Vincent Chen stopped by a nearby clinic for a COVID-19 test earlier this year. The test came back negative. But his blood pressure was 203/120.
“That can’t be right,” he thought.
Yet after resting for 15 minutes, it had risen to 207/130, creeping further beyond the normal blood pressure range of 90/60 to 120/80.
Then, hooked up to an EKG, Chen had six episodes of tachycardia, a heart rate of more than 100 beats per minute.
“Guess what, you’re going to the hospital. Right now,” the 61-year-old was told. If he didn’t: “There’s a very good chance you’re not going to make it.”
Chen, who moved to Nashville in 2009 from the Los Angeles area, soon was in an ambulance in a Code 3 siren-and-flashing-lights rush to a hospital Feb. 11.
“My first line to [the EMTs] was, ‘Sorry about messing up your day. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.’ I was just trying to make the best of a situation that was literally scaring the life out of me. … That’s the thing about being lost — the fear of the unknown.”
Range of emotions
He started to cry. “It was about survival at that point. … All the range of emotions were running through my mind and my body.
“And then they said, ‘Mr. Chen, don’t be scared. It’s going to be alright. We’re going to take good care of you.’”
In the hospital emergency room, a male nurse named Michael gave similar reassurance: “We’re going to take good care of you, Mr. Chen. Don’t worry.”
Chen was connected to a heart monitor and received medication to lower his blood pressure. Three vials of blood were drawn.
“When the tests came back, this is when I got an inkling that the Lord was taking care of me,” he said.
“My heart was good. My kidneys were good. My liver. My pancreas. Everything was good.” And his blood pressure, though still elevated, had dropped.
“I think the doctor was dumbfounded. He said, ‘Considering how high your blood pressure was, how in the world are you just OK?’”
Chen’s lifelong penchant for curiosity was sparked. “I wanted to know why and thought about it very deeply. Could it be? Is it possible? … I can’t just be OK. I knew there had to be more.
“Some of the wheels started turning in my head, and my heart started to open up. Is [God] really taking care of me?”
After less than three hours in the emergency room, Chen went home with some blood pressure medicine and returned the next day to his information technology job.
A task he had been excited about, however, now seemed unethical. It “wasn’t just something I picked up on my own. I was getting help to understand it … a message from the Lord, saying, ‘Vincent, this isn’t right. This isn’t where you need to be. It’s time for you to go. I have a different mission for you.’”
Chen told his supervisor, “I have a different path to take. This isn’t a decision I’m making on my own. The Lord says it’s what I need to do.” They amicably agreed he would leave the company that day because of IT sensitivities.
‘Lord came into my heart’
While telling a co-worker about his impending exit, Chen recounted, “The Lord just came into my heart. I just felt that glow and that warmth, that welcome. I felt His grace, His kindness, His love. It felt as though I had literally lifted about a foot off the ground. … I’ve never had a feeling like that. Ever. Nobody has ever loved me or hugged me as much. Nobody has ever comforted me at that level as in that moment. … I started crying in front of my co-worker. I didn’t know how to handle all of this emotion. I felt so incredibly blessed.”
At his car, he took his blood pressure. The medication and his encounter with God had rendered it nearly normal.
At home, “I was ecstatic,” he said. He had time “to do the things that matter. Get myself into shape. Clear my mind. And embrace my spiritual gifts,” with a longstanding readiness to help people now having “a genuine reason.”
“I said to my friends, ‘I want to get baptized.’ They went, ‘Where did this come from?’ I told them ‘Jesus has come into my heart. The Lord is here. He’s saving me and I want to serve Him.’”
Chen was baptized March 14 at Brentwood Baptist Church, near Nashville, Tennessee, where two good friends are in the orchestra.
In baptizing Chen, Roger Severino, the church’s minister of leadership development, told the congregation of the “life-changing event, a near-death experience the Lord used to capture his heart. He turned His heart toward Vincent, and God’s grace overwhelmed him. … And in the brief time I’ve gotten to know him, I’ve seen the joy of the Lord in his life.”
Array of influences in his life
Looking back through the years, Chen ponders an array of influences pointing him to Christ, especially his Chinese grandmother and mother, who were both Baptist.
His grandmother often would say, “Jesus loves you, you know.” “I would look at her kind of funny” because the words typically “came out of nowhere.”
“But there was something about when she said it that made me feel warm. It made me feel very secure.”
His mother, in a quiet way, “wanted us to understand the grace and the gift of God,” Chen said.
When he was 11 or 12, he was on the verge of responding to his father in a way “that I probably would have regretted for the rest of my life.”
“My mom stopped me. She didn’t yell at me, she didn’t say anything derogatory or mean. She was wearing a necklace with a white gold cross on it. She took it off and said, ‘I want you to wear this for a little while,’ and put it around my neck.
“It was probably the most tender moment I’ve ever had with my mom,” Chen said. His mother died in 1994, the same year his father, now 85, came to faith in Christ.
‘Angels’ sent by the Lord ‘to take care of me’
He likens his mother and grandmother to angels that “the Lord sent down to take care of me,” along with a second-grade teacher and one of his Vacation Bible School teachers who showed him God’s loving acceptance.
Angels are a part of everyone’s life, Chen believes. “Somebody looked out for you. Why were they here? Why did they bother to look out for you? You know they had millions of other people they could look out for. Why you? … God knows. Jesus knows. He’s looking out for you, taking care of you even when you don’t realize it.”
He’s no angel, however, when it comes to the struggle with sin, Chen said of what he describes as “a great numbing of the soul.”
“The Lord knows your sins before you do them, what you did and what you’re going to do,” he said. “I sin every day. But I repent. I ask for his forgiveness. He’s helping me. He’s saying, You really shouldn’t be doing this. You’re better than that.”
Chen said he’s learning to pray. “It’s like I’ve got this $2,000 device and now I’ve got to talk to somebody on it,” exploring such questions as “How does this relationship work? How do I thank him for his grace and power and wisdom, his patience and his love?”
And he’s working to improve his health, using a virtual reality game to play table tennis and going for walks. “I never wanted to exercise as much as I do now,” he said. “If my body isn’t right, my mind isn’t right. And if my mind isn’t right, I can’t share the good news very well. … I don’t own this body. This is his. So I have to take care of it.”
Chen’s account of being Asian in America
With assaults against Asians in the news, Chen said he experienced insults and taunts “all the time growing up. I usually was the only Chinese person in the school and that was very tough for me. Did I fight a lot? A fair amount. Did I win all the time? No.”
“I believe in our systems of justice, but I also believe that the ultimate judgment is not with us, and never will be,” he said, voicing trust in God’s justice.
Resilience, however, is a positive result of the bias and strife Asians have faced — “You may have beaten me but I’m not defeated.”
It has become even more important to him as a Christian. Without it, “I don’t just let myself down, I let him down.”
With his tech skills, Chen has recorded a three-minute, 45-second YouTube video about his journey into faith.
Still, he acknowledges, “Without a common point of reference, it’s very difficult to share with people how wonderful it is. I feel almost condescending — ‘You’ve just got to have this. You’ve got to have him in your heart.’”
Even so, “what investment can you make in your life that will give you the payback that the Lord will give you? … There’s nothing man can do for you that will take the place of what the Lord can do.”
