MIRACLE A HEARTBEAT AWAY FOR COUPLE
Tomball pastor shares the story of his daughter’s birth in a new book filled with stories of faith and divine intervention
The Rev. Danny Carpenter, pastor of Grace Christian Family Center in Tomball, is a man of strong faith and believes in miracles and divine intervention. On the other hand, he says believers need to guard against glibly ascribing to divine intervention occurrences that happen due to natural causes.
There have been a few incidents that caused Carpenter to wonder about the role God played in them. One of those incidents happened when his wife Sandi, pregnant with the couple’s first child, was injured in a car crash.
Doctors believed that the baby would be stillborn because they could not detect a heartbeat after the crash.
In “Miracles and More: 101 Stories of Miracles, Divine Intervention, Answered Prayers and Messages from Heaven,” a recently published collection of stories of spiritual uplift, Carpenter provided a firstperson account of how two depressed, nerve-racked parents initially were tortured by the prospect of giving birth to a stillborn baby and then later rejoiced when she was born healthy.
“This story serves as inspiration,” said Carpenter, a 68-year-old resident of The Woodlands. “I believe that God is capable of miracles. But I don’t know
that we can expect one to happen when we ask for one.”
“Miracles and More,” a collection put together by Amy Newmark, was published by the Chicken Soup for the Soul publishing house, whose books typically focus on inspirational true stories about ordinary lives.
The Carpenters were living in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall when the car accident happened in 1975.
A pickup truck ran a red light and smashed into the driver’s side door of Sandi Carpenter’s Toyota Celica as she returned to work from lunch. Not wearing a seat belt, she was hurled out of the driver’s seat into the passenger side window, shattering it and leaving glass pieces embedded in her skull and forehead.
As they rushed her to the hospital, ambulance workers tried to stanch the bleeding and pick bits of glass from her skull. Sandi, then 24, kept on repeating that she was pregnant.
She and her husband had spent months painting a room, getting it ready for the baby. They enjoyed swapping prospective names.
At the hospital, the news was not reassuring. The baby, who had been active, was no longer active. Doctors could not detect a heartbeat.
A doctor tried to reassure the couple by telling them that it was not uncommon for a baby’s heartbeat to go undetected after physical trauma.
The next weeks passed uneasily for the Carpenters as they waited for the baby to start kicking. But a doctor still did not detect a heartbeat when Sandi went in for examinations.
A month after the crash, a doctor told the couple that Sandi would deliver a stillborn baby.
Carpenter, then 25, began to prepare for that eventuality. He sought counsel from co-workers about whether a funeral should be held for a stillborn baby. His colleagues shied away from the grim subject.
The couple, who had been so anticipating the arrival of new life, now had nothing to await but the birth of a dead innocent.
On a weekend, Carpenter suggested that he and his wife escape the gloom of the house.
“She didn’t want to go out. She couldn’t fix her hair well because of the head injuries. Still had tiny scars all over one side of her head from the glass pieces,” Carpenter writes in “Miracles and More.”
She eventually agreed to go to a church conference because he felt that they needed spiritual uplift.
As they left the service that night, the couple ran into Carpenter’s childhood pastor. The pastor said he customarily prayed for pregnant women at his church, and the couple did not tell him that the baby would be stillborn.
The pastor placed his hands on Sandi’s stomach. “Let this baby be born in perfect health,” the pastor said. The Carpenters began to cry.
“We thanked him and left. The drive home was quiet,” Carpenter writes. “We undressed and lay down almost without a word. Our sadness was overwhelming. In the middle of the night, Sandi woke up screaming. I lunged out of bed, grabbing the trousers I kept on the chair, aware of the suitcase on the floor. I fumbled for buttons on my shirt while she kept crying, ‘No! No! No!’ Finally she called, ‘Stop!’ I flipped on the lamp. She was sitting up in bed, bawling, with one hand on her tummy. ‘Come!’ she called. ‘Come here!’ I went. She took my hand and placed it on her tummy. The baby was kicking up a storm. Allison would be her name, and she was born in perfect health!”
These days, Allison Reinke of Tomball serves as worship leader at Carpenter’s Grace Christian Family Center, a nondenominational church.
In his “Miracles and More” story, Carpenter said he does not tell readers that he knows a miracle occurred. He knows that it is possible that doctors simply failed to detect Allison’s heartbeat.
“People can interpret the story as they want,” he said. “I simply don’t know what happened. But I believe that God could have revived the heartbeat. I do believe that miraculous things happen every day.”
On the other hand, he said, he knows Christians of strong faith who frequently believe divine intervention has worked in their favor because they have prayed. He said believers should guard against viewing some actions as due to divine intervention that can be explained by natural causes.
After a creek flooded in north Harris County about 15 years ago, a couple told Carpenter that the flooding had stopped inches from their door because they had prayed. Another man’s home some blocks away had flooded because he had not prayed, the first couple said.
Carpenter told the couple that he did not agree. “I said the difference is not faith. It was a difference in 4 feet of elevation.”
Miracles do occur, he said, but if one believes in them, a religious belief system also has to account for what philosophers call the problem of tragedies and evil. In other words, he said, if faith can cause God to intervene and provide good outcomes, why does God allow tragedies to occur to the faithful and to innocents, such as children?
When Christ encounters a group of paralyzed, sick people at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:5-15), he performs a miracle and heals one of them, but not all the paralyzed people, Carpenter said.
Believers can pray and ask for outcomes, but they have to accept whatever outcomes occur. “You have to be big enough to take whatever God gives,” he said. “I still ask God for a lot of things. I don’t get a lot of them.”
Sometimes believers are better off that prayers go unanswered, he said. Carpenter said he prayed and asked God not to allow him to be sent in Vietnam during the war.
But serving in Vietnam, he said, was a good thing for him — his service there formed his character and helped him become a better person.
Sometimes, God provides the best outcome by not answering prayers, he said. Bill Murphy is a writer in Houston.