| Blessed by God
Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Mississippi
Posts: 329
Points: 3,159.09 Bank: 49.73 Total Points: 3,208.82 |  Rain~A true story of Faith & Healing
Rain
A cold March wind danced around the dead of
night in Dallas as the doctor walked into the small
hospital room of Diana Blessing.
Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held
her hand as they braced themselves for the latest
news.
That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications
had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo
an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new
daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.
At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and
nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously
premature. Still, the doctor's soft words dropped
like bombs.
"I don't think she's going to make it', he said,
as kindly as he could. "There's only a 10-percent
chance she will live through the night, and even
then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her
future could be a very cruel one".
Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as
the doctor described the devastating problems Danae
would likely face if she survived.
She would never walk, she would never talk, she
would probably be blind, and she would certainly be
prone to other catastrophic conditions from
cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and
on and on.
"No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David,
with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed
of the day they would have a daughter to become a
family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that
dream was slipping away. Through the dark hours of
morning as Danae held onto life by the thinnest
thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing
more and more determined that their tiny daughter
would live and live to be a healthy, happy young
girl.
But David, fully awake and listening to additional
dire details of their daughter's chances of ever
leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew
he must confront his wife with the inevitable.
David walked in and said that we needed to talk
about making funeral arrangements.
Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he
was doing everything trying to include me in what
was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I
couldn't listen.'
I said, 'No, I don't want to listen to what the
doctors say; Danae is not going to die! One day she
will be just fine, and she will be coming home with
us!"
As if willed to live by Diana's determination,
Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help
of every medical machine and marvel her miniature
body could endure. But as those first days passed, a
new agony set in for David and Diana.
Because Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was
essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only
intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even
cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to
offer the strength of their love. All they could
do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet
light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray
that God would stay close to their precious little
girl.
There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew
stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly
gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of
strength there. At last, when Danae turned two
months old, her parents were able to hold her in
their arms for the very first time.
And two months later, though doctors continued to
gently, but grimly warn that her chances of
surviving, much less living any kind of normal
life, were next to zero.
Danae went home from the hospital, just as her
mother had predicted. Today, five years later, Danae
is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering
gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She
shows no signs, whatsoever, of any mental or
physical impairment. Simply, she is everything a
little girl can be and more, but that happy ending
is far from the end of her story.
One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996
near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting
in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local
ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team
was practicing.
As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her
mother and several other adults sitting nearby when
she suddenly fell silent.
Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked,
"Do you smell that?" Smelling the air and detecting
the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied,
"Yes, it smells like rain."
Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you
smell that?" Once again, her mother replied, "Yes,
I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain."
Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head,
patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and
loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It
smells like God when you lay your head on His
chest."
Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily
hopped down to play with the other children. Before
the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what
Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.
During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.
__________________
Christina
Me~26 DH~28
Megan Elizabeth born 6-2-04
TTC#2
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
2 Corinthians 3-4. NIV
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