A SECOND CHANCE, NOT BY CHANCE Ben Pohl
“W
e’ve got some work to do.” These were the first words Mike Ball heard when he came out of the coma. If they had come from his nurse or doctors, they would have been an understatement. On January 13, 2019, Mike suffered a major heart attack at his home, and was unresponsive for thirty minutes. Finding him shortly after the onset of the heart attack, his wife, Pico, tried to administer CPR, while their son waited at the front door for paramedics. She “tried,” because, at the time Mike was 290 lbs. and incredibly fit. He ran “Mike Ball Fitness” and loved spending time in the gym with his clients. Mike was one of the last people you would imagine being on the floor that night, his life hanging
by a thread. But nearly two weeks later, as he awoke from the coma, the Lord of life spoke to Mike a word of mercy: “We’ve got some work to do.”
“There was a sequence of things that were not just chance. It had to be divine intervention.” In a world charged with the advances and successes of modern science and medicine, we are tempted to consider as factual or relevant only those things that are material or physical, things that are testable by the scientific method. To a secular mind, providence is an antiquated way of understanding the survival of people like Mike who, in their mind are simply “lucky.” But the experience of the Ball’s that night, and in the weeks and months that followed, challenges that assessment. As Mike says, “There was a sequence of things that were not just chance. It had to be divine intervention.” Pico recalls that while doing CPR, desperately trying to save her husband, “Some guy comes running in; the paramedics hadn’t even arrived yet.” Marty, an offduty paramedic with the Lansing Fire Department, happened to be in the area, and responded to the call before any other emergency personnel arrived. When help did arrive, their CPR machine failed. Marty continued to help with chest compressions and was, as Pico puts it, the Ball’s “guardian angel.” Pico vividly recalls the scene, which seemed to reflect our Lord’s Passion: “He was lying in between our bathroom and the hall, and I had this huge mosaic cross that I had bought when my daughter was in sixth grade at Resurrection’s auction...he was basically laying at the foot of the cross.” Later, when he awoke from the coma,
