After two unsuccessful rounds of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), John Mark Chen was ecstatic when he found out that he was going to be a father.

This was the child that they had been praying and waiting for. John was 45 at the time and his wife, Janice, was 40.

But the “happiest day” of his life became short-lived when Janice started experiencing regular episodes of heavy bleeding in the second trimester.

The couple celebrating Christmas 2023 with their dogs. John is carrying Toby, whom they decided to get on the day their first round of IVF had failed. Janice is holding Max, who recently passed on.

Every few days, the couple would be at the clinic, relying on progesterone injections to stabilise the uterine lining. 

“We kept asking for prayers. That’s all we could depend on,” said Janice of the requests that John would send out to their cell group.

“Sometimes we felt like aiyoh, are we a burden? We were always wondering, ‘Should we share?’ But we knew we needed a bigger pool of intercessors to support and pray along with us.”

Her doctor placed her on bed rest, leading Janice to exhaust all the medical and hospitalisation leave her company allowed. She spent her pregnancy working from home mostly.

Hearing Joshua’s heartbeat for the first time in March 2024.

A short getaway that they had planned when Janice was 20 weeks pregnant had to be cancelled as well.

But even though there were so many bumps along the way, having a pre-term baby never crossed their minds.

Seeing God’s hand of provision

At 25 weeks, Janice’s water bag burst.

“I was still half expecting the doctor to say, ‘Aiyah, the baby is okay lah.’ But that day he actually said, ‘I’ve got bad news,’” recounted John.

Told that their son would need medication to protect this brain and lungs because birth could come any time, the couple were in a state of shock.

“The only thing that I could do was to pray,” he told Salt&Light.

While people were supporting them in prayer, advice also poured in: Move to a public hospital with a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) that is more equipped for such cases.

The next morning, they rang up different hospitals. Two were full, but they managed to get a spot on the waitlist for another.

“We were praying and praying. I was potentially looking at a S$300,000 to S$500,000 bill or even more,” said John, cognisant of the fact that if their son was born in a private hospital, transferring him to another institution after that would be less straightforward.

John and Janice with their IVF team at Mount Alvernia Hospital.

“We were in a desperate situation. I called everyone I knew.” By 3pm that day, God provided a bed for both mother and son at Singapore General Hospital (SGH).

“It was another answered prayer. Immediately, we were discharged from our hospital at 6pm and by 7pm, Janice was in SGH.”

Unbeknown to the couple, that would be the start of more miraculous signs. 

The day after Janice was warded, John was curious when doctors who came to see them were not wearing the usual scrubs.

The Chens were invited to the Light Weight Club Party, an event that celebrates all the pre-term babies that were born in SGH’s NICU over the years.

“And get this, they haven’t had a party since COVID. This was the first party they were having in many years,” John marvelled.

The party proved to be an emotional boost John and Janice did not even know they needed. While they were struggling with anxiety, the party brought hope and introduced them to a community that would come alongside them for the difficult journey that was about to begin.

John told Salt&Light: “I was very encouraged by all the success stories, seeing all the children thriving.

“Coincidence? I would like to think it’s really divine appointment. It was God’s way of assuring us that He is in control. We had not even thought about going to SGH before this.”

John speaking at this year’s Light Weight Club Party. Once a beneficiary, this was a full-circle moment for John, as the first time he attended the party was three days before Joshua’s arrival.

“We cannot get a heartbeat”

While most new parents are excited by their baby’s arrival, it was the complete opposite for the Chens.

John and Janice knew that each day that Joshua stayed in the womb meant he had a higher chance of survival.

In Singapore, it has been said that the survival rate of a premature baby born at 24 weeks is about 50 per cent. A baby’s due date is calculated based on 40 weeks, and a full-term baby usually weighs around 3kg.

“The first few months were fraught with uncertainty. We didn’t know whether miscarriage was going to happen. And then Janice just didn’t have the last three months of her pregnancy,” John recounted.

Three days after Janice arrived in SGH, she started experiencing sporadic contractions off and on. For 36 hours, John stayed by her side.

When things seemed to have stabilised, he went home to rest. That was when Janice went into labour on July 31, 2024.

Joshua was coming out faster than expected. However, he was in breech position – his legs came out first, instead of his head.

John rushed back to the hospital the minute he got the call that Janice was in labour. He could hear what was happening in the background.

