Bless Those in Need This Christmas

DeAnna and Lee Mork were shocked. In 2019, after years of infertility, they were pregnant. “I didn’t believe it at first," DeAnna says. “It was just out of the blue.” Her husband, Lee, was surprised as well. “We were so excited because we had tried for so long and we’d prayed too much.”

It had been eight years since they had their first and only child, Abby, in 2011. Even then, it took 5 years of fertility treatments, and the couple had all but given up on getting pregnant again. DeAnna says, “We were just amazed that it happened, so we knew God had given us this child.”

All the regular checkups and ultrasounds showed the baby was normal and healthy, and revealed the couple would have a son. DeAnna couldn’t wait to meet him. Lee, however, felt something wasn’t right. “I thought, 'God, why I am I worried?' I know God says what I start I am going to finish. I shouldn’t have any worries. But then, it started me praying."

DeAnna’s pregnancy progressed without problems. But at 40 weeks, there were no signs of labor. Doctors said the baby was large, so they decided to induce. On the way to the hospital, Lee decided to share his concerns with DeAnna.
DeAnna remembers, “He said he had just been having feelings that something was going to happen to me. I just kept telling him that everything was going would be fine.”         

After Deanna was induced, Lee’s concerns became a reality. After four hours of labor, she still hadn’t progressed. DeAnna will never forget the excruciating pain. “It felt like something tore and I was having unbearable pain. My blood pressure dropped. I was throwing up in the garbage. It was horrible.”

Now, both DeAnna and the baby were in trouble. DeAnna was rushed in for an emergency c-section. DeAnna remembers the agonizing wait for the surgery to begin. “I was so worried about Jack. I was in so much pain. I worried, am I going to make it through this?”
    
“Everything that I have been afraid of," Lee says, “it was happening right here. I knew Jack was going to be okay, but I was very worried that I was about to lose my wife."

Lee waited outside the operating room and prayed. He called on family and church friends to pray too. “I see people start running down the hall with equipment. I am crying out to God, and I screamed, 'God, please, you promised me. You told me it was going to be ok. You said what you start you will finish.'” 

Finally, DeAnna was out of surgery. Her uterus had ruptured, and she had lost a lot of blood, but she was okay. The baby they’d named Jack was not. Deanna learned later about Jack’s critical condition at birth. “When he was born, his heart wasn’t beating. He was unresponsive.” So, doctors decided to transport Jack to the neonatal intensive care unit of a nearby hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. 

DeAnna tearfully remembers seeing her son before they transported him. “They rolled him up in this little clear box to the side of my bed. I got to rub the back of his little hand before they took him away.”

Lee wanted to say goodbye to Jack too. “I went into the room. He’s got all the tubes and all this. I said, 'Jack' and he turned and looked at me and grabbed my finger, and I knew he was going to be okay right there.”

At Grandview Medical Center, doctors put Jack on cooling therapy to prevent further brain damage. They gave the couple little hope. Lee remembers their haunting words, “Even if he does live, there is a strong chance that he will have future troubles, he may have brain damage, cerebral palsy, and developmental problems.”

“We didn’t get to hold him for ten days," DeAnna says. "He was hooked up to so many wires. It was overwhelming, overwhelming.”
 
After two weeks, Baby Jack was breathing on his own, but was largely unresponsive, and wasn’t eating. DeAnna remembers what concerned her the most. “You worry about your child’s future. What kind of life they will be able to live.” 

For Lee, it was an intense struggle of faith. “Everybody around me was telling me how serious it really was. It really tests your faith because you hear one thing from God, but I am seeing another thing.”
    
By now, there was a groundswell of prayer on social media that had gone global. Meanwhile, doctors performed a second EEG and MRI. The results were hopeful, as they showed no brain damage. Still, Jack wasn’t eating and had problems with his GI tract.

“We asked God to heal him," DeAnna says. “We just kept praying that.” Lee was painfully honest in his prayers. “I’m like, 'God, he is alive, and I know you saved him, but I want him to be whole.'”

Then, a sign of hope. After spending Thanksgiving in the NICU, Lee and DeAnna began to pray for a Christmas homecoming. Jack was improving, but doctors wanted all his medical issues resolved before he was discharged. By Christmas Eve, they’d changed their minds, and sent Jack home! 

