December 3, 2010

The young man was hesitant to approach the guest speaker. But he knew he was acting in obedience. The speaker, Dr. Manuel Cordero, remembers the man as shy but insistent.

"I was in Uganda in 2008 giving a seminar on prison ministry," Cordero remembers. "This young man told me that God was going to change my ministry, and that my later years of ministry would be greater than my previous years."

On the surface, a reassuring message. And also a little sobering. Cordero, the Correctional Ministries representative for the Assemblies of God's national Chaplaincy Department, had given more than 30 years of full-throttle service to the corrections community. He was also an in-demand speaker and Bible school instructor. Some would describe Cordero's wife, Christine, as a "ministry widow."

When Manuel returned to Uganda in September 2009, his calendar was packed. He planned to follow his weeks in Africa with a ministry trip to Puerto Rico, a European vacation with Christine, and a chaplaincy conference. But even the European trip included ministry dates.

While Manuel was in Africa, Christine followed her own demanding routine. As a member of the "sandwich generation," she provided regular care for her own aged parents, as well as for her grandchildren. Today she looks back on those weeks and shakes her head in disbelief.

"There were no red flags," she says.

Their lives were about to be hit by a juggernaut.

Manuel kept his standard appointment with his doctor after returning from Uganda. Following a routine physical, the doctor asked if he had any concerns. When Manuel mentioned some discomfort and swelling in his abdomen, the doctor examined him again and decided to order a CT scan.

When the phone rang the next day, it was the doctor.

"I need to see you in my office."

"Sure," Manuel agreed. He left within minutes, but got hungry on the way. He caught a quick meal at a fast-food restaurant. His phone rang again.

"I said I needed to see you in my office," the doctor repeated, his concern obvious.

The CT scan had revealed the cause of Manuel's abdominal discomfort to be a large tumor. Winding from below his shoulder blades in his back to the front of his torso at the navel, the tumor wrapped around virtually every vital organ. There was no question of trying to remove it. Manuel's doctor had him see an oncologist that day. The oncologist called for a needle biopsy the following day. Now began the waiting game of identifying the precise cancer and its attendant treatment.

In the mean time, the tumor continued to take on a life of its own at a terrible cost to Manuel's. Its growth was literally blocking off the nutritive value of Manuel's food. Vital fluid from digested food that would normally be distributed throughout the body began to collect in Manuel's abdomen and lungs.

"The first time they brought me in to drain the fluid," Manuel remembers, "they took 1.5 gallons from my abdomen and another gallon from my lungs."

"That started as once a week," Christine remembers, "then twice a week, then every other day. Sometimes a gallon or more at a time."

When the cancer was finally identified in December, the news was a further blow – aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In order to give Manuel the minimum strength he needed to combat the disease, a feeding tube was placed in his femoral artery to provide nutrition. Two chest tubes were emplaced to provide daily drainage of fluid buildup.

By now Manuel was back with Christine at their Colora, Maryland, home. Family members would visit to help relieve the strain as Christine oversaw his round-the-clock care.

"We had a lot of snow last year," Christine remembers. "We live out in the country, and our road is one of the last to be plowed. At one point, we knew we were going to have to get out to the emergency room in the morning, and I just laid there and prayed, ‘God, You've got to send that plow.' And 5 o'clock in the morning that plow came through and we were able to get up and go."

Momentary miracles were spiritual food the Corderos fed upon in what felt like a season of famine.

"During the worst of it," Manuel remembers, "I couldn't feel any emotion. I couldn't sleep. I would sit in my recliner staring, trying to pray, but my prayers would bounce back."

His sister had sent him an IPod filled with worship music.

"I was listening to Ricardo Rodriguez singing ‘I Can Only Imagine' in Spanish. I felt I needed to pray by faith. I began to imagine the joy of God's presence. And the Lord touched me and joy came. I felt transported into God's presence. I had His peace."

Christine woke up on the couch and saw Manuel lying in the recliner raising his hands. God had touched his spirit even as his body continued to decline.

This divine encounter came as a confirmation of two previous words of knowledge friends had shared based on the same passage of Scripture:

"I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done" (Psalm 118:17, NIV).

But before Manuel would grasp life anew, he plunged into weeks of near-death existence.

"They had sent me home again and had begun in-home care with a nurse," Manuel says. "She came to the house the second day I was back. Christine was out helping her parents. I greeted the nurse, and that's the last thing I remember."

It was March 19, 2010. Manuel was rushed to a nearby hospital.

"It wasn't his usual hospital or team of doctors," Christine says, "but he was so close to death they didn't think he would survive a longer drive."

At first, doctors offered little hope and advised the family to consider removing Manuel from life support. They discovered his body was retaining carbon dioxide and that he was slowly poisoning himself to death.

"I remember one of the times that he crashed, and they got him stabilized," Christine says. "I just walked down the hall and I just told the Lord, ‘If You choose to take him and reward him for his service at this point in time, I'll still praise You.' And that was just, for me, the time that I truly let him go."

But it was at the small local hospital that God directly intervened. With a new team of doctors came a renewed attempt to discover effective avenues of treatment.

For Manuel, a miraculous turning point came with the removal of his chest tubes. Doctors explained that the tubes had to be removed if they were to learn whether his body was again accepting nutrition. The process is normally excruciating.

"When the doctor pulled out the tubes, I felt absolutely no pain," Manuel remembers. Because he was still on a breathing tube, he could not speak. But he wrote out a note to Christine: "This is my miracle."

The journey to restored health came with difficult stages. First feeble steps at the hospital. Weeks at a recovery center. A return home to again sleep in the living room. Then, by mid-June, the first triumphant walk up the stairs to their bedroom.

Today, Manuel and Christine look back together on the many years of their earlier season of ministry and the past year of almost unimaginable shared pain.

But they are looking ahead in faith to the greater season of ministry prophesied by a bashful African teen.

"God is faithful," Christine says simply.

"He is a Healer, He's always there, and His presence is not dependant on how you feel," Manuel says. "If it depended on my faith, I'd probably be gone. My faith was weak. But it doesn't matter how I feel, He's there."

For more information about the Assemblies of God Chaplaincy Department, see its website at http://Chaplaincy.ag.org/.

AG News
Scott Harrup