“Imagine: I was listening to the doctor saying over the phone, ‘Janice, you have to listen because we cannot get a heartbeat anymore.

“I was like, ‘What? No heartbeat?’ I started praying in tongues.”

After the second push, Joshua was born. But there was no sound of his cry.

“The first thing I heard was ‘resuscitate’,” said Janice, welling up with tears in recollection.

Joshua at birth.

Desperate, she whipped out her phone and played Goodness of God and 10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord), worshipping God there and then.

Her husband came into the room at that moment. Janice told him, “You don’t come here. You go and pray for your child. He’s not breathing. Just go. Just leave me be, I’m fine.”

John, who had walked in to the sight of one group of people tending to his son and another group to his wife, said: “I could hear Janice’s music blasting, and I went over to Joshua and kept praying for him. We just kept going, ‘Joshua, breathe. Please breathe.’”

A traumatic birth

When he finally started breathing, Joshua was whisked away to the NICU.

His APGAR score (a test that assesses a newborn’s physical condition) was initially 4/10, but it went up to 9/10 within a few minutes.

However, as a micro-preemie, Joshua weighed only 680g. He was only slightly larger than the palm of a hand and his lungs were still underdeveloped.

Knowing that the next 24 hours were crucial, the couple waited in agony as multiple procedures were performed on their tiny baby.

While in the NICU, Joshua needed to be intubated so that a ventilator could help him breathe, an umbilical venous catheter for his medication and nutrition to be delivered intravenously, and a lumbar puncture on his spine to check for infection, among other medical procedures.

As his wife was in a shared ward, John went home to rest, but his heart was heavy.

“I just sat and bawled my eyes out,” he admitted to Salt&Light. “I called my Pastor and spoke to him. I was just wailing; I was so worried.”

In the hospital, Janice was fighting her own battle. The sight of Joshua – who looked more like a foetus than a fully formed baby – connected to so many tubes, lying helplessly in the NICU broke her.

“I prayed for him and said I was sorry because I couldn’t hold him in longer,” she said.

“I felt very, very guilty. What if I had just had a catheter and stayed in bed instead of going to the toilet? Would that have helped him? Maybe I should have listened to my husband and not work at all during the pregnancy.

“A lot was going through my head.”

Janice applying firm touch to bring comfort to Joshua.

While Joshua made it past the first day, the couple was still filled with worry.

“Pulling through (the first day) was one thing. But we didn’t know how long it was going to be like this, and I think that’s the scariest thing,” Janice explained.

Joshua was born at 26 weeks and faced a number of issues, including not being able to breathe by himself. “The doctors couldn’t give us a date or even an estimate (of when he could be discharged),” John recalled.

Despite the emotional rollercoaster that they were on, the Chens were comforted by the people who rallied around them.

From a fellow believer they met through the Light Weight Club who came to keep them company at the hospital, to their cell group mates who cooked and sent confinement food, so many chipped in to keep their spirits up.

Learning to surrender their son

The Chen’s biggest concern was bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a respiratory complication where a premature baby’s lungs are unable to take in oxygen by themselves.

Since birth, Joshua’s lungs had already collapsed multiple times.

“His lungs were just too weak and too small,” explained John. “We were starting to come to terms with the possibility that he might not make it.”

Each time a family conference was called, it was just more bad news.

“We were told every time that things weren’t looking good, and that they were trying something else.”

Despite Joshua’s unstable condition, his parents decorated his room to mark his first month in faith.

On August 29, things shifted dramatically. “That was the night that we almost lost him,” John told Salt&Light.

Just the day before, he had just felt God prompting him to surrender his son while he was praying. Wrestling with what this meant, John remembered the story of how Abraham sacrificed Isaac (Genesis 22).

“At that time, I was thinking God wants to take Joshua already, so God wants me to surrender,” John said.

Thinking that Joshua’s life was going to come to an end, John remembered sitting in front of his son’s incubator and crying out in anguish.

“I was very sad because after I had prayed and surrendered,  I opened my eyes and saw Joshua. He was lying down in prone position and his eyes were open, looking at me helplessly.

“I felt really rotten. His parents should be his strongest advocates. We go all out to fight for him, for his rights. But now, his biggest advocates have just surrendered.”

Pastor Choong Tshih Ming of City Harvest Church praying for Joshua. John recalled how his simple prayer of “Lord, have mercy” reflected their pleas during that critical time. Ps Ming had been journeying with the couple since Joshua’s birth.

