setup: [E-Mail Ministry] The Smell Of Rain

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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; 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.

-- Author Unknown

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