Providence In The Life Of Steve Hays

"those who honor Me I will honor" (1 Samuel 2:30)

God's providence is the subject of the title of Steve's memoir and a recurring theme within it. I won't repeat everything he says about the topic there. But I want to supplement the memoir with a discussion of providence in Steve's life in contexts the memoir doesn't discuss much, especially his work at Triablogue and the events surrounding the end of his life.

Whether we consider something providential will depend on a lot of background factors that we've discussed in other contexts and that I won't get into here (the existence of God, the characteristics of God, the evidence for Christianity, etc.). And different aspects of providence are going to be evident and evidenced to different degrees. I'm not suggesting that all of what I'll discuss below is of equal significance.

I'll start with some examples of providence related to Steve's life as a whole. I'll then conclude with the events surrounding his death.

Over the past two weeks, on Facebook and here, I've written about Steve's significance in general and to me. You can read the comments section of our obituary post and the tributes from Peter Pike, John Bugay, and Ryan McReynolds for more examples.

I've often recommended the practice of keeping a record of God's providence in your life. Shortly after Steve's death, an instance of providence in my life involving him came to mind, and I decided to look over my records to review other examples involving him and Triablogue. There are many. And I'm just one person, only keeping a partial record of representative examples, and I didn't start keeping that record until at least a few years after meeting Steve.

Think back in time, prior to the beginning of his life, to the time of his older relatives he writes so much about in his memoir. He wrote that, "The faith was all on my mother's side of the family, extending back some distance." (12) He wrote of his maternal grandmother, "She lived by faith, lived by prayer, lived to share her faith–to pass it along to the next generation–like the spreading flame of a candlelight service, candle-by-candle, aisle-by-aisle, until the entire sanctuary is ablaze in aureate light, all from one lone candle in the darkness." (22) His grandmother and those other relatives had no way of knowing what a light Steve would be. How much was he an answer to their prayers and a fulfillment of their hopes? When we think of providence in his life, we should consider how much his life was providential to those who came before him.

For the remainder of this post, though, I want to focus on the events surrounding his death. During the closing months of his life, it was agonizing to read his emails about how unstable and unpredictable his situation was, in a variety of ways. I'll focus on health issues for now. He would go into some detail about how his medications were affecting him, how various parts of his body were weakening, and so forth. His eyesight would diminish in one way or another. But not enough to prevent him from keeping up the work he'd been doing for so many years. His ability to use his hands would get worse, but not enough to prevent him from keeping up with the work. And so on. It's hard to convey the full force of what it was like from my end of things (and Patrick Chan's, etc.) to see the situation develop in that manner. Your mind goes through so many different scenarios in the process of considering how easily so many things could go so wrong.

To keep doing the work Steve was doing, he had to have the relevant mental faculties. As far as we can trace it, he seems to have functioned at a high level mentally at least until the closing week of his life, maybe until death.

He would spend the last weeks of his life in a hospice. I don't know how hospices normally handle computer issues on their end. I don't know how common it would be for a hospice to provide a computer that somebody staying there could use. Patrick was concerned that Steve might be out of contact with us once he went into the hospice. At this point, I should go back in time to discuss some weaknesses Steve had, which turned out to be favorable during those closing weeks of his life.

When he started this blog, Ryan McReynolds wrote in his first post that he was providing a platform for two unnamed friends who previously didn't have a blog, but should. One of those friends was Steve. When he began blogging the following week, his initial post and the ones that followed had some characteristics that would become familiar to many readers in the coming years. On his first day of blogging, Steve decided to post ten times. You notice a lack of links, graphics, and such. Ryan noticed, and he put up a post that began, "Steve, Here's an example of how you can link to other blogs". Steve's next post included such a link, but his later posts revert to the previous lack of links. Maybe Ryan inserted that initial one for him, or maybe he just did it to satisfy Ryan, then went back to his previous pattern. You get the impression that Steve didn't know much about blogging and could easily have never gotten involved in it.

Some of my early memories of him have to do with his ignorance of technical issues. On pages 64 and 75 of his memoir, he refers to the technical help he got from James Anderson and Peter Pike. Others could be added to the list, especially Patrick Chan. I helped Steve with technical issues to some extent in the earliest years I knew him, but most of the work was done by other people as time went on. I remember experiencing a lot of frustration and exasperation, to the point of wondering how he managed to turn his computer on. He refers to the "technical assistance" he received, which is an understatement. Patrick has told me that he tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to convince Steve to get another computer to replace the laptop he was using. In a recent email to Patrick, he referred to "my increasingly obsolete laptop". If Steve described it that way, it must have been really old. He got better with technical issues over time, but it was an ongoing problem. I'm sure that after he died, the hospice found something that vaguely resembled what could be called a laptop, probably powered by a hamster on a wheel.