However, John also gained important lessons about fatherhood and surrender as he prayed.

“I kept praying for Joshua to live. I kept praying for him to be well. I earnestly asked God and made a lot of pleas,” said John, who is a lawyer.

“But I learnt to detach myself from the outcome, and trust that if the Lord takes him away, then there has to be a reason. There has to be a purpose for it, and I might not be able to see it now, but at some point in the future I will be able to know why.”

During this prayer, God also gave John a revelation.

“It hit me that God actually loves Joshua more than I. Jesus is his advocate even more than Janice and I. We’re just stewards of this gift on earth.”

This truth was reinforced when John later shared this revelation with his Pastor.

“My Pastor said, ‘You’re not surrendering to the devil, you know? Surrender is not giving up his life. You’re surrendering to Jesus Christ, our High Priest. He is Joshua’s biggest advocate.’”

They almost lost Joshua

Their time of testing seemed far from over. Instead of getting better, Joshua looked like he was getting worse.

On August 29, just before midnight, a call came from the hospital.

“Joshua’s lungs have collapsed and we have been bagging him (to give him oxygen) for three to four hours. We really need him to make it through the night,” the doctor told them.

Dismayed, the couple stayed by Joshua’s bedside, praising God with worship songs while praying that he would pull through.

When Joshua was doing poorly, the couple could only pray and wait.

While Joshua did get better, something astonishing also happened within the next few hours.

“It was really divine intervention. It’s so specific, it makes your hair stand,” said John, highlighting how the timing of events seemed to have unfolded perfectly.

Just a few days ago, John had written to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, US after learning that the institution is a leader in BPD treatment for premature babies.

However, when he found out that Nationwide only does physician-to-physician consults, John approached one of the senior consultants at SGH who agreed to reach out.

John and Janice with Joshua’s doctors and nurses. The couple are so grateful that Joshua’s medical team never gave up on him even when he was on the brink of death.

“Never did we think that our medical team in Singapore would be open to it,” added Janice. “We thought only private doctors would do this. But the fact that they did, we were very touched. They just wanted to do anything and everything to save Joshua.” 

In the pre-dawn hours of August 30, their senior consultant received an email from the head of BPD at Nationwide.

Pointing to the 12-hour time difference between the US and Singapore, John marvelled: “Our doctor’s on-call time was 9am. What made him wake up at 5am in the morning, I don’t know. He saw the message and got in touch immediately.”

Having reviewed Joshua’s medical information, Nationwide recommended a new ventilation setting based on a study that they had recently done. Both doctors got on the phone to discuss this at 5.30am, Singapore time.

As it turned out, Joshua’s lungs collapsed again at 9.30am when the senior consultant was on duty at the NICU. Armed with this new strategy, the doctor decided to try it out as a last resort.

Amazingly, the new ventilation setting coupled with a regimen designed to heal Joshua’s lungs worked so well that his breathing tube could actually be removed 10 days later.

The couple were only able to hug Joshua more than 40 days after he was born.

Joshua, a living miracle

Forty days after his birth, Joshua was extubated on September 9 – the day the Chens finally heard their baby cry.

“It was so meaningful, right? Forty days in the wilderness and then we walked into the ‘promised land’ with Joshua,” John marvelled.

Every day in the NICU, John had been reading aloud Joshua 1:5-9, reminding his son not to be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord was with them.

The couple was also told there was a paradigm shift in Joshua’s treatment.

“One of his doctors came to tell me, ‘Ten days ago, we were pushed to the corner.’ Everything they could do had already been done.

“He said, ‘We were just trying to keep him alive. For him to be extubated today is nothing short of a miracle.’”

When John thanked the doctor who administered the new ventilation strategy, he was shocked by the response too.

“He actually said, ‘It’s not me. It’s God who saved his life.’ I said this same thing to him again and he repeated those words to me.

“He truly believes that it is God who saved Joshua’s life.”

A meaningful photo for the couple as every doctor here played a part in Joshua’s journey. The family recently got to meet Dr Edward Shepherd (third from right), the head of BPD at Nationwide Children’s Hospital when he visited SGH in March 2026.

Despite the turnaround in Joshua’s condition, there was still some uncertainty.

Joshua was still relying on non-invasive ventilation through a CPAP mask. Aside from the risk of re-intubation, there were other worries.