DeAnna’s eyes glisten when she says, “It was the best Christmas ever… the best Christmas gift that anybody could ever give me.” Deanna and Lee knew that it was still a waiting game. “The doctors still said that he may have a lot of developmental issues, maybe even cerebral palsy.”

Follow-up appointments with Jack’s neurologist revealed a different story. One by one, Jack met every developmental milestone. DeAnna will never forget the words of the neurologist. "He was just amazed. He was like, 'You have a miracle baby. There is no other explanation for this other than he is a miracle.'”        

Three years later, DeAnna reports, “You wouldn’t know now that he was basically dead for 23 minutes. He’s so strong, healthy, and happy.” Lee adds, “None of the things happened that they thought could happen. God healed him. He’s not just well, but he is better than well.”    

Jack will even tell you who healed him, “Jesus healed me!!”    

DeAnna says she is eternally grateful. “If God hadn’t intervened, Jack and I might not be here. I am so thankful for prayer. I am just overwhelmed by God’s goodness.”

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As told by Rick Renner, from his book, Christmas, The Rest of the Story.

“The Christmas story is the most wonderful story that has ever been told and this is the time of the year when you and your family need to fall in love with a miracle that took place on Christmas.

Luke 2: 6 and 7 says, ‘The time came for her baby to be born and she brought forth her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him on a manger because there was no room for him in the inn.’ 8 and 9 says, ‘And they were in the same country, shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night.’

The angel of the Lord appeared to this particular group of shepherds, because this was not just any group of shepherds, these were shepherds under Levitical care whose charge was to raise lambs, which would be offered as sacrifice at the time of Passover. And when the angel of the Lord appeared and said, ‘This will be a sign to you, you will find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes’, this literally meant, ‘Guys! You’re looking at the wrong lamb! The real lamb of God has just been born in Bethlehem.’   

"But you may ask, ‘What are swaddling clothes’? To make sure that they were unblemished they would take little bandages and would wrap the legs of newborn lambs to make sure they were protected. So, the first time that Jesus ever appears in the Bible, he appears as a little lamb wrapped in swaddling clothes and that’s because he was born to be the lamb of God to take away the sins of the world.'”
  
"In Matthew 2, 1 and 2, the Bible says, ‘After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where’s the one who’s been born, King of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’" 

"You may ask, ‘Who are Magi?’ Well, in the world today we do not have the equivalent. Magi were priests, they were astrologers, they were scientists. Wow! These were powerful people. In fact, Magi had so much power with a single word they could install a king and with a single word they could depose a king, and that’s why King Herod was so upset when they showed up saying, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ And when they came, they came with caravans, they came with troops, soldiers, and armor because they were carrying a whole caravan of gifts which they were bringing to the King that had just been born."

"Matthew 2:11 says, ‘And when they had opened their treasures, they had presented to him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” 

"When they came, they didn’t come to Bethlehem, they went all the way to Nazareth where the holy family had been living in their house already for two full years. And when they came into that house, they saw Mary, and the toddler king in front of them and they fell down and worshipped him. And they gave him treasures of gold, which was significant because this was a gift given to a king at birth. Frankincense was a perfume, which was used in high priestly ministry. Myrrh was actually an embalming fluid. And in these three gifts there’s a prophetic statement: that Jesus is the King of all Kings, he is the high priest, and he was born to die as the lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. He was born as the lamb of God, he was introduced by John the Baptist as the lamb of God, and Jesus died on the cross as the lamb of God." 

"From my family to your family I want to say, have a wonderful Christmas and remember that - Jesus really is, the reason for this season!”
 

Country music's Celeste Kellogg sings 'Remember Me' from the 700 Club studios.

“I was looking at him and I was like, how am I going to tell my daughter that he's gone? And that's when I just start praying,” says Olga Vedernikov. May 19th 2022. Standing in her driveway Olga heard a loud crash just moments after her son-in-law, Nikita, left her home. She ran to the scene, overwhelmed by what she saw. “I remember, I have this voice inside of me saying, 'Nikita is no longer with us.'" She says, “I kind of took him by his neck and I start looking for a pulse and I couldn't find anything. I knew that there was no pulse, there was no life.”

