Fox Enterprises Ltd. http://www.icthus.8m.com

The place for Christian, creation, and conservative information on the web.

______________________________________________________________________

Smell the 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 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!

_______________________________________________________________________________