He became Catholic, then almost died in the Holy Land
Agonizing pain.
Stumbling through Jerusalem.
A different license plate needed to cross a border.
A wire transfer.
The U.S. Embassy involved.
A briefcase with $6,000.
Death was a possibility.
A story that sounds like a movie script, but in fact, it was drama in real life with a spiritual revelation at the end.
By ANDREW HANSEN
Editor
The streets of Jerusalem were loud. City life sounds filled the air: car horns, revving engines, and sirens. Cars were congested. People crowded the sidewalks with some yelling at others, showing obvious signs of impatience. In the middle of that chaos, with many people staring at him, was Darren Price of Springfield. He was hunched over and struggling to walk. Wearing a plain-white, torn up T-shirt and jeans and looking obviously out of place in this foreign country, the pain Price felt was excruciating. He knew he was in trouble. His body was failing him. He needed to get to a hospital fast as thoughts of him dying right then and there raced in his mind. This was not the Holy Land pilgrimage Price envisioned — especially becoming Catholic just a few months earlier.
Price grew up a Baptist. He says that he loved his Baptist upbringing, and which is “responsible for my personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” In 2008, Price met and started dating his future wife, Katie, who was “strong Catholic” he says.
“We started going to Mass together, and I learned to appreciate the sacraments and the tradition,” Price said.
He and Katie would discuss what was happening at Mass, Church teachings, and deep faith questions, but his conversion to Catholicism wouldn’t be overnight. The two married in 2011 in Chicago at a Catholic church, and they eventually had three children. Despite the Price family going to Mass every Sunday, the children baptized Catholic, and Price starting to fall in love with the Catholic faith, he just wasn’t ready to convert yet.
“I’m a stubborn person,” Price said.
Eleven years after meeting his wife, those constant nudges he felt to become Catholic turned into a shove from God. Price became Catholic at the Easter Vigil Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield in 2019.
“It was piece by piece that really fell into place,” Price said. “I remember when I was young, I asked my uncle how he knew my aunt was the one for him. He said that it felt like ‘coming home.’ That’s how it felt when I became Catholic. The faith feels like coming home. I attribute the Holy Spirit coming down and saying, ‘Darren, you are home.’ It was a series of moments, a lot of moments, that build up, and then you’re there, and then I walked across that bridge with a full heart and absolutely ready.”
What Price wasn’t ready for, however, happened just a few months later, which tested his physical and spiritual limits.
The couple decided to join a group of young adults from the diocese on a Holy Land pilgrimage. Price said he wanted to go because he wanted to take his faith to a new level, especially as a new Catholic, and he is a “history nut.”
Their trip started like most who visit the Holy Land, visiting locations you read about in the Bible where Jesus walked and preached and then reflecting on them. Their first stop was the place where Jesus gave us the Beatitudes, then the Sea of Galilee and Capernaum which sits on the sea, and then the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized. That’s when Price started to feel some stomach discomfort, but nothing too bad.
“The Jordan River is beautiful, and it wouldn’t have been that much different in Jesus’ day. That is one of the things I loved,” Price said. “I remember looking at a rock formation of a mountain and thinking, ‘That’s the same mountain that Jesus looked at.’ The old Baptist in me loved the Jordan River. Everyone was dipping their toe in the water, maybe going ankle deep, but I of course, went all the way in the water, full submersion, which was a great moment in my life.”
Despite feeling spiritually and physically refreshed, as the water was a nice reprieve from the more than 100-degree temperatures, Price’s stomach pain started to get a little worse. The group arrived in Jerusalem and went out to eat, with Price opting to stay at the hotel hoping a good night’s sleep would shake off whatever was bothering him.
As night came, however, it only got worse. With sleep not happening, Price would go in and out of the shower, at least a dozen times throughout the night, as the warm water was the only thing that would calm the pain.
In the morning, the group went off to Bethlehem to experience the city where Jesus was born, with Price opting to stay behind at the hotel hoping a lack of sleep would eventually lead to sleep.
“I said to my wife that she could go with them to Bethlehem and leave me here at the hotel, but in retrospect, I should not have done that,” Price said.
With the group in Bethlehem, which required a border crossing as Bethlehem is in Palestinian control (not Israeli control), Price’s pain turned into a borderline debilitating condition. He now knew his health was in major trouble. He spoke with his wife, Katie, on the phone and told her to come back as he needed to get to a hospital immediately as he couldn’t get there himself.
This is when events started happening that sound more like a movie script than real life. To get back to Jerusalem, Katie, and another member of the group who happened to be a physician, Dr. Chris Yoon, needed to cross that border. A man who worked at a Bethlehem gift shop agreed to take them to the crossing. However, once at the border, the man said that they couldn’t go through the crossing because his car had Palestinian plates. He didn’t have access to the Israeli controlled territory. The driver told them he made a call to one of his friends and told Katie and Yoon to get out of his car and find a green Jeep in what had become a parking lot at this border crossing. That person would take them the rest of the way.
“When I heard this, I turned to Dr. Yoon and said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Katie said. “To which, he grabs me by the arm and gives me this shrug as if saying, ‘Well, we don’t have any other option.’”
So, there, at the border crossing, with security and armed forces with large guns, Katie and Yoon exited that car in search of this green Jeep, going on a hope and a prayer this was the right thing to do. Amongst the sea of cars, they found the Jeep, which had a German couple inside, who in a deep German accent, welcomed Katie and Yoon with a friendly, “Hello!” So, off they went to Jerusalem with this German couple and their driver.
Back at the hotel, the pain is so severe, it’s now getting difficult for Price to walk, but he had to get down to the hotel entrance. Wearing that white T-shirt with a giant blue ink stain from a pen and jeans, he made his way out of the room.
