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From Luke’s Journal March 2026  |  Vol. 31  No. 1  |  God at the Bedside

Our church’s fifteenth anniversary was Sunday, August 4, 2024. I’d been there since the start and had been a pastor for the past seven years. It was meant to be a day of celebration.

As we drove to church, our daughter Junie was nearly six months old and sleeping in her capsule. Serena was driving. Just before 9 am, driving along the Riverside Expressway, I was about to reply to a message, but I couldn’t lift my left arm. “I can’t move my arm.”

“What do you mean? Like you slept on it?”

As I tried to explain, the left side of my face began to fall, my speech slurred, and my left leg went dead. Even at 34 years old, something in me knew the signs. “I think it’s a stroke.”

There was a traffic jam ahead. Serena pulled onto the on-ramp, and we were at the Royal Brisbane Hospital in a few minutes.

We pulled into emergency, and Serena ran in to get help. For some reason, I tried to get out of the car on my own and fell face-first onto the pavement. A minute later, I was on a stretcher, surrounded by doctors. As I was lifted onto another stretcher and eased into the CT scanner, I prayed the first words that came to mind, on repeat, with half my mouth fallen: “I lift my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? It comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” The words of Psalm 121 had always been a comfort to me, but the question posed in it seemed more real than ever.

“I remember thinking: I don’t care if I can never work again. I just want to be able to hold my daughter.”

When they wheeled me back, Serena placed Junie on the bed beside me, and I broke. I couldn’t hold her. I could barely smile. I remember thinking: I don’t care if I can never work again. I just want to be able to hold my daughter. And: If I die right now, Junie won’t remember me. They were live questions.

Although nothing showed up on the CT, considering my age and symptoms, they were sure that I had a clotting stroke and not a hemorrhagic stroke. They asked me to sign a form to administer thrombolysis.

“I just have to tell you that there’s a two percent chance that this will make you get worse, and there’s a one percent chance that you’ll die, but considering your symptoms, we think that this is absolutely your best chance.”

Half an hour previously, I had been changing songs on Spotify. Now, with the left side of my body completely paralysed, with my wife and six-month-old daughter by my side, I was signing a form with the consideration of death on the table. I signed it. They administered the lysis, and we waited.

“The MRI confirmed a lacunar infarct in my basal ganglia. None of those words meant anything at the time, but now each is laced with explanatory power and significance.”

The MRI confirmed a lacunar infarct in my basal ganglia. None of those words meant anything at the time, but now each is laced with explanatory power and significance. The blood clot was in the centre of my brain, in the tiny communication hub between the left and right sides – the fragile space that holds everything together.

We sat, waiting for the thrombolysis to loosen the clot. I remember in those hours, as absurd as it seems now, going into my Google Drive and giving Serena access to the novel I’d been writing. It was called Maple Diction, and it was about a father writing a letter to his infant daughter, because he was afraid that he might not be alive for much longer.

I felt two things in that moment: I wanted to make sure that Junie could read it one day, and I felt sure that, if I could ever write again, that this moment was a line in the sand. Everything I’d written was the first half of the story, and the book would start again from there.

It took about eight hours for me to feel any movement in my left side. First, I could swing my leg from the thigh; then, I could twitch my thumb. After a long and sleepless night in the neurology ward, little electric jolts began to travel down my arm and leg, and muscles came back online. By morning, without even standing yet, I knew I could walk again.

Telling the Story

There’s a power in hearing other people’s stroke stories. Not because they’re the same –they never are – but because they help us orient ourselves. They remind us that what feels singular and isolating might still be shared.

After having Junie, I was struck by how many mothers (and women hoping to become mothers) have said to me, “I love hearing birth stories, because every one is different.” It isn’t just variety that draws them in. These stories echo our own. They help us knit our experience into something larger. They help us feel understood, known, and located.

“…grief must always be expressed – if not through our words, then it will always boil over in other areas of our lives.”

The writer Meghan O’Rourke describes chronic illness as “camouflaged grief.” ¹ When what has happened to us is invisible, when it isn’t immediately legible on our bodies, we’re forced to carry the grief inside us. Strokes leave scars on the brain, the heart, and the soul that can remain unseen even to the person who carries them. But they still ask to be spoken to, because grief must always be expressed – if not through our words, then it will boil over in other areas of our lives.