Olga called her church prayer chain and then 911. Time ticked by with no signs of life. She says, “I just start praying, 'I speak life, I speak life, life, come back to Nikita because I know God can do miracles. It's nothing impossible for the Lord.'”

Then, after several minutes - the miraculous. She says, “He brought him back. He started breathing and I start yelling, ‘He's breathing, he's breathing.’ And they said, ‘okay, don't touch him. Don't touch him. The help is on its way.’”

EMS soon began cutting Nikita from the wreckage. He suffered a host of life-threatening injuries including a fractured C1 vertebrae, collapsed lung, torn spleen and traumatic brain injury. He was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery. After several hours, his wife, Elona, who was near full term with their second child, remembers seeing him in the ICU. “It was really hard. I began bawling my eyes out and I came and I just held his hand. And at that moment, he did look very lifeless. There was, it felt like there was not much life left. He had breathing tubes and so many wires were connected to him.”

Prayers were offered up around the world. Family in Russia, Ukraine, and across the U.S. were praying for Nikita’s survival and healing. “We knew that we had to lean in to Him. He was the only one that could carry us through it all. Honestly, all we could do is pray and believe that God was going to do His work in this, that He was going to bring a miracle to our lives,” says Elona. 

Elona spent the first night wrestling with her thoughts and struggling to believe that God would heal her husband. "Your husband is not going to live. You're not going to see him tomorrow when you wake up." She recalls, “'You're going to have to plan his funeral.’ And all these thoughts kept flooding my mind. And then I just hear the Lord's voice saying, ‘Your husband will not die. Do not fear. Do not fear.’ And I knew that right then and there that God’s spirit was much stronger than the enemy's voice.”

Due to the extent of Nikita’s brain injury doctors said he would require more than six months in low light conditions and extensive time in rehab. However, over the next few days, Nikita began showing signs of recovery that went beyond anyone’s expectations. Elona says, “They're like, ‘We don't know how, but the swelling in his left frontal lobe actually went down.’ They were all just amazed to see how well Nikita was doing and how he was even responding already on day three. After, that really began the journey of faith and believing God for the more believing God that He was going to completely restore my husband and fully heal him.”

Just under two weeks after the accident Elona gave birth to their second child. Nikita’s healing progressed so well that he was wheeled down to the delivery room to welcome his newborn son into the world. Elona says, “The nurse said, ‘Do you want to hold Ezra?’ And he nodded yes. And he just kept smiling the whole time. And he he just kept saying, ‘Ezra, Ezra, Ezra, Ezra, Ezra.’ And the whole time, he just kept repeating his name.”

Miraculously, just two weeks after the accident Nikita was discharged from the hospital and spent only one week in rehab before returning home – thankful. Nikita says, “Recovery is...it's a gift from the Lord, if you can recover. My spine was cracked and I didn't get paralyzed. You know, I had a deflated lung and I'm still breathing. I had a torn spleen, and they didn't have to cut my spleen out. And so I'm thankful that He allowed me to live. I'm thankful that I can see my kids. I can hold my newborn. It's a, it's a...it's a testimony.” 

“Just to see how our prayers came to life and God did this for us. It was, it was the biggest blessing we could ever have walked through,” says Elona, “And that just gave us so much hope that He's our peace, He's our comforter, He's our joy, and He's the only one that will get us through this.”

“God can say, you know, that's my kid and that's what I did for him. And this is, this is...this is how great I AM because I can, you know, I can raise the dead, I can bring him back to life,” says Nikita. 

Adding miracle upon miracle, shortly after the car crash that nearly took his life, Nikita began long distance running. In November of 2023, just a year and a half after the accident, he completed his first marathon. An expression of praise and thanks to God - who gave him back his life and health. Nikita says, “I owe it to Him, everything I have, I owe to Him. I wasn't walking and now I'm running a marathon. Tell me something, that I mean, that's it's unreal. Unreal.”

Elona says, “Come what may my faith will stand because it's in Jesus. And I saw how the Lord took us from the darkest season of our lives every single day. He didn't leave us, He was near to us in our weakest moment. He was still there you know, even in the darkest season of our lives. God was still faithful, He was still merciful to us.”