Knock Three Times...

I thought I was dying Thursday night. I’m not even joking or exaggerating – I really thought my time had come. And no, it didn’t have anything to do with the post I had written just hours before in which I talked about turning 30 this week. 30 isn’t that old.

What happened was that I had just finished dreaming a boring, yet probably chocked-full-of-Freudian-meaning dream, when I rolled onto my left side and stretched before falling back asleep. I don’t know how much time passed or how far I had drifted back into slumber, but suddenly my heart beat three times so violently that it shook my entire body in intense jolts. I was aware that it was happening, but it wasn’t like I was totally awake. It took a minute to fully come out of the sleep fog. I then found myself in a hyper state of wakefulness, a strange tingling sensation running throughout my body and a seasick nausea rolling in my belly.

After a moment I sat up in bed. I took a moment to try and gather my thoughts around what had just happened before my mind turned to an unexpected connection with the Lord. The night had actually crept into the wee hours of the morning on Good Friday by then, and it suddenly became significant that my heart had pounded so intensely exactly 3 times.
3 times…I thought.
3 nails would violently jolt the body of my Lord by the end of the evening.
3 times…
3 defiant denials would come from the lips of His beloved friend Peter.
3 times...
3 days of darkness would pass before His glorious resurrection brought us life beyond measure.
3 times…

Eventually my husband woke up to find me sitting up in bed and I told him what happened. We talked about it for a while (at which point we both got the song “Knock Three Times” stuck in our heads), then I got up and went to the bathroom. That’s when the thought of dying hit me.

My heart still felt like it was “skipping” beats (and it would feel like that for the rest of the night and well into the morning), and I grew nervous about going back to sleep. What if it happened again? What was this strange sensation I was still feeling? Was it all some kind of warning from my body that I was missing?

I know the tiniest bit enough about the heart issues of other family members to realize that it’s quite possible what I was experiencing was some kind of vagal response. Given our family history, part of me felt like I was very justified in being nervous about going back to sleep. But I realized that it was all up to God whether something happened or not, so I sat in the bathroom and prayed.

I thanked God that if it was the time to go that I had shared a very special day with my kids at the zoo Thursday. I thanked him for the time my husband and I had shared that evening hanging out, watching Lost (it’s an addiction, I know) and just being together. I prayed for some of the people I’d be leaving behind, and admitted that I was a little confused – not feeling like He was quite done with me here, but realizing that evaluation wasn’t up to me. It all sounds quite morbid, I know, but it really wasn’t. I did cry a couple of silent little tears, but I don’t think I was really afraid. It was surreal, really.

Well, I don’t mean to be a end-of-the-story killer, but I think you know what happened. I didn’t die. I did feel quite weird the rest of the night, but alas – I’m still alive!

Who knows what happened that night. I’d like to think no one will ever get the chance to know because it will never happen again for them to study, but that’s not really up to me either. I do know, however, that I had a single, repeating thought all throughout the weekend leading up to Easter: 3 times…

***On a side note: for those of you who were wondering, no I didn’t make it through Lent without complaining. Sadly it proved too difficult for me (yes, I am actually complaining about it). I had a secret backup plan, though, that I was able to stick with. My backup was to not set foot on a scale all of Lent. I had no idea, really, that I did this at least twice a day out of habit. It was a good exercise of will and thought for me. Several friends who knew about it said that I would probably be surprised to find that I lost a ton of weight during that time. I did indeed loose weight. How much? A whopping ½ a pound. Oh well, maybe if my temple tax box wasn’t full of dollar bills (and a 5 or two) that number would be bigger…