It could have been a MUCH different day ...

The culprit:




This is where the culprit came from:


This branch above used to be a part of this tree. It was right above the lowest branch with leaves on the right side of the tree.

The bad part was that my husband was in this tree and had put his hand on this branch and it gave way, making him tumble to the ground.

He and our two kids were outside cutting down dead branches and burning dead trees, like they have done many times before. (if you look close, you can see that the chainsaw is still up in the tree ... probably will stay there for awhile!)

I am in the house and all of the sudden I get a phone call from our oldest child and the first thing I hear is, "Dad fell out of a tree!" I could tell from the urgency that it wasn't good.

I think I could've have beat any Olympic record in the 150yd dash as I ran to make it back to where they were in the yard.

When I see him on the ground he is white as a sheet. He is in obvious pain and not talking real well.

My heart sinks.



I quickly pray under my breath that God would make whatever is wrong right and that everything would be ok, but honestly I was scared. I knew that he had just fallen from at least 20 feet and it couldn't be good.

I just kept talking to him and trying to figure out what hurt where. It was his shoulder and his head. There were very few marks on the outside, hardly any cuts or scrapes, so that freaked me out. I've always heard nurses say, "it's better that you see it on the outside because if it's not out then it'll go in" meaning that if the injury isn't visible then the injury could have gone internal. Don't know if this is always true, but it has always made sense to me. As I am realizing that I don't see hardly anything visibly on the outside of him and that if he passes out on me or goes into some kind of shock, I am in trouble because there is no way that I can move him.

He keeps talking and his breathing good, much to my relief. After a while, he is able to stand up and walk all the way back to the house.

I make him go to the doctor. (you would think that after you fall from about 2 stories high you would know that you are going to go to a doctor, right?)

We get right in and they x-ray his shoulder, back, and arm, etc...

Nothing is even broken! When the doctor said that nothing looked broken in the x-ray, I had to question him. I said, "nothing? what about his collar bone? or his lungs, nothing is going to make a lung collapse or something?"

He just looked at me and said, "it all looks fine. It is severe bruising which can hurt more than a broken bone initially, but he will be fine."



Praise God! We immediately recognized that it could have been a much different day.

I could, right now, be sitting next to his hospital bed looking at him with paralyzed legs or something much, much worse.

We don't understand why "us" in these situations, but we can't stop being thankful for it. Understanding totally that this is nothing short of a miracle. Just since it happened we have heard of two similar stories that had very different outcomes.

We just can't feel anything but grateful, realizing that we came very close to a much different day and praying fervently for those that it turned out so differently for.

You just never know what could happen in a day. The most comforting thing is that our God does know and He will be there to carry us through it, every step of the way.