upward.
Not today! Not now! I really need this child. He’s got a brother who needs him. He has a call on his life. I need him.
He took his last breath—the monitor’s beeper went off. The heart monitor’s line went flat and stayed that way.
“I Will Run to You, God”
I was so far into grief that Deborah’s reaction could not have been more astonishing. “Do you feel the peace?” she asked.
“No, I don’t feel the peace,” I said, angry.
Deborah was walking around the room.
“I feel it,” Christian said. “It’s so nice. It’s unbelievable.”
All I could do was pray, “God, I’ve done everything You’ve asked of me. Give me back my son! My heart is breaking!”
There was only silence and Chad’s lifeless body in my arms.
I knew I had a decision to make, right then, at my son’s deathbed. “I don’t understand what’s happened,” I told God. “Either I’ll run to You now and give You absolutely everything in my life from this moment on or I’m going to abandon You, as I feel abandoned. I’m mad and I don’t like You anymore. What should I do? What can I do?”
I realized then that during those four years I had experienced too much of God to abandon Him; I knew too much of His reality, even if I could not fathom His purpose in allowing Chad’s death.
“I will run to You, God,” I declared. “For the rest of my life, with all my heart, mind, and soul. But if I run to You, Lord, I want a million souls for Your kingdom in exchange for my son. I plant the martyr’s seed, Lord, because he has been martyred by evil and disease.”
I laid Chad back in bed. Deborah arranged his body under the covers and tucked him in. I told Deborah, “I’ve made my decision. I will follow the Lord. But it says in my Bible that we can pray to raise the dead, in Jesus’ name. I would like for us to pray together for Chad to be raised. I’ve already made my decision to choose obedience, whatever God decides to do. But I want to act on what God allows us to do.”
We had a bottle of anointing oil, and Deborah, Christian, and I anointed Chad’s body for the next hour and a half, crying out to God. “Bring him back, Jesus. Raise him up from the dead, Lord. You are a great and almighty God. You can do this.” As we anointed Chad, I realized the truth of what the Scriptures teach—we are but clay. Chad’s flesh no longer had the resilience of life; everywhere I touched him his flesh showed the marks. Deborah shut his lips and they stayed closed, like clay, dust.
After all of our prayers, I said, “It’s done. Let’s go home.”
The next day during her prayer time Deborah was given a message from God: “Remember Stephen.” She didn’t know what this meant. Later, as we thought about it, we realized that Stephen was the first martyr and that his death and the threat of further persecution caused many of the new Christians to leave Jerusalem and spread the gospel across the Mediterranean world. Was this a promise that my son’s death would be honored with the one million souls for which I had asked?
CHAPTER 10
Home-Going
Chad’s funeral took place at the Royal Poinciana Chapel in Palm Beach. After the battle we had been through, I did not want a minister to conduct the service—someone who would speak with us for a half hour and then devise a well-meaning but superficial service. We decided upon a “home-going service,” as we called it. We were grieving and grief cannot and should not be denied. At the same time, Chad’s struggle had shown us God’s power and God’s glory, and we wanted people to understand the true character of God as the One who brings life—not death. “Let’s have a victory message in this,” I said. “Let’s win the Island of Palm Beach to Christ!”
I knew that out of respect for our family many people would come. I did not expect the church to be packed to overflowing.
In the end, we did have a minister officiate—Deborah’s brother, Pastor Don Newell. I spoke as well. What people remembered most, though, were Deborah’s remarks.
She began by saying, “I want to first thank everyone for all your prayers, love, and support. I want you to know that your prayers did not go unanswered.”
Didn’t they? I imagine many at the funeral or those reading this would take Deborah’s words as merely the pious sentiment of a mother desperately trying to compensate for her loss. We do not believe it when people say things like this, but we allow them their comfort. Chad died. He was not healed of leukemia as so many had prayed.
But such a “realistic” view is real only if we think in terms of our natural desires and the time given to us, not God’s will and eternity. Deborah recounted several of the remissions Chad had been blessed with through prayer and medicine. Then she spoke of Chad’s passing, and through her prayerful intuition she saw, prophetically and through faith, a greater reality than we wanted to envision and one that we later had even more reason to embrace. She spoke of the night when the words of Scripture flowed from her like a river and Chad came back to life before our eyes. Then she said: “We had Christian nurses and a respiratory therapist rejoicing, because they had never seen anything like this before. But there was something different now. Chad had seen heaven and felt the Father’s love. Jesus had embraced him, and Chad knew the overwhelming love of his Savior.”
