In early March 2023, Pastor Ryan Marlow, Grace Baptist Church, Wilkesboro, NC, was released from the hospital after being wrongly declared dead and nearly becoming an organ donor. In August 2022, Pastor Marlow was hospitalized with a bacterial infection (listeria) that entered his brain. Later that month, the doctors told his wife that Ryan was clinically deceased. The following is from “Family, Congregation Welcome Home Pastor,” Christian Headlines, Mar. 7, 2023: “Marlow says, ‘They put the time of his death on his chart. That was it. I was called into a room and told that my husband was an organ donor and that we were going to begin the process of finding matches for his organs. So that process began, he was on life support, and they told me he would remain on life support until they found all of the donors.’ The following day, doctors had scheduled the harvesting of his organs, but when Meghan visited him and showed him videos of his three children singing, Marlow moved his feet. She said, ‘I told Ryan all the things that I wanted to tell him. That I loved him, people were taking care of me, that God was going to make sure our babies were taken care of, and it was going to be alright. And at the very end, I tell him, if you’re inside of there and you can hear me, I need you to fight. I need you to fight like crazy. Long story short, he’s not brain dead, my friends. The doctor would not even do the brain death test because they said that there is brain activity.’”
(Friday Church News Notes, March 17, 2023, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)
