Little Girl, Get Up

Two weeks before her ninth birthday Leah Hansen, the author's oldest grandchild, spent the weekend playing basketball, practicing softball and doing cartwheels. That Monday her body shut down gradually over an eighteen-hour period when she suffered a spinal cord stroke. The next morning in the emergency room she was "profoundly quadriplegic," and kept alive on a ventilator. That Wednesday a heavy wet snow fell, and when her father Peter returned home to retrieve items, he found that the cherry tree he planted when Leah was born had split down the middle. Family friend Jeff Allen then led a team of five men from Liquid Church to repair the tree, with threaded rods and bolts, ratchet straps and beeswax. "We prayed for the tree," said Jeff. "We prayed for Peter and Abby, we prayed for Leah. It was simultaneously silly-to be praying for a tree to live-and spiritual. I remember it being so sad, looking at the dark and vacant house, knowing why it was dark and vacant." Five years later with God's help, prayer and heroic caregivers, Leah is a vibrant teenager, and each spring the cherry tree, with rods and bolts still in place, has exploded with a burst of pink blossoms. "When I was eight, I did not understand," said Leah, at thirteen. "Looking back, God had a plan. He was with me. Everything worked out better than I can imagine."