Joshua had stage 2 retinopathy of prematurity, an abnormal growth of blood vessels in his eyes. He also had gastroespohageal reflux disease, resulting in constant vomiting as he just could not hold down his milk.

“It was very stressful for us. After one milestone, we were rushing for another milestone, but we didn’t know it would take so long,” Janice told Salt&Light.

“Seeing other babies coming in and going home, we were like, ‘Will we get to see that day when he will step down to the high dependency unit or special care nursery?’ But that day didn’t quite come.”

Next, they were given a choice: Continue to leave Joshua in NICU or transfer him to another hospital that could discharge him on a ventilator for home care.

The Chens chose to transfer Joshua to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH).

Mobile ICU: Making the decision to go to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), Joshua was moved from SGH after more than 100 days.

At KKH, Joshua spent two weeks at the Children’s Intensive Care Unit, while John and Janice underwent intense training to be equipped with skills such as performing resuscitation and inserting the nasogastric tube (NGT) for Joshua’s feeds.

“In summary, August 30 was a turning point, but it was still a long journey for us,” said John, recalling the four months that Joshua spent in intensive care.

A special memento from the doctors and nurses of SGH NICU for Joshua, their “miracle boy”.

When Joshua was finally discharged, John and Janice became what they describe as “medical parents.”

“It felt like I wasn’t a mother; I was a person taking care of a patient,” said Janice, who took a sabbatical from work and only returned to her corporate communications role in March 2026.

For the first two months after returning home, Joshua was on room quarantine as he was still hooked up to an oxygen concentrator.

During the discharge from KKH, nurses accompanied the family to ensure that the home care set-up was suitable for Joshua’s recovery and rehabilitation.

It would take nine months before he could be weaned off from the ventilator. In fact, there was one time he stopped breathing.

Having developed an aversion to bottle feeds, Joshua also had to rely on the NGT for nutrition for close to 18 months, making little progress even after embarking on a 10-week pre-tube weaning programme with a feeding consultant in the UK. 

“It was so terrible. Almost every day we were inserting the NGT for him because he would pull it out or it would get dislodged. Until when he sees his Daddy holding the NGT, he would squirm. He was scared,” said John.

“We were praying, and everyone was praying with us for a long time.”

Celebrating Christmas 2025 at home with the extended family. At that time, Joshua was still on the NGT.

Then they decided to take a leap of faith and put Joshua through the next stage of the tube-weaning programme. One day out of the blue, Joshua decided to start drinking and eating.

“It’s a miracle,” said John. “Even the feeding-tube weaning circles recognise that it’s not common for a baby who is so adverse to drinking milk to just suddenly take to it.”

A reminder of God’s faithfulness

Through all these answered prayers, the couple has seen how God has been there for them over the last two years.

Joshua has been healed, and every single one of his conditions has been resolved – the last one being the NGT that he finally weaned off in January.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Joshua’s first few words were ‘Amen’ and ‘Jesus’, because we kept praying for him and he’s been listening to that,” said John.

Dedication of baby Joshua during a church service last year. Throughout their entire journey, many intercessors from their church were also praying for them.

Today, Joshua has caught up with all the developmental milestones for his age. This tiny fighter also bears the marks from all the tubes that have been inserted since birth – around 15 holes on each upper limb.

“These are scars that he carries from what he has gone through. But they remind us of God’s grace and mercy. This boy is so happy and he brings joy to everyone that he meets,” John told Salt&Light.

Cheerful Joshua.

The couple has come full circle. They are now able to encourage other preemie parents who are going through similar journeys.

For instance, Janice not only volunteered at SGH’s Light Weight Club Party this year, but also helps out in a non-hospital-affiliated parent support chat group.

“Joshua is really a gift from God who taught us to look at things in a different way. Now we know what our priorities are and we are even more anchored in God,” she said.

The Chens’ latest family photo. Joshua is now a healthy boy, and they have been able to go on holidays together.

Reflecting on his journey as a father, John added: “Fatherhood is being a good steward of God’s gift. And because of this journey where I’ve learnt to surrender, I know that I’m not the one in control.

“It’s about taking control away from ourselves and placing it in the hands of someone else – and Who better than our Lord Jesus Christ?

“We will not attribute anything that has happened to Joshua to ourselves. It’s very obvious that it’s the grace and faithfulness of God. All glory to God.”

READ MORE:

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Finding God’s unexpected love through raising a child with developmental delay