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 doctors 
described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she 
survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would 
probably be blind, 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 was 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, that is not going 
to happen, no way! I don't care 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 along 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, what so ever, of any mental or physical impairments.  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 ball park 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.

"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all 
men."
     Titus 2:11
             God Bless...Pass it on!