A Different Kind of Christmas

Just wanted to let you all know what is going on in our family and ask for your prayers. We had planned on spending Christmas in the mountains with my (Missy's) family, but yesterday as we were loading up the car to leave my grandma tripped over an uneven part of the sidewalk and slammed face-first into the bumper of the car and then the cement. She stopped breathing and her heart stopped three times in the course of the morning, and we spent most of yesterday in the emergency room and the ICU. Praise God, though, last night she started to flutter her eyelashes in response to our visits and tonight she had her eyes open and was nodding her head furiously and grabbing for our hands.

We crave your prayers, as she continues to heal and the doctors figure out exactly what happened. Today they determined that when she fell she also had a heart attack (caused by the fall, apparently), and there was some damage to her spinal cord. At this point her legs are paralyzed and it is likely she will undergo surgery after her heart is strong enough. She's still in pretty tough shape and still critical, but the improvement today was phenomenal. It is already incredible to see how God has worked--yesterday the doctors told us that they were losing her, that she had massive internal bleeding, and by the time they transferred her to the hospital with the trauma unit they found no bleeding at all. It is awesome to remember that we have a God who is absolutely, completely in control of life and death.

And we've had a good Christmas. Not what we had planned, but we are all here together and we all took turns singing Grandma Christmas carols (whichever ones we could all remember the words to!) in her room. How thankful we are for family and friends who have called, brought food, visited, and prayed! The ridiculously large pile under the Christmas tree seemed pretty irrelevant when it came to celebrating Christmas this year.

Well, forgive my rambling here (though if you can't ramble on your own blog, where can you?). I hope your Christmas was wonderful and that you, too, were able to celebrate miracles.

mjs