However, I don't know that he would have been able to have done the work he did in the closing weeks of his life if he hadn't had a laptop to bring with him to the hospice. And it probably was good that it was an older laptop he was more accustomed to rather than a newer one he would have had a harder time using. He probably would have gotten significantly less done at the end of his life if he'd gotten a desktop computer or had a newer laptop. And it's easy to see how his time over the years was better spent on matters other than technical ones.

A lot more could be said about the other circumstances surrounding his death, such as the relational, financial, and living arrangements involved. In the closing weeks of his life, he'd send emails from time to time about the providential nature of what was going on, such as getting things done that needed to be done just before he lost the ability to do them. Patrick helped him a lot in those closing weeks, as he had previously. He was a faithful friend and a providential blessing to Steve for many years.

Steve told me that in March of 2019, he'd been given six months to a year to live. He outlived that prognosis by a few months. He died peacefully in a hospice at about 6:30 A.M. Eastern on June 6, 2020.

The next day, Peter wrote to Patrick and me about an experience he'd had the previous morning, close to the time of Steve's death. Patrick responded by saying that he'd had a significant experience as well, around the same time. I also had a relevant experience around the same time as theirs. All of these experiences happened in the timeframe from a little before 6:30 A.M. Eastern to a little after, as best we can remember. None of our experiences are as significant as something like seeing an apparition or hearing a disembodied voice, but they are of some value.

I'll start with my experience, which is the least substantial of the three. I'll end with Peter's, which is the most significant. Instead of restating what we reported, I'll quote what we wrote close to the time of the events.

Me:

I have patterns of prayer that I follow, some daily and some weekly. I set aside some time to pray about apologetic issues every day, and I've been praying about Steve in that context a lot lately. There's no set time for those prayers, but it was just before 6:30 A.M. Eastern when I got to it yesterday [June 6, 2020], probably something like 6:20 or 6:25. On a typical day or typical Saturday, the time could easily have been further away from 6:30 and normally would be.

Patrick was outside the United States at the time, in a significantly different time zone, so he had already been awake for a while when Steve died:

Around the time Steve died, though I had no idea he had died at the time, I was with my wife and her co-workers. We were at a casual get-together at the apartment of one of my wife's co-workers. There were seven people present: me, my wife, the couple who owned the apartment (wife was a co-worker of my wife's), two other co-workers, and another roommate who didn't join us but stayed in their room.

Everyone was chatting with one another, laughing, sharing stories about work. However, since I didn't know anyone except my wife, and since she was talking to her co-workers, I just sat there quietly, not doing much. At best, I was passively and half-heartedly listening to them talk to one another. I don't remember what I was thinking about exactly, but I did have a lot weighing on me. In fact, I've had a lot weighing on me for quite a while. That included Steve's impending death, which I've known about since Jan 2018, and which I had been emailing with Jason about that same day as well as for the last one or two days earlier, I think.

So I was just sitting there, in a slump, not really engaged with anyone or anything. I was feeling like I've been living a meaningless life. Feeling (sinful) self-pity. Feeling disoriented in life. Sighing inside about vague notions of purposelessness in my life. Feeling a sense of listlessness in life.

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a bright and encouraging idea entered my mind. Like light dispelling darkness. The encouraging idea was that the purpose of my life is I should live the rest of my life for God, especially to spread his gospel, including to my wife's co-workers present in this apartment. That is, the way to overcome meaninglessness and purposelessness is to love God and love others, especially by telling them about Jesus. The idea just hung there in my mind's eye, encouraging me, or something like encouragement, giving me more hope, more brightness, more strength to face the future. Then, a few moments later, the idea was gone, and the room and the people and life and everything else seemed humdrum or mundane again.

Of course, this is hardly a revolutionary idea for the Christian. It's not particularly special or unique for the Christian. It's just basic Christianity. Stock Christianity. Plain, vanilla, ordinary Christianity. So it wasn't the content of the idea that was edifying, per se (though it can sometimes be encouraging to be reminded about old truths from time to time). After all, I know we are commanded to love God and love neighbor, to share the gospel with others, to make disciples of all nations. I know obeying God's commands has the wonderful side effect of giving Christians who obey deep and abiding satisfaction and joy in life. I know all this, but I was still downcast. So I think there must've been something else that encouraged me besides the bare idea or thought itself.

I think what it might have been, that is, what might've been special or extraordinary about this idea or thought, was the way in which it came to encourage me. It was as if this idea that entered my mind came with a kind of gentle strength or power behind it. As if there was some reassuring force behind the thought or idea that the purpose of my life is to love God and others and share the gospel, not merely the naked thought or idea alone, on its own. It was like hearing words I already know, but hearing them from a good coach cheering me on to run the race, saying I could do it, picking me up, buoying my flagging spirits, instilling in me a future and a hope.

