Joy After A Christmas Eve Nightmare

It was the best of times and the worst of times, when the joy of a Christmas Eve birth turned deadly – well, sort of?

They are being called “the miracle mother and baby” after a near horrific incident in a hospital in Colorado Springs. Tracy Hermanstorfer stated, “I got a second chance at life,” and that she did, after she and her newborn were both not breathing just as the delivery was about to take place.

The 33-year old mom had stopped breathing from an apparent cardiac arrest. The medical staff tried to revive her, but nothing worked. A maternal fetal medicine specialist at the hospital said of Tracy, "She had no signs of life. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn't breathing,"

It was at that crucial moment that doctors told her husband Mike that his wife was likely gone and they were hoping to save the child through an emergency c-section. To the doctor’s shock, when the infant boy was delivered, he too was not breathing. The husband recalls thinking, "I had everything in the world taken from me.”

Immediately he doctors went to work on lifeless little Coltyn as the helpless father held him. But the infant suddenly began to breathe and show other signs of reviving. Meanwhile, the mother’s pulse returned even before she was wheeled out of the room and into surgery. She had showed no heartbeat for nearly four long minutes. But as soon as the child was delivered, her heartbeat miraculously returned. An evaluation was conducted by experts but tests failed to yield anything that could explain the bizarre incident.

Father Mike Hermanstorfer said the Christmas Eve miracle was simply "the hand of God." He stated, “We are both believers. You explain to me how this happened. There is no other explanation."

Some two thousand years ago, there was another “miracle mother and baby". But in this case the miracle extended far beyond the physical. The mother’s name was Mary and Luke 1:35 describes the miracle of the conception of her child. “And the angel answered and said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.' ”

The miracle birth of Mary’s son was that He was not merely a human child with an unusual conception. Jesus was also a divine child. He was not an odd blend of God and man. He was fully both.

His miraculous makeup is described in theological terms as the “Hypostatic Union” - a mystery explained best in Philippians chapter two. Paul writes there in verses 5-8, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is the one and only, and fully unique, God-man.

Tracy Hermanstorfer believed that she had received “a second chance at life”. But if she was already a Christian before that most stressful Christmas Eve, she had already taken advantage of a second change by being revived from a life of spiritual death to the miracle that is new life in Jesus Christ. Her greatest miracle was not her own physical survival and that of her child’s. But it was primarily the divine revival of her soul through saving faith – a transaction described in Colossians 1:13-14.

“He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.”

Bill Breckenridge