Almost a year later, their lives were shaken up even more. On April 8, 2011, Kevin played his regular early morning basketball game in the Rosedale Bible College gym. About half an hour afterward he started feeling extreme nausea, accompanied by a sensation that he was going to pass out. Then “All of a sudden the elephant came and sat on my chest,” he says. Barely able to breathe, he lay down on the floor, trying to figure out what was wrong. He ran over a list of possibilities—he might have pulled a muscle, or it could have been related to a terrible cough he brought back from a recent trip to Costa Rica. Or maybe a panic attack. He finally gave Wendy the OK to call 911 even though it felt like overkill.

In the emergency room, the doctor came back from the tests and told him what was really going on—a heart attack. “Wendy and I both started crying,” he says. “She was crying because of being shaken up with what’s going on, and I was crying because I was mad. I was like ‘I cannot be having a heart attack.’” He was young, had been working out four to five days a week, and the family was trying to maintain a healthy diet. It simply made no sense.

He didn’t know it at the time, but this was no mild heart attack. It was a severe and often deadly form caused by a blood clot. And because of bad weather, they could not fly him to the Ohio State medical center; they had to take him by ambulance. By the time he was in surgery, the clot had completely blocked the left ventricle of his heart for three hours. During the whole ordeal, he maintained consciousness and never really felt like he was going to die. He only realized how close he had come later, when he was told that only a low percentage of people survive the kind of heart attack he had.

There had been no warning signs, either—had he taken a battery of tests the day before, he says, there would have been nothing to tip the doctors off. “I definitely feel like a walking miracle.”

As if that weren’t plenty to worry about, on the day of his heart attack his daughter Ellie collided with some other children on a trampoline and broke her arm. Two days later, something fell on the family cat in the garage and crushed it. The kids had been eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of a litter of kittens and were devastated. “That was sort of the ‘Job’ week for us,” Kevin says.

Soon there was another strange twist. Kevin had for some time sensed a call to missions, a pastoral role, and work with youth, but didn’t know how all three would fit together. They began to fit together about a week after his heart attack, when Todd Miller, the director of RMM’s SEND Ministries Department, announced he was stepping down. The candidate who eventually stepped into that role—one that combined strong elements of missions, a pastoral role, and youth work—was Kevin. He took over the job in August 2011.

At least some of the fog has cleared since that confusing call to leave Spain. “It was a leap of faith, because we really didn’t have any clue what was going to be on the horizon,” he says. In a strange reverse of their original call, the Mayers gave up their lives in Spain to go overseas to the United States and serve in missions. “That was tough and to be honest it’s still tough,” he says. “We still miss living in Spain, and there are many times I sort of wish I could direct [SEND] from Spain instead of from Rosedale.”

He still doesn’t understand everything. He downs hazardous medication to prevent new blood clots and wears an implanted defibrillator. It’s designed to regulate his heart if it goes out of rhythm, with a shock they say feels like a kick from a horse. Like the move from Spain, it’s confusing. “I often wonder, why did it happen? What good does it serve?” Kevin says. All he knows is that for some reason, God still has a purpose for him to be here.

“I think for all of us, our goal is to be with Jesus, and I long for that day,” he says. “But when I think…of Wendy and the kids, I’m just so grateful to still be here.”

Even though God hasn’t answered all the questions, Kevin speaks gratefully about where he’s at. “I feel really blessed that I could be in a position like this. I thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing right now.”