The Smell of 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, 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
under-developed 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, what so ever, 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 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,
her mother 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 remembered so well
Story submitted by: roger@ashbaengineers.com
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