Martin Pistorius was just 12 years old when a mysterious illness began slowly robbing him of his ability to walk, talk, or communicate on any level. Finally, he descended into a vegetative state that left the doctors baffled and his family despairing. His parents were told to “take their son home because his time left was limited.” But his time wasn’t limited. “Martin just kept going, just kept going,” said his mother.
The first two years, Martin was indeed in a coma-like condition, motionless, unresponsive, and utterly unconscious. But some two years into his ordeal, his mind began to wake up. Unfortunately, his mind was the only thing that began to awaken. Martin was soon fully conscious, but unable to communicate with the outside world. No one, not even his closest caretakers or doctors knew that he could hear and see everything going on around him.
Martin felt trapped, claustrophobic, terrified, and felt that he would surely go insane. His lowest moment came when he heard his mother say, “I hope you die.” So full of despair, she later (unsuccessfully) attempted to take her own life. As for his father, “For the next decade, his father's life consisted of getting up early in the morning, driving his helpless son to a special care center, then picking him up eight hours later and driving him home, where he would be bathed, fed and put to bed,” reports the UK DAILY MAIL.
But Martin remained trapped in a frozen body. “‘I knew who I was and where I was, and understood I’d been robbed of a real life.”
Suddenly, after more than a decade of imprisonment within his own body, Martin began to once again feel his members. Slowly and painstakingly, movement followed, and then came rigorous rehabilitation. In his late 20s, he learned to use a computer to speak. Soon after, he got a government job. Then he graduated from college with a degree in computer science, started his own web design company and married his wife Joanna in 2008.
“Martin Pistorious' story may sound far-fetched,” reports Snopes.com, “but The National Institute of Neurological Orders and Stroke states ‘locked-in syndrome’ is in fact a real disorder:
Locked-in syndrome is a rare neurological disorder characterized by complete paralysis of voluntary muscles in all parts of the body except for those that control eye movement. It may result from traumatic brain injury, diseases of the circulatory system, diseases that destroy the myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells, or medication overdose. Individuals with locked-in syndrome are conscious and can think and reason, but are unable to speak or move. The disorder leaves individuals completely mute and paralyzed. Communication may be possible with blinking eye movements.
Martin’s amazing and unbelievable story is once again in the news thanks to a recent book THE GHOST BOY and a new NPR radio show Invisibilia which featured Martin’s story in its first episode January 9, 2015.
It's hard to imagine the claustrophobic fear, or the hopeless bondage of being "locked-in" one's own body, unable to walk, talk or communicate with the outside world. Sadly, there is an even more fearful bondage, one that is far more common. It's the vegetative state suffered by every person who is cut off from God by sin. Though robbed of real life, they do not live without hope. For in Christ, even those who are "dead in transgressions and sins" can find newness of life (Ephesians 2:1).
In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope" (Ephesians 2:12, NLT).
"But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved" (Ephesians 2:4-5).
"Sometimes," reports entertainment correspondent Megan Basham of WORLD Magazine, "it’s worth covering a television series or film not because it offers an edifying or even innocuous way to spend an hour, but because it reveals something noteworthy about the mindset of our culture. The Leftovers, a new supernatural drama on HBO," she says, "is just such a show."
The show follows the lives of citizens of a small town as they try to come to grips following a "rapture-like event" which caused some two percent of the world's population to simply disappear, "and depicts with uncomfortable authenticity the psychological toll it would take on a society to have demonstrable evidence that they’ve been left behind."
The Leftovers doesn't claim to be a biblical depiction of events. It does not claim to know or even purport that God was necessarily the one responsible for the "departure" of the missing. What it concerns itself with is the burden, the abandonment, the loneliness and despair of those who didn't "depart."
Those who remain cannot make sense of the "departure." Some are now living an aimless existence, robotically walking through life more like zombies than human beings. Others are angry, despairing, hopeless (inject your dark adjective here). Interestingly, many have simply chosen to go on as if nothing even happened.
"Even if it doesn’t recognize the gospel," notes Basham, "it recognizes the problem the gospel solves. Without the love and grace inherent in a relationship with the Creator, this—burden and abandonment, sin and loneliness—is all that is ultimately left to the created."
"Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin. My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly" (Psalm 38:3-5).
It is purported that when Thomas Pain showed Benjamin Franklin the manuscript of Paine's book, THE AGE OF REASON, Franklin advised him not to publish it, saying, “The world is bad enough with the Bible; what would it be without it?”
In this post-Modern, post-Christian era, we seem to be getting a glimpse of just how bad things can be without the influence of the Scripture on modern culture.