When the Ground Disappeared

There are numbers that disappear from our memory just minutes after we hear them. A price, a time, a password, some piece of information that seemed important at the moment and then simply fades away.

Others remain.

For me, 58 is one of those numbers.

For many years, it returned to my memory without asking permission. Today, it no longer carries only the fear of that day. It also reminds me of the beginning of a journey that would change the way I saw God, my family, and even myself.

At that moment, however, I was not thinking about any of that.

I only knew that something was very wrong with my son.

But this story did not begin at the hospital.

It began in June 2011, when Philip was born.

When I held my son in my arms for the first time, I began imagining the future without even realizing I was doing it. I think many parents do the same. We look at a child who has just entered the world, and within moments our minds are already years ahead.

I imagined his first steps, his first day of school, the games we would play, the trips we would take, the conversations we would have when he grew older. They were simple dreams, perhaps the same ones millions of parents had dreamed before me.

I looked at Ana. There was no need to say much. Her smile said enough.

Maria, our oldest daughter, welcomed her brother with that mixture of joy and curiosity that comes with a new child joining the family. Little by little, our home took on a new routine, new responsibilities, and a new kind of love.

At that time, I was not carrying great theological questions. My idea of life was much simpler: work, take care of my family, love my wife, be there for my children, and solve problems as they came.

I wanted to watch them grow.

That seemed like enough.

Perhaps there is a kind of distance between knowing that suffering exists and imagining that it might cross the threshold of our own home. We know children get sick. We know there are hospitals, accidents, diagnoses, and losses. We hear other families’ stories, feel sadness for them, perhaps even say a prayer.

But hearing someone else’s story is very different from discovering that now the story is ours.

Philip’s first months were filled with the things that normally occupy the attention of parents with a small child: feeding, sleep, growth, little discoveries. Then, when he was about a year and a half old, an apparently ordinary day began to change.

His breathing became rapid.

At first, we had no reason to imagine anything so serious. Children catch colds, run fevers, get sick, and get better. But his breathing began to worry us. His little chest rose and fell far too quickly, and every movement seemed to require more effort.

We could not explain exactly what was happening.

We only knew it was not normal.

We rushed to the hospital.

When we arrived, everything happened quickly. Medical staff began treating him, equipment was connected, and I tried to follow what they were doing. But no matter how much I looked at everything around me, my eyes always returned to Philip.

I just wanted to see him breathe normally.

In that moment, there was no theology.

There was no philosophy.

There were no complicated questions about God.

There was only a father looking at his son and thinking:

Breathe.

I looked at Ana. We did not need to speak. The fear was already there.

Then I heard the number.

Fifty-eight.

Philip’s oxygen saturation had dropped to 58%.

At that moment, I did not understand all the implications of that number. I did not need to. The way the medical team reacted was enough for me to understand that the situation was serious.

And there I felt something I had never experienced in quite that way.

I couldn’t fix it.

I have always been a man accustomed to working and looking for solutions. When something breaks, I try to fix it. When a problem arises, I think about what can be done. Much of my life has been built that way: a difficulty appears, and I work until I find a way through it.

Perhaps, for many years, that gave me a greater sense of control than I actually had.

In that hospital, however, there was no tool I could pick up.

I was there.

I was his father.

I loved that little boy more than I could ever explain.

But I could not breathe for him.

I would have done anything within my power to protect him, but in that moment I discovered one of the hardest parts of being a father: loving someone deeply does not mean having the power to prevent everything that may happen to them.

I think there is a silent promise we make to our children. We never have to say it out loud, but it is there inside us from the moment they arrive:

I will take care of you.

And we do.

We do everything we can.

But one day, we discover that our arms have limits.

It was in that hospital that I began to learn this.

That would not be our only time in a hospital. From that episode on, asthma became a permanent part of our family’s routine. There were doctor visits, medications, nebulizer treatments, periods of calm, and new attacks. Little by little, we learned things that had never been part of our lives before, and we began noticing signs that, before that first scare, probably would have gone unnoticed.

After you have watched your child struggle to breathe, his breathing no longer seems completely automatic to you.

Something as basic as breathing had become something I paid attention to.

And something I prayed about.

In time, another problem appeared. Mucus began to build up behind Philip’s eardrum, and he started suffering from frequent ear infections. One came after another. After approximately nine infections, the doctor explained that he would need tubes placed in his ears.

Today, I can summarize all of that quickly: there were infections, doctor visits, and then the procedure.

At the time, however, we simply moved through each stage as it came. There were decisions to make, difficult nights, worries, and the responsibility of trying to choose what was best for a child who depended on us.

We wanted to spare him any discomfort, but we also had to accept treatments that could help him.

It was simply life happening.

Only many years later would I realize how much those days were forming questions inside me.

At the time, I was not interested in explaining suffering.

I was busy trying to get through it.

And there was someone going through all of it with us who, for a long time, did not occupy the same space in my memories of that period.

Maria.

When I think about those years, it is natural for my memory to go first to Philip. He was the one who was sick. He was the one struggling to breathe. He was the one who needed the appointments and procedures.

But that story was also unfolding through his sister’s eyes.

Maria noticed our concern. She saw her parents exhausted, watched us leave for the hospital, and waited for news. Perhaps at the time I did not fully understand everything she was going through as well.

Today, I can look back with different eyes.