I spent six days in the hospital. A few days after the stroke, almost all the damage of the stroke was invisible. I went from health to paralysis to walking again in less than a day. But I know that it will take me years to process what happened that day.

On my first night home, I insisted on bathing Junie again. Sitting beside Serena as she fed her to sleep, the week finally caught up with us. We cried tears of grief, but also of gratitude.

Six weeks after the stroke, I cracked. I was trying to push myself, to do the kinds of things we used to do. Serena and I were meant to meet friends for lunch. Halfway there, my body told me I couldn’t go. Speaking required intense focus. My left arm felt leaden. My leg felt dense. I started crying uncontrollably. It wasn’t really about lunch. It was about powerlessness. About the fear beneath it all: that my brain will recover when it recovers, that my life will crawl toward equilibrium when it decides to, and that there may be scars I will never fully locate.

“The lingering beast of stroke recovery, and the word that never seems to quite capture the experience is fatigue.”

The lingering beast of stroke recovery and the word that never seems to quite capture the experience is fatigue. I used to work long days and get home and collapse. But this was something else altogether.

For me, it’s always the same progression. First, I notice that my left arm feels like it’s made of lead. Then, if I keep pushing, it becomes like a hand is trying to pull down the force-shutdown lever on my brain. When that happens, it’s as though gravity has doubled. My left side feels doubly heavy, and it’s a battle to keep moving. I’m having to realise that my battery has been replaced. I used to have a new battery – fast-charging and able to hold its charge. But it’s been swapped with an old battery from the back of the cupboard – one that takes a long time to charge and drains very quickly. That’s what my life is like now.

“I’m not sure if this body is my home, and I’m not sure if it ever was my home.” Maple Diction

Just like I knew that I could walk before I stood up for those first few months, I knew that I couldn’t write. I could write words. I’d jot down phrases, sentences, poems. But I knew that I couldn’t write my book.

“These words are my refuge… they’re an affirmation to myself that there is humanity in me and beyond me, and it can still find coherence.” Maple Diction.

After a few months, though, I returned to the book, and it became a powerful voice in my recovery. The line in the sand meant that I had freedom of narrative. I had to complete the story – I gave myself permission to write whatever I needed. It helped me to articulate my griefs and my fears, and my place within a larger story.

About a year after the stroke, I gave a sermon where I reflected on the stroke. The passage was Ecclesiastes 3, a meditation on the seasons of life, and it was verse 15 that struck me: “That which is, already has been that which is to be, already has been, and God seeks what has been driven away.” The hope of the Christian story is not that our past will be erased, but that it will be gathered. As James K. A. Smith put it, “Jesus’ redemption gathers up the broken fragments and makes something of them. The God who saves us is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: He creates a work of art in which that history is reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. God’s grace goes back to fetch our pasts for the sake of the future.”²

Every loss, every deficit, every lunch you couldn’t make, every cell that’s died in the stroke. There’s hope for those broken fragments to be gathered up into a new thing, into a whole, into a greater story.

Or, as the father in Maple Diction writes:

“A part of my brain has permanently died, and another area has taken over its function. That much is true. But even that seems absurd, that we’re capable of such things. The new brain tissue knows its role, and what’s dead can become alive again – what’s dark can find its way back into the light. That’s my great hope.”

The Great Hope

Even within that small dead space in my brain, something astonishing has taken place – another area has taken over its function. The new tissue has learned its role, and muscles have come back online. What was dark has found its way back into the light. “Redemption does not sweep away the past; Christ’s redemption gathers up the broken fragments and makes something of them.”³ That doesn’t mean God will sweep over the loss. But the hope of the Christian story is not that our past will be erased, but that it will be gathered.

The cells that have died, the things I haven’t done, the nights I couldn’t hold Junie; God seeks what has been driven away. God has done a work, and is doing a work, and will do a work in the resurrection that will wash back over history and breathe new life into it.

Jesus’ resurrection washes back over history, such that one day, God will seek out every one of those moments and give them hope.

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1. P. O’Rourke M. The invisible kingdom: Reimagining chronic illness. New York (NY): Riverhead Books; 2022. (1, p. 266)
   
2. Smith JKA. How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now. Grand Rapids (MI): Brazos Press; 2022. (1, p. 63)
   
3. Ibid.