This is really a thank you to all the people, many complete strangers, who have been praying for my brother-in-law Mike and my sister Diane.
When the small plane Mike was a passenger on crashed March 16, Diane’s first words on the phone to me were, “Pray, please pray as hard as you can.” Mike was in the E.R. lingering between life and death for 24 hours, burns covering much of his body, his internal injuries so dire that he had to get 32 units of blood.
Then he was in a burn unit, the skin painfully cleansed once a day, skin grafted on the burned spots and all of us visiting in surgical gowns to protect him from any infection. For many of those weeks, he was on such high doses of pain killers that he was barely conscious.
In the middle of this month, he was released to a rehab hospital, where he went through long, grueling days of therapy, learning again how to walk, stand, sit. It was there that Diane finally told him the tragic details of the crash, how he was the only survivor, how he lost dear colleagues and friends. They both wept.
Just last week he came home. Home! Such a celebration. He’s gone to a soccer game. He’s gone to the movies. He sleeps in his own bed—fitfully, but he’s there.
It feels like time to take him off the prayer list at church and to let you know that although, like all of us, his family needs prayers, the urgency has lifted. The prayers are ones of thanksgiving. As Diane has said, “I see new things in him every day that remind me of what I love in him.”
Thank you, dear friends and dear strangers; your prayers have been answered. Here’s a picture of Mike on his front porch with his daughter as living proof.