Again, I had no idea Steve had passed away during our casual get-together. I only learned about his death after we got home.

All that said, it's possible the whole thing could have just been a trick of the mind. Maybe it was really just me talking to myself and somehow encouraging myself. It also might just be sheer coincidence that this happened to me around the same time Steve died. The whole thing might be explicable on purely naturalistic grounds. I don't know.

Peter:

I almost don't want to mention this because I'm not sure if it even means anything at all, but something weird happened to me yesterday morning. I had a dream which I can't remember the details of, but what I do remember is that I needed to do something urgently. Yet I kept failing at accomplishing whatever it was I needed to do. The instant I began to regret it, however, everything snapped into place and I realized I didn't need to do it after all. It was already taken care of. This cycle repeated four or five times, and then at some level I realized I was actually awake.

I also realized at that point that I wasn't wearing my CPAP mask. I picked up the mask and found out that not only had I not been wearing it, but the machine had been turned off. I can't sleep at all without my CPAP because as soon as I fall asleep I will stop breathing and wake myself back up. I also clearly remember putting the mask on before going to sleep. So that means at some point in the night, at a time I'm not aware of, while sleeping, I took the mask off AND turned off my CPAP.

Now clearly not having my CPAP and suffering from sleep apnea, I can agree that I must not have had enough oxygen in my brain, but for the life of me what it feels like is that I'm missing time. Not in the sense of me being kidnapped by aliens, but in the sense that SOMETHING out of the ordinary happened. Indeed, I've had sleep apnea for almost 20 years now and this has NEVER happened before the night before last.

I hadn't considered it before I went to bed last night, but the approximate time that Patrick gave of Steve's passing would have fit the "missing time" I felt while I had that odd dream. Not only that, but when I had looked at his memoir again that afternoon and saw the pictures in it [which had been added for the final edition], Steve looked very familiar even though I never met him and even though I had never seen a picture of him before that moment. To be precise, seeing his picture didn't make me think, "Oh, that's Steve Hays!" but rather I just got a sense of "I know that guy."

So last night, as I was falling asleep and pondering all that, I began to wonder. What if my dream wasn't really about *me* failing to accomplish a task (a task I still don't remember), but then finding out that it's already taken care of so I don't need to worry about it? What if the feeling of missing time and the familiarity with Steve's picture was because perhaps God had teleported me to give Steve words of encouragement that he didn't have to worry because everything was taken care of? I mean, I don't know if that's even what it was--maybe Steve was giving me encouragement as he departed the earthly plane, and God knows I needed it too. Either way, I've never experienced anything like it and it makes no sense to me.

The weirdest part is that I don't want to accept any of it as having actually happened. I'd rather just say that I must have been in some kind of sleepwalking state, even though I've never sleepwalked before in my entire life, and I must have turned my CPAP completely off and then dreamed what I did, and it was coincidence that it was at roughly the same time that Steve was dying. But saying it was a coincidence...THAT feels like a lie. Maybe instead there's just some kind of thread between people who are friends, and maybe that thread resonates in a strange frequency when it is cut. If so, I would have expected something similar when my mom passed away, given I was far closer to her than I was to Steve. Yet when my mom died, nothing like that happened to me. My aunt said she had a dream that mom had visited her, though, so maybe there is something that happens for people who are close but not too close? I don't know….

I should also add that my CPAP does NOT automatically shut off. In fact, in the past I woke up early because I needed to use the bathroom, so I just removed my mask without turning off my machine. After I used the facilities, I looked at the time and saw my alarm was going to go off in less than 30 minutes, so I decided to stay up. Since I had a small fan running next to my bed I didn't notice the CPAP was still running and I just went about the rest of my day. When I got ready for bed that night I found it was still running. So for my CPAP to be off, I do literally have to hold down the off button until it powers down. That doesn't seem possible for me to do in a sleepwalking state, especially since I have no history of sleepwalking.

It seems likely that a series of paranormal events of a positive nature occurred among the three of us, around the same time, close to Steve's death. All three experiences plausibly have a close connection to Steve. My experience and Peter's directly, explicitly involve Steve. None of that tells us whether God was acting directly in these circumstances or acting in some indirect manner, whether Steve was interacting with us, etc. But some kind of paranormal explanation of what happened seems to make more sense than a normal explanation.

Whatever the significance of those events, Steve has now seen his Savior who died for him and his mother and the other sainted loved ones he refers to in his memoir, having come "to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel." (Hebrews 12:22-24)