“I stumbled somehow to where you can make your way downstairs and we were, of course, are up four flights of stairs and there’s no elevator, so I worked my way down the stairs kind of hugging the railing or hugging the wall, just trying to get downstairs,” Price said. “Fortunately, the hotel was air- conditioned, so it was fairly comfortable in there, but when I walked outside and you’re hit with just blinding heat, and I am already a mess and hunched over and holding my stomach — things are not good.”
That’s when the next problem arises. Price calls Katie, and she says that due to heavy traffic and not being able to park in front of the hotel, Price will have to start walking the blocks around the hotel and hopefully, time his connection with Katie to then get into the car. With this added hardship, plus the pain entering a new category, the thought of falling over and dying has crept into his mind. Price musters the last ounces of energy he has left and begins to walk the streets of Jerusalem hunched over. The chaos of the traffic, the loud noises filling the air, the foreign languages he doesn’t understand, and not knowing for sure if he’s even going to find his wife is leaving him “barely lucid.”
“I’m just sort of holding my stomach and wandering through the streets from one block to the next with a lot of people looking at me as if they are saying, ‘What are you doing here? You aren’t supposed to be here.’”
While he was walking to find this random car, which at this point was his only lifeline, Price said he just gave himself simple goals like getting to the next block, trying to block out of his mind falling over and potentially dying.
That’s when Katie saw her husband, “pale as a I have ever seen him, hunched over, grabbing his side, and so ill.”
So, in this frantic moment at a traffic light, she jumps out of the car to get her husband. With horns now blaring at them to get moving, Price collapses inside the car and said in his mind, “I’m done. It’s up to you, Katie, to get me help.”
Dr. Yoon then said to the driver, “Hospital. Now!”
The driver sped off, but the drama didn’t end there. Price’s issue was his appendix, and Yoon recognized that Price needed immediate surgery.
“Doctors told me the appendix is supposed to be the size of a pinky, but mine was the size of a large potato, and they said, ‘It has to come out, and it has to come out now,’” Price said.
But “now,” couldn’t happen. That’s because the hospital required cash up front before doctors could perform surgery to remove the appendix. The group didn’t have the $6,000 needed.
“So, what do we do now?” Price asked. “There are no Chase Banks around the corner.”
A cash wire transfer was needed, or they would have to switch Price to a different hospital that would accept a credit card.
“So, I am now thinking, ‘I will have to take my husband, who is not moving, how am I going to transport him to another hospital in Jerusalem,’” Katie said.
Enter the parents of Katie and Darren and the U.S. Embassy. Katie called her mom, who then called Darren’s mom. They said that they could get $6,000 together and wire money to the hospital, but it wasn’t that easy. The money instead, had to be wired to the U.S. Embassy, who would get the cash to the hospital. So, another layer of the waiting game occurred.
“The good news is that while all this was happening, they hooked me into some nice pain-relieving medication,” Price said. “Father Chris House (a priest of our diocese, who was on the trip) came to the hospital and was able to pray with me. I’m scared, and I’m emotional, so it was nice, as a new Catholic, to have a priest come in and sit and pray with me and be with me while you’re going through that. It was a very moving experience.”
Fortunately, the wire transfer of money didn’t take long.
“I get a phone call from the U.S. Embassy saying that there will be a gentleman at the hospital, it has all been taken care of, and he will arrive and pay cash for the surgery,” Katie said. “So, a black SUV pulls up and a man walks in with a big briefcase of cash to pay Darren’s bill in this hospital. It was all just wild.”
The surgery to remove his appendix began and went well. The doctors told him that they “didn’t know how his appendix didn’t burst,” which was a good thing it didn’t burst because when an appendix bursts, it brings immediate relief, so a person may think everything is fine, when in reality, a deadly infection then starts without their knowledge.
“Knowing Darren, if it did burst and all the pain went away, he would have just pressed on, but the way our trip was planned, we probably would have been a plane over the ocean with him in toxic shock,” Katie said. “It could have been way worse. I think it was all in God’s plan.”
Price also learned he was lucky he was in Jerusalem and not in Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian control, when this all happened, because the health care in Palestine is sub-par.
“The U.S. Embassy told us if that would I went to a hospital in the Palestinian side, the Embassy would have sent troops into Palestine and taken me by convoy to the hospital in Jerusalem, so it was a good thing that didn’t happen, and I was in Jerusalem, and I got first class, top care,” Price said.
A couple days after surgery, Price was discharged, just in time to meet up with the group at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus died on the cross, where He was buried, and where He rose from the dead. Price, as a new Catholic and after experiencing all this pain and agony, wanted to reflect on Jesus’ pain and agony and be filled with Jesus through the Eucharist.
“Our tour group just happened to be having Mass in the basement of the structure, and I arrived just as Mass began, and that’s where it became very real of what I had just experienced,” Price recalls.
“In retrospect, some people might say, ‘Well, you lost your appendix in the Holy Land,’ but I could tell at that time, this was a moving experience that was given to me for a reason, and I drew from it a lot of meaning.
“As I sat and participated in Mass, it kind of dawned on me the parallels between what I went through and what Christ went through. I could only think of gratitude and thankfulness for being given that gift — this experience of suffering. It just really brought home that I was doing the right thing with my life. It was confirmation of the calling that I felt to become Catholic. The window into the experience that was given to me of Jesus’ suffering. It was like an ultra-rare gift that very few people receive. I felt extremely fortunate and extremely touched that God singled me out for that experience and wanted me to have that experience, if only to draw me closer to Him and closer into the faith, and to be rest assured that, ‘Darren, you’re in the right place. You are home.’”