She then spoke of Chad’s passing—the peace both Christian and she felt and yet her desire to keep Chad with us. “Chad,” she had said that day, “I know you’re standing with Jesus. We can feel it. But I’m going to ask God to bring you back again.” But Chad had had enough, as Deborah recounted. He wanted to stay in paradise with Jesus.
“I believe Chad was healed when he entered hea
ven,” Deborah said. “His prayers and our prayers were answered. Hebrews 13:8 says, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.’ In Revelation 21 [v. 4] we read: ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’—Chad’s eyes—‘and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’ [KJV]. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.”
Comforts
After the service, we learned that Chad must have been watching over the banisters of heaven, smiling with approval as people came into the kingdom as a direct result of his life and death. One was a lifeguard. We had lifeguards from our club as ushers, because they were always watching over Chad and Christian. Lifeguarding in Palm Beach is a career—this man was still fit and trim but in his sixties. After the service, he stopped a friend of ours and said, “I’ve never experienced anything like this before.” He told us subsequently that he had accepted Christ as Savior.
The next day, the father of a family well known in Palm Beach society called a friend of ours. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “We just want you to tell the Crandalls that Chad did not die in vain. After that service, my wife and I were up all night crying, and we recommitted our lives to Christ. They need to know that!”
A Jewish woman took one of Deborah’s friends aside and asked her, “How did she do that? How did she get up there and speak of her son without crying?”
Deborah’s friend said, “Because she knows her God. She has a personal relationship with Christ, and that’s how she was able to do it.”
The next week another woman stopped Deborah on the bike trail and asked, “Will you teach me the Bible? You have something I don’t have, and I need to learn about it from you.”
Such requests were multiplied many times over, and now Deborah, despite her shyness, is leading a booming Bible study. God equips those He calls.
A Message in the Sky
We had a natural need for comfort, though, too. While God has assured our ultimate victory over death in Jesus, God doesn’t demand that we deny our suffering. Jesus came in the flesh and suffered Himself—that’s the meaning of the Cross. Through the Cross He asks us not to run away from Him but to run to Him in our grief and fear. He asks us to unite our suffering with His—or as the apostle Paul wrote, to “fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col.1:24). Paul even went so far as to say, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10).
God comforted us in our grief in remarkable ways, two of which stand out. One of the most painful experiences is that the person whose loss is being grieved is no longer there to communicate with. Deborah and I longed for just one more opportunity to embrace Chad and tell him we loved him. We wondered if he would know anything of our lives in the future—whether on the day we went to heaven Chad would recognize us as his parents. Deborah read the wonderful book Heaven by Randy Alcorn. Alcorn cites the passage from Revelation in which the martyrs in heaven ask the Lord when God will avenge their blood. The writer asks the question, “If the martyrs understand that their deaths have not been made right, what more do they know of earthly events?” Many Christians believe that the company of heaven—that “great cloud of witnesses”—not only witnesses to God’s glory but also witnesses human history, including the lives of those with whom they were close.
One night as Deborah, Christian, and I were walking on the bike trail with the dogs, Deborah stopped in the middle of the trail, raised her hands to heaven, and prayed aloud, “Oh, God, is Chad still aware of us down here?” I was trying to get in as much exercise as possible and had walked ahead, but Christian was standing by his mother’s side. Deborah looked into the sky to her right and saw YES in the cloudlike letters a skywriter would make.
She asked Christian if he saw what she saw.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Did you hear—”
“Yeah, I heard what you prayed. That’s amazing!”
“But where’s the skywriter?”
A private pilot carried on a ministry of skywriting in the Palm Beach area. Many days as Christian and Chad would be playing tennis or swimming at the club, we’d look up and see “God loves you” or “Jesus loves you” written by this pilot. But on that day they could not see the plane or hear it.
“Where’s the skywriter, Christian?”
“I don’t know, but Mom, it says Yes!”