While I focused almost all my attention on the child who was physically ill, my daughter was also going through that season with us.

Later, this taught me that suffering is rarely confined to just one person. Illness may exist in one body, but its consequences reach through entire relationships.

Philip experienced it in his own body.

Ana experienced it as a mother.

I experienced it as a father.

Maria experienced it as a sister.

And each of us carried it in a different way.

Perhaps because I came to know suffering from that place—not as a scholar, but as a father—I became uncomfortable with explanations that make human pain sound too simple.

From a distance, suffering fits neatly into theories.

Up close, it has a name.

In those days, my prayers were not sophisticated either.

I was not asking why God allows suffering. I was not trying to understand how His sovereignty relates to human fragility. I did not even know how to formulate some of the questions that, years later, would occupy so much space in my journey.

I simply prayed:

“Lord... heal my son.”

That was all.

For a long time, I thought a powerful prayer had to be a well-constructed prayer. I no longer think that way. There are moments when all we can bring before God are a few words accompanied by fear, hope, and an enormous need for Him to hear us.

At that time, that was all I had.

And perhaps it was enough.

Psalm 46 says that God is an “ever-present help in trouble.”

When we are suffering, our eyes naturally go to the word help. We want God to intervene. We want healing, a solution, an open door, an end to whatever is causing the fear.

I wanted that too.

But as the years passed, I began to pay attention to another part of the verse:

“ever-present ... in trouble.”

It does not say that those who trust in God will never know trouble.

It speaks of a God who is present in it.

It took me a long time to understand the importance of that difference.

In that hospital, my faith was not a theological answer. It was where I ran when I realized that my own strength had reached its limit.

That did not eliminate my fear.

I was afraid.

I was still a father.

I was still worried.

I still desperately wanted my son to get better as quickly as possible.

Faith did not make the hospital less real. It did not erase the asthma or make the infections disappear. Nor did it turn me into someone incapable of feeling fear.

It simply gave me somewhere to take that fear.

Perhaps one of the first things that experience began to teach me was precisely this: trusting God and feeling afraid are not necessarily incompatible experiences.

I could believe and still not understand.

I could pray and still be worried.

I could trust God while desperately wishing the situation were different.

At the time, I had no idea how much this would change the way I lived my faith.

The questions came later.

During the crisis, there was no room for them.

When we are in the middle of a storm, we usually do not stop to study the wind. We look for something to hold on to.

When the crises began to subside and life regained some rhythm, I had room to look back.

I returned to work.

Our routine continued.

The days went by.

And little by little, another prayer began to take shape.

I had never stopped believing in God. That is important for understanding everything that came afterward.

My questions were not born because I had decided that God did not exist. Nor were they born from a desire to confront Him or prove that Scripture was wrong.

They were born because I believed.

I believed in God, and I believed in His love.

That was why I wanted to understand Him better.

The question inside me was not:

“Does God exist?”

It was much closer to another:

“God, I know You are here. But I still don’t understand.”

That difference eventually became the doorway into a journey I never imagined I would take.

I began to realize that I had spent a long time thinking faith meant not asking questions. Somewhere inside me, I had learned that a truly trusting Christian should simply accept, remain silent, and move on.

But I could not do that.

Not because I had lost my trust in God.

I wanted to know Him.

And the more important someone becomes to us, the more we want to understand them.

That realization took time to take shape. There was no particular day when I woke up and said, “Now I am going to begin exploring questions about God.”

It was simpler than that.

One question led to another.

A passage in the Bible began to trouble me in a way it never had before.

I returned to passages I thought I already knew.

I began to read more slowly.

Sometimes I closed the Bible without an answer.

And for the first time, I began to accept that this did not necessarily mean there was something wrong with my faith.

I was still learning.

Today, when I return to that number—58—I cannot separate it from any of this.

I still see the fear of that father in the hospital.

I see Ana.

I see Maria.

I see Philip, so small.

And I also see a man discovering that he did not control life the way he thought he did.

But there is one statement I make today with much more caution than I would have a few years ago.

I do not like to say that God needed to make my son sick in order to teach me something.

I do not know that.

And I do not want to attribute to God an explanation He never gave me.

Perhaps at another point in my life, I would have found it easy to look back and organize everything by saying, “God did this in order to produce that.”

Today, I am more cautious.

There are things I simply do not know.

I do not know why that crisis happened the way it did.

I do not know why some families receive a quick answer while others endure pain that lasts for years.

I cannot explain every instance of suffering.

But I can speak about what I experienced.

In that suffering, God was not absent.

That is a different statement.

I do not have to say that I understood the cause in order to recognize His presence.

I do not have to call the pain good in order to say that I found God while walking through it.

I do not have to be thankful for the illness in order to be thankful that I did not have to face it alone.

That may seem like a small difference in words.

For me, it became an enormous difference.

In that hospital room, I thought I was fighting only for my son’s recovery.

Years later, I realized that experience had also revealed something about me: my fragility, my fear, my need to control things, and the depth of the love I felt for my family.

And it also revealed my dependence on God.

The questions did not yet have names.

They would come in their own time.

In the beginning, there was only a father and a prayer:

“Lord... heal my son.”

When the storm began to move away, another prayer appeared.

It did not replace the first.

It grew alongside it.

It was less desperate, but perhaps deeper.

And it was with that prayer that this journey truly began:

“Lord... help me understand.”