FOODFORTHOUGHT

F O O D F O R T H O U G H T

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;
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 drugged 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, 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 alone beneath the ultra-violet 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 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 non-stop 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.

PRAYER
"Lord Jesus Christ, your call to holiness extends to all in every state
of life. Sanctify our lives--as married couples and as singles--that we
may live as men and women who are consecrated to you. Make us leaven in
a society that disdains life-long marriage fidelity, chastity, and
living single for the Lord."

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