I Was Dead, But God

“I just spoke to his body and told it to come to life -- I didn't realize at the time that, that was the first breath he took.”    

Ana Hankins and her husband Anthony had just arrived at a high school gym in Westminster, California for their son Macaiah’s basketball tournament. Moments later, everything came to a halt. “There was a tournament director who came in and he stopped all of the games; he said that there was, there was someone's son or child passed out”, says Anthony. His wife Ana said she immediate knew it was their 12-year-old son, Yoshua.

Yoshua was their 12-year-old son who’d gone back to the car for a snack. A police officer pointed them toward the school’s entrance where they found their son surrounded by a crowd of people, and paramedics administering CPR. Luke Perkowski was one of the paramedics on the scene. They estimated Yoshua had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. He says, “we found a boy on the ground; He is unconscious. He has no pulse, and he is not breathing, so we considered that a cardiac arrest. So technically you could say he was dead for that amount of time. You don't typically have a high expectation that they're going to make it through.”

When Anthony and Ana Hankins arrived, Anthony kneeled by his son’s side, holding his head as he prayed. “I just spoke to his body and told it to come to life. I commanded Yoshua to live and told him that he would live and not die and declare the works of the Lord. I spoke life to his body and commanded his spirit to come alive. “I didn't realize at the time that, that was the first breath he took.”

Once they got a pulse, they rushed Yoshua to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Yoshua was put on life support and into a medically induced coma. They discovered he had Cardiomyopathy, a heart disorder that was restricting blood flow and requiring surgery. Because Yoshua had been without oxygen or a heartbeat for an extended time, doctors were concerned about permanent brain damage...if he lived. The Hankins refused to accept the prognoses. Yoshua was put on life support and into a medically induced coma. They discovered he had Cardiomyopathy, a heart disorder that was restricting blood flow and requiring surgery.

Between the Hankins church, friends, and Ana’s family in Colombia, South America, thousands of people prayed and fasted over the coming days. It had been almost a week since Yoshua’s collapse when doctors performed the surgery. While it corrected the problem, they wouldn’t know if there was brain damage until they brought him out of sedation, which they did soon after surgery.  The prayers continued.  

Thankfully in rehab, Yoshua slowly improved physically, and cognitively. He doesn’t remember much about his ordeal, but there was one thing that stuck with him ---- he says, ““when I look back on my story, I feel like I feel mostly joyful because I'm alive and I, and I began to understand that God wasn't finished, he wasn't finished with the job that he started in me. So I'm gonna pursue it till the day of Christ.”