Our friend, Vicky, tells my husband and I she’s on a bus, traveling. She wants to get to her final destination, only she’s not sure where the bus is headed.

On Wednesday, Vicky went on life support following a massive cardiac arrest incident and multiple organ failure. Vicky has no family, no living will. On Thursday, the medical staff made a decision to stop life support. The tube was removed and the doctors concurred that she could not survive. After several hours, extremely dehydrated but alive, Vicky opened her eyes and said, “I want to live!”

With those words, the atmosphere in the ICU changed. Bright lights. Busy staff. Medical procedures.

Vicky needs a new heart, but she’s not a candidate, given her damaged and failing organs. No one can explain why she’s alive. But she is. Vicky has a brilliant mind, even now. She’s a deep thinker, even now. She’s an educated, vibrant, witty woman, who can crack a joke, even now.

But Vicky also cries often. She has a sensitive heart, maybe too sensitive. Her wounds, going back to her childhood, are deep and like open sores that she shows to us from her hospital bed in the ICU.

She’s the same Vicky we’ve known, but the ammonia build-up in her liver causes her confusion. She thinks she’s on a bus, or perhaps a train, she says. But she feels as if she’s traveling. “What’s happened to me?” She often asks, especially after waking. “Where am I?” Where are we going?”

When the tsunami hit South India, in 2004, Vicky was instrumental in our church’s major fundraising event. Vicky came along with my husband and I to India. Together, we walked through devastated remote villages and shed tears on beaches that had become cemeteries dotted with coconut sapling gravestones. Vicky hugged children, prayed for the wounded and was a trooper through horrendous conditions.

Now, Vicky hugs us and says she loves us. She jokes, smiles, chats, and contemplates on her past, and often cries, touching the sandalwood rosary around her neck that she purchased during our mission trip to India in 2004.

Please pray for Vicky. I’m not sure why shy can’t get off the bus she thinks she’s on and why she can’t reach her final destination. I wish and pray she could survive and be the full and complete person God meant her to be. I want her to live. The medical staff says she has zero chance of recovery. She has the will to live, but so do many others who still die. God is a factor in why she is surviving. We can’t get anywhere on our own. There is more going on, spiritually, in this situation than I can wrap my mind around.

I just don’t want Vicky to remain stuck on this bus going nowhere, sad and confused.

Tonight she told us she wants to go home, but she says she’s stuck in a bizarre situation, in a house with three girls who say they are nurses, but she knows it’s not so. She says her house needs to be cleaned and she’s really worried about that mess.

Please pray for Vicky. Pray to God that she can find peace and healing so that she can reach her final destination. Pray for God’s mercy for Vicky, for God’s Grace and for Jesus to take her where she needs to be.

I am human. I am frail. I am sad. I am not the driver of this bus.