Deborah and Christian called to me to come running, which I did. But by the time I reached them and looked where they were pointing, I couldn’t see anything. The letters had come and gone.
This remained a huge comfort to Deborah. She confesses to being “the type who needs a billboard sometimes,” as we all do, and it was as if God had answered her prayer with a billboard in the sky.
I had my own confirmation of Chad’s presence with the Lord. During our time at M. D. Anderson, we often attended Lakewood Church, where Joel Osteen is pastor. One of their associate ministers, Steve, came to pray with us regularly, relieving the spiritual loneliness we felt at first. A year later, I was invited to a Houston TV station to tape a segment about Jeff Markin being raised from the dead. I pulled my car into a parking space and immediately another car pulled in next to me. It was Steve.
Steve was so glad to see me, he said. He had to tell me something! Steve’s mother, an elderly woman in her eighties, had a powerful ministry of intercessory prayer. At Steve’s urging, she had been in prayer for Chad during the final weeks of his illness. Steve had been in the hospital the day of Chad’s passing. He hadn’t come into the room that day, but he had heard of Chad’s passing.
Later that day, his mother called him. She had seen a vision of Chad, dressed in white sports clothes—like a tennis player—sitting on a mountain overlook, on a smooth round boulder. Although she did not know this, the Crandall family often went hiking in the Virginia mountains. The locale and Chad’s attire provided details about his life that she probably had no way of knowing, which added credence to her vision. Steve’s mother said, “I saw the boy you’ve been praying for. He was talking with the Lord. The Lord asked him what he wanted to do. Did he want to come home with the Lord or go back?” In her vision, Chad was at peace, full of joy. The Lord told him it was his choice. If he wanted to resume his life, he could, or he could come to paradise with God. The mother told Steve, “Chad said he wanted to go with the Lord.”
Steve said, “Mom, you don’t know this, but Chad just left. He’s with the Lord now.”
She said, “Oh, son, I’ve been praying so hard for him.” Evidently, Steve’s mother received this vision a few hours before Chad died.
Our Share in the Cross
As I thought over the next weeks and months about losing Chad, I realized that Deborah, Christian, and I were the ones still suffering from his loss. Chad was with the Lord. He was in glory, happy. He wasn’t feeling the terrible pain anymore. I became grateful, in a sense, for the ultimate healing that God had brought about in Chad’s life through his death. The Scriptures tell us: “No matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God” (2 Cor. 1:20).
I’m also beginning to realize that through Chad’s death, Christ gave the Crandall family a share in Christ’s cross. An opportunity to join our suffering to Christ’s for the conversion of souls and the life of the world. When people ask me now why God should be using us as He is, I come back to that fundamental decision I made at Chad’s deathbed: to run to God instead of away from Him. To accept the cross of Christ as part of my reality. “With his stripes we are healed,” the Scriptures tell us (Isa. 53:5 KJV). And 1 Peter 4:12–19 says we are privileged to share in Christ’s suffering.
The Cross is a gift that nobody really wants. It’s the gift that people almo
st always turn away from, choosing to curse God rather than submit to God’s will. Even Jesus Himself sweated drops of blood contemplating the agony of His coming death. But Christ’s willingness to die—and our willingness to die with Him—is the source of resurrection power. I believe that God began blessing me as He never had before, because in my own hour of feeling abandoned by God, in that moment when I came as near as I could to understanding what Jesus felt when He cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), I claimed God as my God.
From that moment on I knew that my life in the flesh—in terms of most worldly desires, at least—was over. I was here for only one reason: to serve our almighty God and Lord, Jesus Christ.
In return God seemed to say to me: “Now I’m going to use you. You’ve been broken, and yet you haven’t turned from Me; you’ve turned to Me. Now I will use you to advance the kingdom of God.”
Shortly afterward—and I can only describe it this way—the heavens opened.
CHAPTER 11
The Heavens Open
After Chad passed, our friends the Hunters asked me to speak at a healing service at Victory Christian Center Church in the north Houston suburb of Kingwood. I had presented papers at medical conferences but otherwise had never done much public speaking. I spoke at the church about how I had run after God for the past four years and the works of healing I had seen in Mexico and elsewhere.
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