As I cleaned my makeup off tonight I looked into the mirror and wondered, “Does this face look like the face of a mother who might lose her daughter?” I don’t know what tomorrow holds. I don’t know what the next minute holds. And sometimes Fear threatens to overwhelm me, creeping in like a thief. I can smell it. It makes my jaw ache and my heart squeeze. But I breathe because His breath is in my lungs. And as I breathe, slower and deeper, Fear senses His Presence, and slinks away, the loser again. The neurosurgeon is still fighting for her life. He has not given up. But he gives us little hope of a high-functioning Kiara. When I woke up this morning, 26 December 2018, I had one prayer. That God would not make Kiara live without being able to dance. But God replied, “Don’t say Kiara’s ‘no’ for her.” We say that often in ministry. Don’t say a person’s ‘no’ for them. Give them the opportunity. Maybe they have strength for a ‘yes’ that only God knows about. The night before the accident, around the dining room table with the children, we played a silly game. We all had to answer the question, “If you had to live without one of the following: sight, speech, hearing, or legs, which would you choose?” Kiara chose legs. She said she would rather be able to interact with the people around her. She already chose loss of movement over loss of life. It’s not my decision. In this world, we all have a source of suffering, which produces patience, endurance, character, and strength. It is between God and Kiara what her suffering looks like: what she can bear, and how He will use it for her good. The last thing I would want to do is get in the way of God’s plan for producing goodness in and through her life. I did a hopeful thing before I left the hospital tonight. I massaged Kiara’s legs, her feet, her hands. It was like heaven to disregard the cold steel boundary of the hospital bed rails and touch her skin with a firm, commanding grip. I used to massage her after her bath every night when she was a baby, to the sound of classical music. She sometimes joked she didn’t know why I’d stopped all those years ago. And so we go to sleep tonight, not knowing how long we need to be strong for, and needing to pace ourselves accordingly. There is a constant stream of prayer warriors standing in the gap for us at the hospital. My friends have become the bones that keep me standing. I don’t know what tomorrow holds. But tonight, we Keep Hope Alive. #keephopealive
